Reveries of Heresy

Foreign gods, foreign lands, ancient creatures, ancient men, alien palms, alien eyes — spread out, melted: a knob of butter pools on the kitchen counter. The ghost of my grandmother’s grandmother gathers, peels, smothers, bends — a whole life pressed between foreign bodies; makes her bed in the pigpen. Would love be so kind as to kiss that damned, haunted thing? Eyes bulging, shark teeth gleaming, crawling  by my bedside. Her shackles rasped for centuries; her chains scrape my cheeks. Better to drag me to the nether coven with her than to ever let me be free. If she survived by kissing soiled feet, anointed first in chains, do I have the right to pry the bedrock — the very prison that once crowned her most beautiful wretch, most beloved concubine? I love you, but I can’t ever be you. To save us, I’ll have to let this bloodline die. So I pry. The bedrock sheds like old skin,  revealing — beneath — a tender pulse: my grandmother’s, then mine (keeps time). I unravel a single thre...

Does the river feel the weight of its banks, or the clover bed sense night folding in? If the mockingbird sings a requiem beneath the moon, perhaps this heart could learn to cleave the cord that’s bound to you. Forsaken by the moon— that cold, wavering crescent, a lantern flickering false, casting echoes of fractured vows. Lies upon lies: a gale gnarling branches, a snare of tangled twine, mist that smothers rivulets. I hate that I love you. I love that I hate you. If hate could bury love, the death knell would have rung— long before the sun could swallow the moon.

To betray myself — to abandon my truth and morals, and draw forth the venom of self-loathing — is a fate more wretched than any betrayal this world could inflict. What is existential abandonment? To be forsaken by the sky and gods above, or by mortals cowering below the firmament? Or is it to abandon oneself; to serve one's own head on a blood diamond platter, jewelled with the wages of self-obliteration, trading one's own flesh for a pound of belonging and social validation? Could you ever truly belong if you severed the umbilical cords to the womb of your nature, exiled as an orphan among the cosmos? Sealed in a tomb of Babel stone, wandering as a spectre, loved only in your mummified guise? Do you rely solely on another's consciousness to affirm your own existence and right to exist? Does your identity exist at all if not embedded as a simulacrum in another's psyche? Is the ghost in your shell truly so brittle , so vapid, so spineless? These questions linger in the t...