Initiation

“There is nothing for you

In Mesoamerica”

A Mexican oracle chides me

For seeking remedies

To a lifetime of ailings

From an alien culture

“Remember the mist and the moss

Teeming in your veins

Child of Tuatha de Danann

Remember your name”

He foretells how I will love in this life

Kisses my cheek and proffers

Six books and a dream

A dream that delivers me

To an underworld highway

Of dank, dark canals

Ferried by canoe

For I cannot tiptoe on shadows

Like the cult of imps

Tittering from the bankless edge

“Unworthy”

“A waste”

“She should not be here”

“Never have what it takes”

“Send her back”

“Not for us to decide”

“She was summoned”

“Let her stay”

I am passaged to your forge

Glowing orange like your hair,

Like you,

A wooden room

In the mantle of the earth

Where I first learn to worship

Reverent, at your feet

You wear a purple cape like royalty

You say to me

“Child you came early

There is something you still do not know

Return to me when you do”

You splay five clues on your table

Three cards, cloaked figures

Cut in shapes of grim reapers

The fourth, a crown

Crested by musical notes

In billowing smoke

And a mole familiar as the fifth

A guide for the depths

I clutch him in my teeth

And wake with your name, new, on my lips

(From a Pantheon better suited

To a girl with spackled, frost-pink skin)

Brigid.

For six months I worship the sun

And give it your face

Offering oranges, burnt cinnamon

I pray to be free from a prison of pain

I excavate my misdeeds

I get off on my shame

I learn there is no virtue in victimhood

But ecstasy, all the same

That there is no sin

In wielding the executioner’s blade

For the hands that hold the hilt

Are the same ones gibbeted

As Sophia intended

Duality transcended

So I descended.

And when two men who loved me wrong

Died at their own hands

And a third who loved me well

Lost an innocent

I lit three candles and wept

Then went to see a band

With King in their name

My false friends wore forked tongues

And I danced in their flames

As the rhythm unspooled

The sun rose above the stage

It bequeathed a secret mantra

That rolled through me in waves:

I

Choose

Not to heal.