The Many Faced God

I recoil from the false belonging,

the maladapted attachment to toxic comfort, 

an insidious protection, 

an anaesthetised severance,

a sanitised dismemberment.

I embrace instead

the sickeningly unstable terrain,

the reclamation of dismembered histories

alive in my skin,

the vast complexity of existence 

that swirls and smarts within me,

that stings and swoops inside,

just as it does without.

The truth, 

at once annihilating 

and restorative.

I reach down deep to the loamy soil, 

to dig my own grave. 

From my turreted captivity I reach down,

dizzy, undone.

Even just the reaching down, 

a disloyalty to my enscripted direction. 

Tender mother,

child of rape,

birthing the predator.

I am forging the grave 

within my own living flesh,

earth and blood on my hands.

I am making space for the little deaths 

and for the big one also,

space for the reality of the violation,

the implications of the travesty 

we have begot.

Down deep with the worms 

and the maggots 

and the mycelium.

I am crafting the living tomb within my body,

that connects me to life,

a power source,

a placenta, 

a comfort,

a dismantlement,

a composting,

a resting place.

The cold and clammy body, 

earth stained and damp,

of the murdered instinct

is birthing itself back into existence,

from my encapsulated witholding.

Through each psychic pore, 

through the walls of my civilisation,

the push and the stretch,

each cell a birth canal,

to my severed and harrowing humanity.

I turn to face inside,

that which is the opposite of goodness,

the goodness I was so brutally groomed 

to believe myself to be. 

There too I choose to know myself,

in this darkness that I also am,

as brutal perpetrator, 

as senseless violence,

as immoral desecration.

I am a vast bridge that spans

the eternal complexity 

of the many-faced god,

the formidable trickster,

the life-giving paradox,

that dwells within me and all around.

Life, the vast bridge

between birth and death,

between good and evil,

between ether and earth,

between god and the devil,

between goddess and the killer.

There is room inside me for all of it.

That is how big I am.

That is how loved.

Image and text © Lucy Pierce 2020