Category Archives: Wymyn/Myth

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Cinderella

Audio version

Slowdance yourself at sunset

In the incense smoke

To the sound of the solar inverter

You found your shoe at last

It was in the back of the cupboard

The pumpkin is in your belly

Sweet as apricot with the chicken

Someone else caught

And killed for you

You were never at home in a palace

What did the prince want from you, anyway?

It was your voice

It was the way you danced

Knowing you only had until midnight

When everything would vanish

It was the energy

That last-day-alive intensity

Slowdance yourself

Stratocumulus forms in the north-west

And the storm sweeps away your unrest.

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The Beauty Of Sleep

Audio version

When you wake you return

To your body

That temple

City of shadows and lights

With your eyes closed

You prepare for departure again

To that mountain

That temple

Forest of shadow and sun

With your third eye open

Listen, princess

It’s a lie they tell you

The prince will not come to take you away

But one will come, 

To guard you while you fight

It’s an inconvenient truth,

Oh prince

Though you feel the safety of it in your heart

It’s the princess who rescues, as much as you

It’s the union and the distinction that saves

How can you stay here

In your body, 

Your prison

Hearing scratches at your door

Dear princess

They tell you lies from birth

It’s not their fault

They can only pass on what they’ve been shown

Here, 

This second

You dream you are reading

Words about yourself

Warnings, encouragement

Here,

Here

Wake with me

In your body you dream

They said you were royalty

They only knew half the truth

In your dream body you know

You are more than a human 

More than male, more than female

More than two, less than one

In your body you dream

You are all the eyes of every universe

You are more than a universe

You are less than nothing

You are fullness and emptiness themselves

And between

And everything else you cannot be

In your body

It’s you, 

Dreamer

It always was

You wake to your own rescue

You, in every body

Sleeping and seeing

Blinded and alive

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Post-Stoning

Audio version

Take the glamour off

Chipped nails,

Cracked coffin lid

I am done with grave-digging

It is finished

He told me there was no going back

If nothing else, I believe what I see

I’ll be your witness

If you make me a reliable one

Now the woman

The sinful one,

Caught in the act

I see the fault-lines slicing her

Into pieces of you, him, them

Hoard of voices bellowing

Warning

She’s a dangerous one

Marked by her desire. You keep away

Cats in heat have nothing on

Her inescapable hunger

Teeth within heart-finger-mesh

She is a net that will swallow you whole and spit out fragments

Owl-coughing wing-swoop death

And lonely

Like the lynx,

Solitary and content to pad the echoing snow-killed slopes

And never lonely

She is a heath-wren in spring

And the honey-bracelet myrtle-leaf

The dagger-tip Hakea pointing outward, and to the sky

She killed me and now I unearth from

My ashes and rain-soaked fields

Repentance

Fire baptism branding

Bark scorch-marks and blackened skin

Survival of the fittest,

The unchosen chance of the leeward

He said go

I am going.

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Cannibal Kingdom

Audio version

Always Eve’s idea

To give ear to the long one

In the interests of equity

Ecological democracy

Give pleasure a chance

Reconnaissance, not romance

Man retains enjoyment

Yet perfect, pleasing, God-sent

Husband, home, employment

Become vaguely insufficient

It’s because she gathers

Novelty, her search-image

It’s supposed to serve her

The urge to collect

Into her arms the lovely, fallen

Entire orchard of paradise

And lose herself in the giving and receiving

But again she’s coming to

With its hard tongue inside her

Eyes open under thick scales

Slip-squeezing muscular

Air only a prayer away but

Dusky, half-forgotten…

Squirm out of cold coils

Back to the warm, honest soil

Of birth and rebirth

The cinnamon-scent of earth

Listening for holy footsteps

Hearing murmuring of wasps

Chasing nectar-dripping skin

And so it begins

Anew

Beside her in the furnace

Gold calf forming, reliquefying

She drinks in each burning breath

Long, deep, uniform

Sweating out the venom

Thinking of eternal love

And on the third day she rises

Sloughs the grey, blistered skin

One long, untidy tangle

Walks upright again.