Deep Wells of Desire

She tells me to be gentle with myself. I want to be a good little subject, despite my doubts about trusting the process let alone myself, so I try to concentrate on being kind to myself for a while.

I sit alone on the floor in a darkened room and listen to the sound of the rain as it falls upon the house and drenches the dry summer grass outside. As soon as I close my eyes and slow my breathing, I can feel the atmosphere is electric.

It simmers all around and inside of me, as though my pulse is learning to syncopate with a plane beyond this one. Coordinates which suspend all time and space. Judgment and cruelty fall away like stars fading out into mist.

I still feel a bit shaky and uncertain inside my own thin frame. I remain still, listening. Imagining the soft strength of falling water, the way it melts together and rushes down into the gutters in the empty street.

As the damp air seeps in through the open window, it clings lightly to my exposed skin. The smell of late summer heat, thick and hot with wet relief.

In my veins, there curls a pewter colored energy, cool, steady, the feel of liquid metal.

I am weighted into myself. Anchored to my being even as she soars high above the whole quiet scene. I remember someone said to me once that where the spirit is willing to go, the body will follow.

A tangle of vines loosens around my heart.

Struggling to remember the last time that kind of wilderness was truly alive in my own bones – in my own life – I sense my tranquility begin to erode, to give way to the slender slithering shape of the unknown.

It is not panic but it is not peace, either. It is elegant, vigilant, unpredictable. It takes on what feels like physical form.

There are snakes inside of me.

Dark dreams of beauty and desire coiling like thinly veiled threats. I can see all the way into their hissing, burning eyes as they rock back and forth like pendulums of fire.

She told me to be gentle with myself but does she understand the danger. Has she ever seen the deep wells of the self which dance before me now.

The things which flicker and lick at me when I’m alone in the dark.

Tell me about gentle.

Tell me about benevolence.

Word for me what must fall away; breathe into me what is to come.

Writhing, undulating, moving to their own mysterious music, I invite the creatures in.