#extremity
“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,”
“And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I 've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.”
-Emily Dickinson.
Jul 9, 2020
Jul 9, 2020 at 1:38 AM UTC
The eye of the universe
bats its lashes at a
a single sliver of splintered light
blinking boastfully in the opaqueness–
a crescent m☽☽n is birthed,
carved by the Huntswoman’s
➳silver tipped arrows➳
on the night I–
a demi-goddess-
am born.
And this Hunstwomen,
my heavenly mother,
my celestial nurturer,
Artemis
plants antlers atop my
hairless skull in the hopes that I,
her daughter,
will grow wild
as the deer Her Greatness
has vowed to protect;
as the cypress whose limbs
swell with greenery;
as the moon who must wax
as surely as it must wane;
as Artemis herself,
whom they call
“Lady of Wild Things.”
And I too
am a Wild Thing,
for I am a women
of extremity.
How can I not be,
when I come from a long line
of deities,
whose veins palpitate
with the very atoms of chaos?
How else am to explain the fire
the seethes inside of my soul?
A fire kindled by Zeus,
the Lord of the Sky,
the God of all Gods.
Lightning bolts play hopscotch
across my collarbone,
crack against my ribcage
like Poprocks crack against tongue.
Some days,
these flames enable
the crusade of my passions,
accelerating me onwards,
like the wheels of
pegasus drawn chariot.
But there is such as thing
as being too passionate,
for with great passion comes
great emotion,
and with great emotion comes
the capacity for great heartbreak.
I love with the catastrophic magnitude
of a category five hurricane;
it ’s no wonder any other mortal man
is capable of reciprocating my musings,
for there is no emulating this storm,
there is no matching the desires
of Aphrodite’s offspring.
And you should see my heart
when it’s broken–
the way it snaps so eloquently
like the neck of a swan,
how it metamorphosizes,
scorching itself
to a point of αγνώριστος
(unrecognizable)
blackness.
In the pit of my
cracked palms,
I hold the charred
f
r
a
g
m
e
n
t
s
of my heart–
kaleidoscopic shards
jagged enough to draw blood.
When the palpitating ache
in my chest proves to be unbearable,
I sprint to the riverside,
well aware that it is the closest
I will be able to get to the ocean
on such short notice.
I take off my socks and
my worn down Doc Martens
and wade into the water.
Entranced by its
refreshingly cruel coldness,
I baptize myself in its
precarious currents and beg
Poisedon to extinguish the fire in me.
He douses me in his spirit
in an attempt to console the embers
that lick at my heels.
But this attempt proves
to be unsuccessful;
for there is no way of curing
the daughter of Olympus.
Fire and water merge,
imposing on to my being
a molten existence.
I l~i~q~u~e~f~y.
Tendrils of lava crawl
up my oesophagus,
sear the impression
of a laurel atop my head,
burn so violently,
they turn purple.
“Dear Gods,”
I plead
“Take away this body,
this mind,
this soul–”
“Child,”
a lyrical voice
echoes back to me.
“You must not forsake yourself
like this, ”
she declares.
“The mark of the Parthenon,
of I,
your third mother,
Athena
dwells among your fingertips–
There is
p
o
e
t
r
y
in your bones,
an emblem of my wisdom,
of Apollo’s bestowal of enlightenment.
And so you,
my demi-goddess,
must carry on the legacy
of your ancestors through
your wildness
your extremity
your chaos–
your poetry.
For you were made
in the image of the Gods.”
Jun 26, 2018
Jun 26, 2018 at 9:58 AM UTC