She is earth. Holy ground. Apple seeds.
She is the milk maid to mother medicine, worshipping with every warm hand hold all the ways you know what is needed: a swirl of a cinnamon stick, a pinch of salt, a cardamom pod.
She is softness, stillness. Calm in the moments of swinging leg before stomping foot.
Maybe this is just what it means, to live. To experience the world: alone. What else can we know?
When every second I feel connected to you is in-ter-rupt-ed by hard ex-hal-a-tion, snic-ker, ex-pres-sion of a self that I have never understood and interpreted to mean disrespect when every shimmering milky shell of a force field is painstakingly created, like tiny leaves breaking through eggshell-ed buds after gaining the trust of the watering can that promises to return daily, even after weeks of breaking, breaking, breaking oaths? Yes, this frequency I cultivate moment to moment, expending every ounce of energy to construct, to push the safety net larger and larger, it disintegrates like old elastic in a long-forgotten swim suit when your barge barges in.
This is honey, harvested from harvest sunsets, a drop a decade, squeezed from lips I worked tirelessly to moisten: burnt, in a wanton effort to make honeycomb. Blackened in the fire. Turned bitter, inedible, unpleasurable, discarded, stuck to the tray, returned to the oven, left to charcoal, to harden, to alchemise into the iron.
Maybe this is why Thor’s hammer is so heavy: it has simply absorbed the bitter nectar of every womb trying to cultivate a new life, or maybe an old one, one that makes sense again, one we remember again, but was long-ago trodden on, not only carelessly, not only accidentally, but without care completely. Without realising the accident has occurred at all, so in his own path he walks that he doesn’t even know another exists, could exist.
Or maybe this is just why the ladder to the cross of martyrdom looks so easy to climb, because every rung is strung with roses growing strong with the thorns of indignation, steps reinforced with steely damnation, footholds lowered with ironically high expectations, standards? Standards never met and yet here, in this tableau, in this image of how I see it, look so effortless to slide by, climbing higher to step, step, step, surprise, delight, over delivery, step, step, step, here I am, here is what you asked for, here is even more, step, step, step, self-flagellation, Dobby will iron her hands now, I know I am not everything you want and nor can I give it to you but please, here, I’ll break every bone trying to fit into this box that is the precise shape you requested.
A prison cell I built myself. A coffin, maybe. Architects would be impressed by the structural integrity of such a shape I shape-shifted.
But there was that word again: iron.
Funny, how it was given to us as a labour-saving saviour, when really they know it applies more-so to our wills.
Funny, how it was re-gifted like that, after years of alchemy, after years of brewing our bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.
Or nailed into horseshoes in an effort to keep you safe from evil spirits.
Surrounding our cemeteries to contain the souls.
Meteoric, tempered by the celestial, holding the singing magic of the Tibetan bowls.
But I suppose our irons still sing, even if it is more like a scream when she reaches boiling point, releasing that which we cannot see and will not name, awaiting the next garment to press, and us?
The next button.