by Beth Dahill
All hell is breaking loose.
I realise that I’ve been a witch locked up in a tower, suffocating from the reverberations of her own insanity which have been echoing back and forth across the blank stone walls for like, eternity.
I realise that I’ve been a princess, choked by the agony of my own contorted diamond crown which has only served to further the erroneous, mistaken and downright lying bitch lie that I’m virginal, safe, clean, white and pure.
Well I’ve travelled, am travelling, and have descended to my lowest depths now. To the proverbial dungeon of all my forgotten dreams only to discover that the white flocking birds are no longer flocking, they simply vanish into dust and as I rummage below the dirty barrels of time something else starts to emerge.
Something hidden and unexplored.
A rabbit hole into Alice’s dance of dreamless and formless creation.
A world where night is day and day is night and all the lowly creatures are in fact gifts sent from heaven; here to help us uncover the ineffable, unfathomable truth of who we really are.
From the underwater caverns, the waves lap against my legs and I disappear. I dissolve into time or rather I am sucked up into the voidness that births time itself and am allowed to be reborn anew.
Reborn into non-human formless formlessness. Into a world of liars and cheats, that stilettoed street walk into a red light district, the clicks, clicking against forbidden pavements and whining brows.
Reborn to a place where parched, dried up, burning, searing, desert breeds hunger and violence and animal blood thirsty passages of rite.
A place where wildness wings a prayer and where the howling wilderness drops down into the aching muggy dews of death, of life, of something that I can’t describe or explain, some kind of … stuff.
There’s a pause; question: what is real anymore?
A cold shiver trails the whispering wind, a tongue licks a quivering, trembling neck. A claw is revealed, a fang saliva-drips, and all that I know is I’m home.
Where wild things are. Where wildness breeds. Where I am impregnated with the seed of immortality, to birth lust and desire and the magician’s breast of … Metamorphosis.
‘Metamorphosis’
Obsolete drafts of human templates.
‘Metamorphosis’
Shape-shifting, animal-dying, immortal, agonistic bliss.
‘Love me’ the Universe cries out, take me here, take me now, let me render you into renderless form from un-rendered hell and a moment in time, a drop of dew, on a leaf. Here. In the forest. Where the caterpillar is born. Where the caterpillar dies. Where the caterpillar births.
Where the caterpillar births the butterfly. Where the chrysalis inhales, in-breeds, and swollen, dying faces are strangled out of the light and into the breathless, airless, darkness of rebirth. Of Metamorphosis.
Of giving up everything you have ever known, of just giving it up. Tossing it into the dying embers of time.
Of laying your bare breast down to be given to the knife, to the fire, to the ultimate sacrifice that delivers you home.
Of watching everything you have ever loved and cared for be dissolved, like bones dying to the dust, like a sound sailing on borrowed time.
And there only ashes remain.
And a pulse.
A pulse; A sound; A movement; A rustle.
A shake of a serpent’s tail. An eyeball rolling back. A squelch of human flesh. Of faeces. Of slime.
Of forbidden-ness, of forbidden-ness, and out of forbidden-ness’ shell, darkness grows. And spreads. A glimmer. A shimmer. A wing. A black feather. Hypnotising. Enchanting. And all of time stands still. And a shudder is heard, reverberating throughout the belly of everything.
And smoke billows in the distance overhead and an eagle prey-swoops down.
And I am there. And I watch, silently. Enmeshed and engrossed in the darkness of my soul, the glimmer of my wing. The beat of my heart against a furry breast.
For I am to, and to is you, and the Blackest Blacked-out Black Ravens soul is mine.
IN CONCLUSION
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