I am sweet, heavy and abundant in the slanting amber sunlight of the harvest season. I paint my lips dark with colours like crimson and plum, echoing the slow and deeply rooted fruits coming round into their fullness now. Ocher and acorn globes of seed, rich with nourishment for the long winter ahead, are piled along the roadside. I have grown fat on the splendor of summer, the curves of my body rolling like the muses of the renaissance. I feasted on figs dripping with spiced honey, cut my teeth through the flesh of sweet mangos and sharp citrus. Drenched pomegranates and pears in the dark juice of ripe blackberries and trickled them across his offered tongue. Brushed soft peaches against my lips before biting into their yolky golden bodies. Bees painted with pollen hum along escaped nectar that flows in rivers across my body, dance in the wildflowers sewn delicatly as lace into a teardrop v of auburn hair. The forest takes on the golden crown of autumn and bursts into a cascade of wildfire. 

It is the season of the headonist. I have followed my deepest pleasures to this place, picking desire from sunriped fruit branches in a free wandering path. In this moment, my bones know that the purpose of my existence is this pleasure, this peace, this round bodied fullness. In my poems, in the feast I place in front of my lover, in the colours I choose to paint the sunrise with, I am always attempting to answer these impossible questions of the universe. Why am I here? Tonight it is simply so I can watch his face as he sleeps beside me and dreams up the sunset. Tomorrow, when he leaves, I will again attempt to conquer humanity. Because if the purpose of this life is to live in pleasure, I must accept how good it feels to wield power. We must each of us accept this serpentine part of our shadow. The Lucifer principle tucked into the spiral code of our human genetics. We like to hold, control, and be above. It is safe. Requires no vulnerability. If I can reimagine the world in the shape of my own meaning, if I can hold a promise from every being on earth then I can lay always splendid across the lap of luxury. The Queen is dead and buried now. Man is begging for another prophet to come to his aid as storms, wildfire and flood begin to devour the boundaries colonizers carved into the land. The annons of the internet, empty apologies from the pope, betrayals of starbound billionaires and kaleidoscoping viruses have thrown us into an age of information no one has the capacity to process. So, at the dark edges of parties, I ask for the promise of a stranger's eternal soul. 

“What do you want it for?” They will sometimes ask me. These are the ones that I like. The waderwisps who want to believe the devil might come asking for their soul. We all believe, somewhere in the space of our bright hearts, that we are truly the most gorgeous and incandescent being upon the earth. This is one aspect of our human divinity, because of course the wild world itself is holy and every atom of the universe divine. And so to slip into a human’s psyche, all I must do is touch upon this desire to be recognized as who they truly are. The hero of their own story, the prey in mine. I have the word Siren tattooed across the rib Adam is missing. Lilith over my spine, Chaos Reigns under my chin and yet still my only crime is in the act of disappearing after they’ve promised their soul to mine. It is a dangerous game, this living. 

As you read these words, I want you to pray with me. Let the teeth in your mouth slide forward sharply. Send your mind down into your being and connect with every hair across your animal body. Find the space in your chest, below the collar bone and behind your left breast where your shadow sleeps. What are they dreaming about? What shape does your darkness pace against the rhythm of your beating heart? What is the taste of their desire? Does it rhyme with rebellion, revolt, rise? Can you hear the call coming from deep in the earth, an echo of eons past? There is a reason witches are remembering themselves in our common era. Why now we share our secret stories with one another in whispers. Me too. We pass around a blade and cut into our palms along the love lines. Press our hands together. What could be more terrifying to those in power than realizing our savage dreams to drag them down from their damned green dreams of grandiosity. Have you ever sat among survivors and stroked them toward violence. Sharpened them against the tender quick of their own pain. We are hungry. We would kill. You gave us the taste of our own blood and now we move to you to drink our fill. It could be so easy. 

Tell me why should I choose to be good when the pleasure of evil is an aspect of my duality? I am neither man nor woman, both a god and demon dancing wild in this modern eden. I could call a cult into being. Among ruins of ancient marble stone, there is a myth cast in gold. It tells of the gods. That they exist, hold their power based on how many humans believe in them. Isn’t truth the same way? And if the masses are calling out in their sleep for one to lead them, surely I must appease them. The history of our humanity is always drawn in templed hierarchies, in the all seeing eye of secret societies. Why not appoint myself to this gilded throne, wrap myself in golden robes and call out the madness in each of your souls? War wages all around us, why not join in the dying? Hallows Eve is calling, are the dead ever really gone? What civil rules of society are we following that no longer ring true? Let's fell the bell towers, rush in where angels fear to tread. Carve our names into their gravestones. Spill blood to bring lands of milk and honey into bloom once again. 

The long darkness of winter is sharpening his knives now against the pits of rotting stone fruit we missed. The curves of this soft body will wither and become the blade our foes will beg to cut themselves against. We will find our sorrow and rage again in the howling winds of December. There are ancient prophecies laid into the ley lines below the ground. Along the creeping roots of willows beside the river, of oaks who stand alone. Evergreens whose needles muffle the ground eternal. And here, in the neverending night of dark soil, we discover the mycelium. Rivered networks of mushrooms, trading nutrients for sunlight they never get to see, spiralized out from underfoot in every direction, in every place on earth. Have you ever killed an animal, cut skin from meat? Do you know the fascia of your own body? The earth too has this webbing membrane. The evolution of a fractal universe sews our identities unendingly into one another.

What do these sweet little beings have to teach us, what language do they speak? I believe it must be similar to the made up dialects of siblings before their tongues hold strict syllables. That it has the cadence of a coiling shell held to your ear along the seashore. That, like the alveoli of our lungs, they are both the beginning and an end. In branches they are ever reaching out towards one another. “I love you” they whisper in the dark, moving blindly deeper into connection with one another. This is why be good. The stories we’ve been taught about survival of the fittest, about kings of the jungle, alphas and omegas, aren’t true any longer. The natural world around us is a love affair among beings completely interdependent upon one another. Humans are the only organism upon this earth who, if vanished in an instant, would leave it flourishing. Every other being plays an integral role in the balance of their ecosystem. So I don't want to rule according to the rules of those who came before us. 

This is the task of the artist. To dream where others simply follow. To question and to push with our whole bodies against answers like “that’s just the way it's always been.” To create, to breathe light into the life of the human soul. To remind us why it is we fight. To stitch pleasure back into the open wound of being in this world with so much sorrow. That is why I bring you these words like offerings to the holiness of your being. Because I know there are parts of you, parts of all of us, that are hurting. Because I know every one of us could be tempted into raging, into following in the footsteps of our forefathers and conquering. Our ancestors knew violence. We could dance into this chaos and destroy. But we could also bring in an age of healing. And, like the discovered mycelium, I want to learn how to reach out blindly towards you and say “I love you”. Let my edges open so the auras of our dreams can create colours I’ve never tasted. I want to swallow your sunlight, and trade you overflowing handfuls of my stardust carbon. I want desperately to birth a revolution in art, but perhaps softness truly is the most boundless form of resistance. 

Come to me in the woods, in the abandoned railways of your city, along rooftops and beside silent lakes. Leave your clothes at the edge of the firelight. Let me wrap a blanket made from the velvet night around you. Dance. Let the flames lick their blue marrowed pleasure into the web of veins beneath your skin. Watch the harvest moon rise and scream. I will hear you. And this winter, when there is time to tell stories with no endings, on the longest nights of the year and as shadows protect us, we will begin to rewrite genesis. 

17/10/2022
@celinas.blade