Strap on your dildo and cue the Norwegian black metal soundtrack! Today is Day 3 of the Epagomenal Days in the ancient Egyptian calendar, celebrating the birth of the most awesome, dynamic, powerful, ¡muy caliente! God in the history of human religious expression: the Great God Set!
By way of editorial comment: This poem of mine was published in Datura (2010), an anthology of Pagan poetry and essays by U.K.-based occult/esoterica powerhouse Scarlet Imprint.
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Persephone’s Rising
If the Ides of March are past
whence comes this heaviness of heart?
He said it would be like this
in the silver half-light
the chariot steeds splashed across the waves
of Acheron
then I tumbled headlong into Lethe
No forgetfulness, though,
for She Who Never Slumbers Above
yet she caused the earth to slumber
her own body to be ravaged by winter’s withering
force
Golden poppy tresses
trembling with rage
as I found a new half-life for myself
fructifying
the dead populace
and my beloved drank deeply
smeared himself
with my pomegranate juices
nectar more precious than wine, he said
Everything cavernous
cadaverous eye sockets
the mask of white loveliness
frozen onto my face like the folds of
the himation molded to my breasts
The pillars of this place
gleaming with the hope
of untold dreaming
the quiet denizens of this murk-world gape and shuffle towards me
arms outstretched
Mother
Queen
The curve of the sickle
Warm lap of abundance
Fertile in fallowness
Gaze not with the imperium of the Judge
but as an unconquerable Protectress
What do you get when you combine a romantic weekend getaway at an out-of-state B&B (a getaway that you planned for your partner’s 32nd birthday); supreme hospitality and welcome from the genii loci as well as the human residents of a place you’re visiting for the first time; the energies of the Titan goddess Hekate; the energies of the Inuit goddess Sedna; the energies of All-Father Odin; the energies of the particular Elder Futhark runes Dagaz, Ansuz, and Gyfu; an amber ring; and the supremely potent cosmic “reset” button energies ushered in by Friday’s whopper of a total solar eclipse Spring Equinox? YOU GET ENGAGED, THAT’S WHAT! Continue reading
“He commenced his walk, but soon again stopped and this time just before me.
“‘Jane! Will you hear reason?’ (he stooped and approached his lips to my ear;) ‘Because, if you won’t, I’ll try violence.'”–Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847), Ch. 27
Recent literary criticism has attributed an air of notoriety to the Gothic’s reputation for contesting conceptual boundaries. Encoded within Gothic narratives is a play of terms, of oppositions, which attest to a fundamental ambivalence: good depends on evil, light on dark, reason on irrationality, in order to define limits. This play of antitheses means that Gothic is an inscription neither of darkness nor of light, a delineation neither of reason and morality nor of superstition and corruption, neither real nor fantastic, but both at the same time (Botting 9). Such amorphous inclusiveness reflects a major problem of defining the “Gothic” itself. According to Sarolta Marinovich, for example, it is “not so much…a specific genre in literary history…but…a mode of writing to be found in novels and poems alike” (189). Little wonder that Julian Fleenor proposes that the Gothic “is a protean entity not one thing. There is not just one Gothic but Gothics” (4).
One of the factors surrounding the Gothic that has remained constant over the past three centuries is its affiliation with women. Indeed, from its late-eighteenth century inception as a genre to its twentieth century “drugstore” incarnation as a formulaic “romantic novel stamped by a brooding sense of mystery and terror” (Whitney 11), the Gothic has been considerably shaped by women. According to the findings of feminist literary theory and criticism, the Gothic, either as a genre or “mode of writing,” suits women writers’ purpose: not only can it give voice to the (hitherto unmentionable) female condition of marginalization in androcentric society, but it can do so indirectly, given the Gothic world’s precarious balance of “the real” and “the fantastic” (van Leeuwen 37).
“As early as the 1790s,” states Ellen Moers, “Ann Radcliffe firmly set the Gothic in one of the ways it would go ever after: a novel in which the central figure is a young woman who is simultaneously persecuted victim and courageous heroine” (91). For many feminist critics, who claim that the victim aspect is more pronounced in Gothic than its counterpart, the affinity between gender and genre is problematic: while the terror and rage that women experience within patriarchal social arrangements (especially marriage) may find expression, Gothic resolutions all too often entail an affirmation of the status quo, pointing to the notorious ambivalence of Gothic fiction. According to Tania Modleski, for instance, “Gothics, like Harlequins, perform the function of giving expression to women’s hostility towards men while simultaneously allowing them to repudiate it” (66). Kate Ellis maintains that the Gothic novel creates, “in a segment of culture directed toward women, a resistance to an ideology that imprisons them even as it posits a sphere of safety for them” (x). Michelle Massé argues that “the husband who was originally defined by his opposition to the unjust father figure slowly merges with that figure. The heroine again finds herself mute, paralyzed, enclosed” (20). In short, the maiden of the Radcliffean mould may act bravely, but she cannot surmount the sphere of woman’s socially enforced helplessness. Continue reading
It really does all boil down to this
Resuscitated courtly love
I’m the luminescent center of creation
Fixate all your longing upon me,
The unattainable ideal
Aloof and ethereal
Above and beyond you
And committed to another
Don’t flirt with your co-workers
Don’t cultivate a social life that would dare to cast me to the periphery
Of your waking consciousness
Don’t masturbate on glossy pages
Or in front of glowing phosphorescent boxes Continue reading
“I balance my masculine and feminine sides.”–Louise Hay, Daily Affirmation for Nov. 7, 2014
Animus et Anima
I can get wasted
but I’m not a sloppy drunk
whirling vortices command
that I expend linear-logic thinking
tenacious tendrils
that can’t be shaken off
Irrespective of that rectal contraction
that last thread of shit
dangles so perniciously
buttocks not the bowl
You’re that spider that lurks inside
the crevice
You’re that particle of food
trapped between my vagina dentata
undigested mealworms
I see past glazed truths
How did I get here?
Continue reading
A scalloped edge
dull-thudding, blunt trauma
an ovarian glare of phosphorescence stirs me,
something stirs me so
the sandy vortex
churns out half-whispered memories
regaled
by gurgling bones
Pele’s hill is crushed by Hina’s skull-white glow Continue reading
That fading phosphorescent glow
emanating from my
still-tingling clit serves as a signal
that it’s time to rest
lay low
like fallow earth
turn aside from your relentless plow
How sweet the ease
the sinking
of skin Continue reading
Intoxicated celebrants send moon-smiles streaming down my spine
Unmoving
High seat in the grasses
Maenads shake and blow their tresses Continue reading
The curse was laid upon me:
The curse of his bad teeth
Tedious evenings of drooping glances
And the mind-numbing parade
Of phosphorescent images
Against a musty backdrop
Of grey walls
Faded drapes Continue reading
amor et mortem 