swishers aren’t so sweet when
our teeth are banging together
tongues fighting for dominance
gin burning our lips
hungrily seeking
an escape from ourselves
selfishly burring our stingers into the back of the other
orgasms are aptly named
La petite mort
because i want to die and be reborn
& i was foolish
for ever thinking that you could be
different

   I’ve been a part of the agricultural community since conception (no, really— I’m pretty sure I was conceived in a field). When my mother was pregnant, my grandfather made her walk through his garden, made her plant watermelons for luck; something about whatever was growing insider her would be good for the field. That year, my grandfather had 200 pound watermelons sprouting. At the age of one, I planted a peach pit in the dirt/cigarette pile where my grandmother dumped her ashtray beside the porch. It still bears peaches. Even though it’s been abused one or two…or three times by my cousin in that 12-year-old machete phase.

    I worked in my grandfather’s produce stand more summers than I can count, and rolled out of bed at six a.m. every Saturday morning of those summers for Farmer’s Markets where I blearily bagged tomatoes bigger than my hands and cucumbers still wet from late night rains. I’ve watched heat lightening from my Grandma’s porch while she sat, yelling at me from the couch to get ‘the hell away from that concrete’ because it would ‘shoot that lightening right into me’. I have sat on that porch, watching the vegetables growing across the road when the summer heat blares too harshly to even swim. I have watched and worked. And I have learned that what you can’t say, write, and what you can’t write, cook. I’ve learned that if you’re sad while making cakes, they probably wont rise properly, chow-chow made while arguing will burn your tongue, and if you’re bitter while making sweet tea, no amount of sugar can cover your bitterness up.

   And today, when a committee of jealous men voted my grandfather off the farmer’s market, all the heat that once baked those fields in the summer, all the heavy rain that pounded angry and ripping at plants, the hail that bruised the melons, the lightening that struck the mountain near by, filled my stomach and throat. This heat fell out in southern-sweet words. My grandfather jerked a door off it’s hinges, I spat words so polite the men looking down on me like a child stared, eyes confused. But this summer, I will have my own farm.

And for this Adventure, something inside me is ready. Something in me is ready for the summer heat again.

if the curves of my stomach offend
you
i suggest you get the
fuck off
   of
me
but when this rage comes you speak
so
sof
      t
ly
and wonder why i look at you
like you burned
me but
you don’t understand how predecessors of your gender have treated me.
kind words have never been spoken to me
soberly or
without weight behind them
like bartering in a dark corner bed while everyone else sleeps
where i stop being a woman, an entity, and become an unfeeling orifice whose name has suddenly become
                                          baby
because a few kinds words were mumbled against the shell
of my ear
you don’t understand
how hands have grabbed me in the dark
and how my own hands have grabbed
only out of desperation
to feel something
you don’t understand how hard it is for you to touch me and
for me not to feel lightening hot repulsion
as i lay drunk, ready to sleep.
you don’t understand how when people touch my hair
all i can feel are hands curling against my scalp
and the way cold-shaking hands curled around my dress
and the way fear has been etched into the lines of my brain like a map of the city i know so well
like that alley i can’t walk down alone at night
or that part of lexington where men shout at me hungrily
or the way stranger’s hands sometimes ‘slip’
you will never understand the weight of my insecurity because no amount of sweetness you can pour onto me can replace the venom fed to me by the men before you
no matter how ‘enough’ i may be with you
you will never understand how ‘enough’ isn’t tangible
how beautiful doesn’t really feel like a compliment
and how much
i doubt you actually love me

i drink whiskey because
after so many
shots
something like a dragon wakes up in my stomach
and crawls out my throat with the exhalation of cigarette smoke
i drink whiskey because the dark brown
mingles with the fire in my veins
and the wild south of my soul is reawakened
a part of my soul that lingers in the bricks of marie laveu’s and between alleyways in the french quarter
stirs up like a ghostly collection of downy feathers
and the fear that is carved into my ribcage seeps out
i drink whiskey because the salt of my fingers plays
with the back of my throat
coaxing all this fear out, chased with mason jars of water
i drink whiskey because it makes me feel ugly and fierce
i drink whiskey because it makes it easier for me to burn bridges and sever ties
i drink whiskey because it makes being used by men with pretty faces and holes in their dead chests easier to swallow the next day
i drink whiskey because it makes me rowdy and alive
i drink whiskey because snarling rage needs to be let out sometimes
i drink whiskey because it sobers up my head
i drink it because it helps me forget that i didn’t say no
i drink it because it makes me angry about what you did
i drink it because i remember the way your hand pushed mine down and the way your hand curled into a fist in my hair and yanked at the top of my dress
i drink it because i didn’t tell you no

He was sitting on the couch, reading a seed catalog, being perfectly normal, then he starts shouting about ‘don’t you people know how to do fucking laundry’, grabbing clean laundry, slinging it, etc.

He then started throwing all the dishes in the sink and washing them, and now he is scrubbing the kitchen floor on his hands and knees, muttering about how nasty the house is.

what the actual fuck.

he’s lost fuck tons of weight lately and, honestly, I think he’s flipped. bad mojo in the house, guys.

If ever I thought I was worthless, useless, an empty vessel to hold the blame of the world, I was ignorant.

In the shadow of others I did not realize I was outgrowing the limited social garden bed of my ‘friends’ and companions. Friends would be an overstatement and a title many of them have never and will never earn. As a Scorpio my trust is not easily gained, and one lost, it is gone forever. Something in me, though, always forgave, but kept the trespasses against my trust cataloged, loaded, waiting to fire across my synapses is self destruction.

If ever I took your interest as a sign of friendship, I was a fool. If ever I opened my heart to you, if ever I extended an almost maternal hand to you I was an idiot.

My body has been run ragged with its attempts at pleasing all and apologizing for its darker nature. My narcissism has become a survival mechanism that I once thought needed you.
My soul is weary of your needy hands, your open-bird mouth that I keep feeding more and more of my soul. Compassion has an end with me. In this game of survival, I will always be the fittest and you’ve stopped entertaining the animal within me.

I am worth so much more than being drained of my entirety. I am manifest energy as you are, as the earth is. Like the Earth my resources have been tapped and I can give no longer. Like the Earth I shall strike with ground shattering vengeance.

If ever I thought friendship was giving you everything for nothing in return, I was blind, for I am a Goddess as you are. I am a Goddess as you are a God, and your meager offerings of passing interest and constant need are insufficient. My inner patriarch has fed of your male-centric patterns of thought, and the women of my past lives are too loud in protest for this to continue.

I deserve much more than “friends” like you.

rage has a way of awakening
the sacred fiery feminine within me
i suppose i should be accepting of flippant
dismissals and easily broken
plans

after all, it is what is expected of my gender—

to be silently accepting
to be smiling and forever forgiving
to be blind to your bullshit.

but I’m not that kind of bitch.

the waters of many rivers flow in my veins
over the rocks and thorns that are growing inward in my inner darkness
wise and warrior women of my past lives swim in these brackish tides and they
are having none of your shit today

there is a predator that hunts in the base of my skull
that loves to feed on

boys {I would say ‘friends’ but none of you are deserving of that title}
like
you

through heavy breaths and gasps between too hot sobs this creature is released
and it reminds me
with the worst of pain
that i am stronger than you
that i am stronger than anything within your petty soul

we’re all made of energy and mine is too bright to be diminished by the likes of you

while i feel worthless and want to destroy myself
{because the easiest way not to feel is to bring blood, to bring forth ribs and cheek bones, and burns—— for the longest while I thought the fault lied within myself, that I was worthless and disposable, but now I see that I’ve only been attracted to the weaker breed of human because you are easy to manipulate. You were stupid enough to consider my compassion a license to abuse my over giving heart}
this animal keeps me in line, holding my hands within its claw riddled appendages

tight enough to bring blood, holding me still until my cries turn into war songs
my frantic heart beats into the sound of war drums.

my tears become paint streaking my face, readying me for another battle.

the scorpion ever present in me rises, barb dripping with the poison
my tongue would love to lay into your psyche

but you aren’t worth my words.

my words are my livelihood and nothing i could say could
every arouse any interest nor care from such a small minded individual as yourself
whose ambitions are the small fractions of pebels beneath my scarred feet.

in this holy and reverent cold I thought I needed the warmth of companions, but I realized I was skinning myself raw to cover others who would only snuff out the flame keeping me alive.
my heart thrives in this harsh season and the skeleton of the scorpion comes alive in solitude.

the warrior woman within me is reborn this night.

she has watched my neglect and has pulled me into her mulch-armed embrace

and tells me through stoney and unforgiving eyes

that you were never worthy of my radiance anyways.

is that there are hundreds of
people
se     p        ar        at   ed
by paper-thin
                     walls
never interacting
only existing simultaneously
(which, is a cosmic interaction if you think about it.)

sometimes I lay in my bed
face against a cold paper wall
and I
think: what are these other people doing?

in this awkward layout of beds and desks
in the earlylate hours of the nightday
are some

sleeping                                    frantically working

drunk in their beds                   laying frustratingly awake

awkwardly masturbating          awkwardly ignoring the awkward masturbation

having cramped sex        sleeping in the lounge to avoid said sex being had

crying and homesick                  consoling a homesick friend

too high to sleep                       to exhausted to be awake

or are some just as awake as I, wondering sleepily, what I am doing on the other side of the wall?

that I enjoy menstruating?

I really do. While I hate the general negatives (cramps etc.) I embrace them.

My body is renewing itself and there is power in that. A dark sort of power, but power all the same. Not dark in the negative sense, but dark in the other side of the moon, the last phase of the goddess, the night, sort of dark. There is power in one’s blood. I feel very connected to the cyclic nature of the world. After all, “we are all born out of darkness and water, brought into this world through blood and through pain” an I am certainly feeling all of these elements at the moment.

Plus, heyhey, I’m not puuuurgnant. Go uterus!

{Way of topic, but are there any thoughts in the ways of herbal birth control?}

• motherwort tea
• manly hand scrub 
• feverfew harvested and made into tea
• herbal grimoire updated
• lavender and sage bundles to be made

 all done listening to wiley mountain music. good fucking day, y’all.

• harvesting motherwort leaves for tea
• charging water and crystals
• harvesting feverfew
• making lavender bundles

madness.

myself as a midwife or a medicine woman—
waking early
               wandering
the wooddesertmountain
with bad-ass boots & a patchy coat, pockets filled with rosemary and crystals
driving an old truck that smells of rolled cigarettes and gasoline
drinking hot tea out of a mason jar.

i see all of this & I wonder where this image will land me.
   Portland in the fall?
Nevada in the Winter?
                              Colorado? Montana?
But I need the trees.
My power is in the mountains.
Or maybe it is in the moon—and her face isn’t bound to the side of the mountain

i need the howl of coyotes, the smell of pine, the sound of running water over rocks, cold air, wind.
i crave this to the center of my
bones.

i want to dance with fire women, sing air songs, pray to the earth, bathe in the water, and
speak with the
spirit mother & the red father that binds all of these together in a chaotic harmony i will never understand.

i need to paint my body with the stain of poke berry and

run, foot against stone, against decaying leaves.

there is a savage within me
that needs to run free

that needs to bark at the moon and breathe clean air.

i

am an animal— should I not delight in this? Should I not celebrate bare skin and bared teeth? Should I not dance barefoot in the light of the moon, jubilating in all that I am? I praise this body that moves me— from the too rough soles of my feet, the hungry churn of my stomach, the burn between my legs. I give thanks to broken sink and bruises; these are the evidence of my life force.
I sit in a Labyrinth, a holy place where my brother & sister stones give me solemn council. I feel life. I smell it, I hear it, I taste it on cold air. Life energies flitting all around me. I soak it up as my skin drinks the sun. Am I thankful for life in this place? No. But I am happy to greet it. I accept its presence for another day and I move with it, dancing and contorting as I ought. I stretch my muscles and fill my lungs. And in this moment I feel no fear. When you do not fear Death how can you fear Life?
How can I fear anything in this life when death—full of the unknowing dark, full of the unblinking darkness, full of that which is unspoken— is known as a friend?
When you welcome death into yourself, you gain and lose life simultaneously.  While you see the day in a different light— more pure, calmer, brighter that you ever could have imagined— this light you are observing doesn’t really reach you. It doesn’t wash nor warm you as it once did. Everything becomes Colder. Everything becomes colder, but the cold doesn’t hurt quite as much. It’s there, but distant— ebbing at the edges of my nerve endings, but my body doesn’t dispel it nor does it coil away, spitting. Rather, it embraces it. Grows little white flowers in its dark shade and growls merrily from the frozen ground.
        Let Winter come and let it awaken the dead-tree creature living within me, somewhere between my spine and my rib-bones. Let the cold douse the fire and let that which is pale and hungry roam. Let it breathe its own fire amid the skeletons of Elms and Pine. Let this feverish animal breathe steam into the night air. Let it roam, choking and coughing on a too hot stomach {too much burbon and hot chemical fire}. Let it run itself back into the ground, squirming with the grubs and the centipedes, blind and snuffling, frantic.

You cannot cage your own animal nature. It will only grow Wilder there. Wilder and hateful— it will turn on that which tried to lock it away. Let it live free, by Bone and by Fire, by Water and by Stone— let it come Alive.

Something made of teeth lives there, breathing shakily, bleeding and slithering in the dark we all try to put away from the light of social normality. Something anthropomorphic and angry. You can’t hide away that which is within you. Maybe it lives at the center of the Labyrinth, waiting on you to stumble upon it. Maybe it only lives at the Labyrinth’s edges— skittering around with outside walls, keeping you fighting within it. You could drown this creature with bourbon and whiskey, but it will only laugh and dance out of your throat. You could stab this animal, but it will only bleed ink and raven feathers. Ink from words left unwritten and thoughts unsaid.
            I am the snake, the bird, the cat, the wasp, the human.
        The Animal.
I am the mother, the daughter, the grandmother.
                            I am Alive.
There is power in the bones.
May mine rattle in the hollow night, may mine howl, hungry at the moon. May I crave blood, may I hunger for its life as my body hungers for sustenance.

How do you tell someone that you’re tired of existing?
    No one has done anything wrong, and by all normal standards this day has been quite nice, but something in me can’t handle that. Something in me can’t stand this constant standard of  “surviving”.
Being exhausted of simply being is draining and no amount of stimulant can correct this.  

How do you tell someone that it takes all of you to simply wake up in the morning? To wake, to breathe. How do you tell them that it’s nothing they’ve done, but you just can’t do it anymore.
                How do you say shit like this?
How do I think shit like this?

        Where could I go?
France?
Scotland?
        How far would I have to run for these hounds to stop their pursuit of me?
Will they stop this chase?
            The answer is no. No, I don’t think they will.
I think they’ll keep fucking chasing me.
                    They’ll keep coming. They’ll keep
this race no matter how run-ragged I may be. They’ll keep pace, keep biting at my ankles, keep snarling, snuffling, tearing the ground with their paws. They’ll hunt me until the end— no matter how many rivers or ocean I cross. Or maybe Styx will clog their all-knowing-noses….I shouldn’t have given them my scent. But they know it now. They know it and they want more.

I’m living off jolts of too much caffeine right now. What way is that to live? Living, though is an overstatement. I’m not living— I’m just taking up space. Taking up space and filling up volumes with these hollow words— as if I don’t know how stale I sound.

So where can I go? What do I do?
                What the hell do I do when I can’t even decide if I want to be Alive?
What do I WANT to do?
        I WANT a house in the mountains. I want an herb garden planted in the shape of a sacred spiral. I want a river to bathe in, a fire place to cast into, a cat to hate and watch suspiciously, a dog to keep the hounds at bay, a kitchen to make magick and medicine in, and a bed warmed by someone else. I want cold nights and mornings warm only because there is skin against my back.
I want not to be a prisoner of my own words. I want to stop dreading the day that I run out of words, because the day I run out of words will be the day I let the hounds catch up to me. I want moonlight, and moonshine. I want sunlight and dizzy sun spots. I want trees and the sound of a roaring tuck. I want sweat and the smell of Wood. I want woods and skin at my back.

We are animals that have outlived our own usefulness. We are animals that go against all intrinsic instinct for the sake of some doctrine that has been bred into our domesticated forefathers. Our senses are our only means of truth and we have annihilated all the truth they may carry. My senses do not lie, despite the illusions they are riddled with—my mind which perceives these illusions only contorts their truths into images some bastard animal within me needs to survive.

We are animals who go against all that we need to survive—we do not hunt, we do not run, we do not SURVIVE, we only exist. We exist and destroy and our destruction is not for the sake of survival. Our destruction is not as noble as a wolf ripping out the throat of a deer, or a bear tearing into a tree for the hidden beehive within it, our destruction is for destruction itself. We are self-destroying. Do other animals destroy as we, the most beastly of creatures do? I am a creature that destroys itself. All animals live—they breathe, they hunt, they fuck, they sleep, they keep going. They kill others to sustain themselves if need be. I destroy myself for the sheer enjoyment of causing myself pain. Does any other creature bumbling about in the woods do this? Does some other beat sit within its den, eyes open in panic, mind racing from memory to memory about something in the past? Does it howl out as I do at the anguish I’ve created in my own mind? I’ve evolved past myself. What was an evolutionary advantage—conscious thought—has become nature’s smirking revenge at my vain attempt to bridle it. I have become too accustomed to ruling over a world I cannot control. I have become my own God, my own devil, my own demon, and nature (the one leveling force) does not appreciate my tenacity.

I do not place my value on my heart continuing to beat. I do not find the sacred in my ability to walk without fear of a predator. And because I do not, nature has instilled something within me—hell, maybe in all human beings—to bring me back to base animal thought; she, he, it, has put a predator in my head.  I do not run from some other animal because I am an animal within myself, destroying, hunting, all within the realm of my own mind. I am an animal that tries to kill itself, an animal that starves itself, an animal that causes itself physical pain and smirks.

Maybe I have tangled with my demons for far too long, maybe I have become what I’ve been trying to exercise from my own head.  For my own survival I need to devolve. That which I see is truth. That which I smell, which I taste, which I feel with the pads of my fingers is reality- not the images which I have spun like a poor sky into my mind.

My eyes do not pierce through darkness, my feet do not slide without pain over rocks and carpets of pine needles, my fingers cannot tear into flesh, my legs are not strong enough to stride behind a deer. My teeth tear tender flesh, my ears catch what they wish, and my hands become hard only in cultivating useless words. I am, at my core, a useless animal. I am an animal that thinks with its mind, not with its body. An animal that invests its time in postulations and pontifications of what life is, of what nature is, of what reality is, rather than living only to live. I am an animal so domesticated I envy the creatures—the dog, the cat, the fish—that I see around me and force them into domestication.  I domesticate that which cannot me domesticated by giving it some name. I name myself. I create an idea of something that needs no idealization, which exists independently of my vain attempt at control. I can tame all that is around me in my head—or I can create the illusion of tameness to make sleep easier.  Does “God” sleep easy knowing that all his creations are within his control? Or did God kill himself when he learned that which he created, that which he thought was a possession rose against his own hand? We are our own Gods—do we not kill ourselves as we have created ourselves? All of the universe is meant to fall into destruction, we are the only animals who fight this. This is our own demise, for no matter how we organize, sterilize, domesticate, it all comes out in the end. This tapestry we are creating will unravel in our hands. Our gardens will rise from neat rows, our cats will prowl in this new untamed land, and we ourselves will destroy the conventions we hide behind.

Maybe that’s why we are the “smartest” of breeds in our ability to end ourselves. We can see our own inevitable demise and suicide is our evolutionary advantage—we end something meant for ultimate destruction preemptively.  Or perhaps it is why we are the weakest of animals. We haven’t the strength to stomach our own illusions, our own lies, our own created truths. We have created a world beyond what is truly there—a world beyond our animal senses. We cannot survive in this world. Living in this world is our ultimate demise. But we have to live in it. The only way out of this labyrinth we’ve walled ourselves into is to cast the idea of the labyrinth itself away. But casting an idea only goes so far. The only way out is to take yourself out. It is the ultimate test of strength and of weakness. Are you strong enough to remove yourself from human created “sanity”? Are you weak enough to take away your own life? Is the life you are taking away only a creation of the human world you’ve invested yourself in?

Or are you strong enough to walk away into the woods? How much “truth” can you stomach before you overdose? I am proofreading this expelling of words (further an expulsion of some part of myself because my monsters are made of words) to further lie to myself. My “mistakes” aren’t MY mistakes—my words are my words, my criticism of myself is not my own, it is of the world around me.  I am buying into a world the animal within me snarls at. What animal am I that does not live out its own purpose? What is the point of an animal that destroys itself? There is no point. I am a defect of nature. What animal finds fault in its own survival? No animal should wake up and find sorrow in its waking. What strange breed am I?