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The ocean floor is littered with whale bones
Ivory dreams that sink forgotten amongst silt
The fish swim in between ribs like birds flitter through mine
Asphalst graveyards lined with tiny carcasses
Where once survivalists and now just carrion
I saw a signpost for a crematorium and thought of
The way your hand burns against my cheek
Everything on heaven and earth is eaten by sunlight and decay
In the distance there are trees being felled
I hear nothing and so pretend they have not died
But I can feel their groaning bodies, I can feel the axe swing
In my sharp exhale when you put your palm to my knee
If I close my eyes I see the temples that used to stand here
Where once we prayed to Gods and now buy coffee
The prayer on our lips much softer now
But I still feel like a sacrifice when you kiss me
A pyre dream, quick as flame and soft as smoke
Who's dreams do I carry with me in this life?
Who's aching heart do i remember when the wolf howls?
I witnessed birds die midflight and fall by the hundreds
My atoms rocked into memory of their first journey
Spread across a thousand stars that crashed into yours
Became then the fish that was born between whale ribs
How many lives do I carry inside of me?
What histories lie beneath my feet?
Who's bones am I standing on right now?
Who's deaths will fall like ash atop mine?
Today I managed to convince myself that there was not a single soul in the world who loved me
That I was alone amongst stars whose names were long forgotten
Just as my own name was on the prescipice
Already a half murmered phrase, a syllable dropped here and there
Just me in inky sky watching my own hands crumble to smoke
Carried away on a wind that will not even return my echo to me
I saw a shooting star and recognised her for the girl I sat opposite on a bus once
Dared not call her name for knowledge she did not herself know it anymore
The smoke climbed further, my arms and all the nerves inside them
Unravelling into shadow, even as my own shadow had long since fled
Once upon the sunlight I could have called forth memory
Gripped his heart in my fist and demand one more day
Another aching hour before the unmaking
The smoke has her silken hands around my neck
Tender as an embrace I collapse into her mouth
As I am consumed I see the faces of everyone I carried inside my heart
Forget their names, their voices, the colours of their eyes
And am too forgotten by all but the nights' cold quiet
Everything is lost to the hungry dark
Small, but a death just the same
I spin in slow symphony around a heart that beats to the song of the dawn and is broken by sunset
New age folklore tells us
We will find pollution pixies
in the scraped bare remnants
Of houses that were gutted
By an overflowing sea
Their blue skin flecked with mud, and eyes
Red and burning from the chemical stench
Black dogs are just white dogs
Doused in oil and waiting for a flame to catch
They sit outside of graveyards and watch
Not for what has come but what will be
Ten thousand fae women, weeping
As radiation has stolen their fertility
And hunger ravaged their children
Ten thousand changelings with bloated stomachs
And empty eyes
We will tell campfire stories of mannan maclir
And how his whole ocean
Boiled and frothed, the palms of his god-hands
Still too small to contain the damage
His collosal eyes weeping tears that drowned a village
When he saw trawler nets of whales he once taught to speak
Present magic is an ugly thing, tar black and tasting of war
Red caps, with their bleeding heads and wide grins
Are the only true victors in this slaughter
But even they mourn their unseelie cousins
The wild hunt chases oath breakers in their white houses
Those sitting on thrones of corpses
Still shovelling money into stuffed pockets
The dogs are baying and savage, nightmares every one
And no match for every iron bullet that they face
None come back alive
Their pelts are traded with ivory, prices stacked
The heads of dreams now wall decor in overlarge houses
New age folklore is the silent death of every myth and legend
That lended hope under smoggy skies
Magic dies in a blanket of ash
Choking on the dust of indifference
They came from the curling tip of the world
She-cats with pelts of ink and smoke
Stars hidden in the folds of their fur
And in their mouths they held the suns’ fire
Where they stepped, trees grew, Rowan and ash
That blossomed and bowed and died before their next tread
They came to the great mouth of the ocean
That hissed and dragged it’s heaving body
Out from the reach of teeth that shine with the moon’s cold
When they spoke it was not with one voice but with all voices
Birthing cities and civilisations with a roll of their tongue
Drooling lifetimes into that sandy threshold
It was many kings and one
A different time, a different world
That beat with the same heart as the one before it
Not knowing it would expire with an exhaled breath
The planets above slowed their spinning
Millennia hastened to glimpse the void that was their eyes
Blinking darkness that held tired dreams and secret truths
That let spring bloom endless on each eyelash
The sisters that were one goddess that was all Time  
Loosed a cry heard at the reaches of the endless dark itself
And even that shuddered
I have always thought myself some small part wolf
Not for teeth nor fur, mine are not so long as that
And before you laugh, not for tail either,
Maybe for my strong legs, but no
I am not wolf like you think of wolf
I only share in one thing, bask in it
Wolf and I, and our moon. How we love her
In the way that only wolves and women can
I was born under her, too. Her sign.
Mother called me moonchild, told me my eyes
Though brown as the dirt below me
Held all the light that reflected from her body
She is, to me, the anchor I tie my nights to
I reach to her the way the tides do; ceaselessly
Strange to think something so far
Can be held so close inside me
But I look at her and think of magic
Of spreading my arms and soaking up whatever brightness she can give
And when I look at her, when she is full-bellied
Joyous and content in her inky kingdom
I feel more wolf than girl
The music playing in my ears is still music
But it is also howling, echoing inside and out of me
Would that I could sing like they do,
Hoping that my small voice could carry to her
How lucky the stars to have that blessing
But still, she sets and takes my heart with her
And I nod at the sun and tilt my face into her gold beauty
But it is only a warm thing, only heat
There is no magic in her light for me
No music
And me, still, not even wolf
Not Hers enough to sing and be heard
Not enough of the Earth to plant roots elsewhere
Caught, as the tides are
As only wolves and women know how to be
I come home stumbling drunk
In a haze of morning light
The barest whisper of spring
A soft promise of dawn
I uncradle my heart from my palms
Step neatly out of my dew dappled clothes
Undress and hang up my skin
The freckled mess of it
Remove the pins from my hair
Let it tumble and fall from my scalp
I put firm fingers into a hollow chest
Gently pluck out all my organs
Stack them in labelled boxes
Let the light splinter through my ribs
I smile a slow grin, all teeth and sorrow
Fold myself tenderly onto the floor
Be illuminated as the hours pass
Basking in sunshine and love
Coax the flowers out with songs
Sung through rattling teeth
Swallowed, consumed, wholly hugged
By the growth of green grass
Inside a honey glow room
The wind is a kiss goodbye
The body sleeps
The wind sleeps
I am survived by my softness
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