crooked as corkscrews

Dionysos does not

explain or regret
anything. He is
pleased

if he can cause you to perform,
despite your plan,
despite your politics,

despite your neuroses,
despite even your Dionysian theories of self,
something quite previous,

the desire
before the desire,
the lick of beginning to know you don't know.

If life is a stage,
that is the show.
Exit Dionysos.

once upon
a time,
the princess
rose from the ashes
her dragon lovers
made of her
&
crowned
herself
the
motherfucking
queen of
herself.

- how's that for a happily ever after?

In fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to represent, much like angels represent the beautiful, pure, eternal side of the human spirit, monsters need to represent a more tangible, more mortal side of being human: aging, decay, darkness and so forth. And I believe that monsters originally, when we were cavemen and you know, sitting around a fire, we needed to explain the birth of the sun and the death of the moon and the phases of the moon and rain and thunder. And we invented creatures that made sense of the world: a serpent that ate the sun, a creature that ate the moon, a man in the moon living there, things like that. And as we became more and more sophisticated and created sort of a social structure, the real enigmas started not to be outside. The rain and the thunder were logical now. But the real enigmas became social. All those impulses that we were repressing: cannibalism, murder, these things needed an explanation. The sex drive, the need to hunt, the need to kill, these things then became personified in monsters. Werewolves, vampires, ogres, this and that. I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable.

This is the story of how I never stopped running.
This is the story of how,
when the wolves knocked,
I met them at the door
and I became the beast, instead.

there is a monster in me, too. i feel it;
a meanness, growing like a tree
in my belly.

is it hidden-in my long fingered hands
in my hair the color of blood?

in my wildfire love
only a god could bear?

is that why i was spared?

i’ll have you know:
i am as bloodthirsty as my father
and that was not thread you unwound

i’ll have you know-
that bull was a brother to me.

I tore myself out of my own mother’s womb.
There was no other way to arrive in this world.
A terrified midwife named me Monster
and left me in the pine woods with only the moon.
My mother’s blood dripped from my treed head.

In a dream my mother came to me and said
if I was to survive
I must find joy within my own wild self.

When I awoke I was alone in solitude’s blue woods.

* * *

A woman found me and took me to her mountain home
high at the end of an abandoned logging road.
We spent long winter evenings by the fire;
I sat at the hearth as she read aloud myths of the Greeks
while the woodstove roared behind me.
She sometimes paused to watch the wall of shadows
cast by my antlers. The shadows danced
across the entire room like an oak’s wind-shaken branches.

* * *

The woman was worried when I would not wear dresses.
I walked naked through the woods.
She hung the wash from my head
on hot summer days when I sat in the sun to read.
The woman grew worried when I would not shed
my crown with the seasons as the whitetails did.
“But I am not a whitetail,” I said.

* * *

When I became a woman
in the summer of my fifteenth year,
I found myself
suddenly changed in the mirror.
My many-pronged crown had grown
into a wildness all its own;
highly stylized, the bright
anarchic antlers were majestic to my eye.

The woman saw me and smiled. “What you are I cannot say,
but nature has created you.
You are fearfully and wonderfully made.”

When night came it brought a full moon.
I walked through the woods to the lake
and knelt in the cool grass on its bank.
I saw my reflection on the water,
I touched my face.
You are fearfully and wonderfully made.

It just goes to show, people said later. It just goes to show how fairy tales always stop too soon in the telling.

Others said it was never a fairy tale at all. Anyone could see that. They were all too lovely, too obviously doomed.

But the wisest said, that’s exactly what a fairy tale is. The happily-ever-after is just a false front. It hides the hungry darkness inside.

Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.

Dear beloved.
Dear betrayer.
Dear Judas.

I was born into this cell. Don’t blame yourself. Your middle name was destiny, and besides, my father has been waiting for me all this time. I was on loan to this simple earth. It was never going to last.

As the pain drives itself into my palms, it shall not hurt me. I’ll remember your token of love on my lips, and taste you still. You taught me so many things, and the one I’ll remember more surely is how terrible, and beautiful, love is. The nails will be nothing compared to such divinity. You betrayed me with a kiss, and only the kiss was surprising.

You’ll wish yourself dead, fill your casket with silver coins. Nothing I can say will stop the rot inside your chest blooming to everything you touch. Just know, that when your heartbeat stops, it will be me cutting the rope from around your neck, me embracing you, and me showing you exactly how forgiveness is given. You loved me first, you loved me the most.

And I, Judas, loved you last.

Once upon a time there was a wicked witch and her name was
Lilith
Eve
Hagar
Jezebel
Delilah
Pandora
Jahi
Tamar
and there was a wicked witch and she was also called goddess and her name was
Kali
Fatima
Artemis
Hera
Isis
Mary
Ishtar
and there was a wicked witch and she was also called queen and her name was
Bathsheba
Vashti
Cleopatra
Helen
Salomé
Elizabeth
Clytemnestra
Medea
and there was a wicked witch and she was also called witch and her name was
Joan
Circe
Morgan le Fay
Tiamat
Maria Leonza
Medusa