wyrdwind

For Fuck’s Sake

The first time I attempted to call my ancestors

It didn’t exactly go as planned

I was taking several intensely physical classes

Heavy weights, dance, flow yoga, various light to full contact unisex martial arts, etc.

Just to offset limbic chaos

Equalize the pressure of my hurricane

And of course wandering around at night

For my regularly scheduled weeping sessions as usual

To clear my head

To soothe my soul, yes

I love the cold

And finally I was like, shout out

Why the fuck am I here?

I have never belonged

Is there some particular direction

An occupation, like what, can I get a hint

I’m lost

Become a tax attorney? Join the circus? Fuck off with some sheep in the highlands? What?

Open to suggestion

Well

I dreamt

A very much pre-colonial outfit

Not even within sniffing distance of the white man

Some distinctly Mesoamerican reminiscent

Xena Warrior Princess shit

On my way with…my tiger, I guess?

To collect my imprisoned children

Which my lieutenants had gone ahead

And retrieved under authority of…my headdress?? Also a big cat

So I show up and they’ve been released from their cage

Filthy, naked or in threadbare rags

We look absolutely nothing alike

They’ve got pale skin, pale eyes

Rounded features and faces

Wild hair very much not black

And they climb all over me

Press their cheeks and foreheads to my skin

Settle in whatever crook suits them

As if we just sleep like that or something

Me and my pile of babies

And they’re so cheerful despite their present circumstances

Had absolute faith I’d come

Utterly without shame or concern

That it ignites an icy, murderous rage

Deep in my stomach

Their captors claimed ignorance

They didn’t realize they were fighting on my land

Caught between dueling giants

They had no idea these were my children

As if any children should be in a cage and reduced to squalid rags

So we return to base

Which is apparently a Mr Rogers style house

Directly on the border

Of an ancient jungle and a hideous grass expanse

And everyone is arguing about our official response

To these escalating aggressions

And I’m just watching my tiger

Chew a bright sippy cup on the rug

Finally I say

We’re going to kill them all

And that’s end of discussion

I journey into the jungle

A place only I am permitted to go

And seek a teocalli mirrored above as it is below

Inside, it is full of mutating jaguars without eyes

Writhing in all directions, crawling up walls

Pupating flesh sacks into the shape of haunting, shuddering warriors

And in the center is a misty darkness

Whom I address directly

I woke in haggard, crusty eyed puzzlement

Only to discover upon further research that there exists

An Aztec deity named Tezcatlipoca

Explicitly omniscient

The trickster jaguar god of the Night

Cardinal North, the cold, death

Destruction, destiny, and change

Granter of ultimate authority

His omnipresence as the night-wind

Means no one beneath his sky can hide their secrets

Their pain

Whose name translates to Smoking Mirror

All knowing obsidian reflection, patron of warriors and kings

The latter considered his personal emissaries

Lord of the Unseen

Observer of the Near and Far

He Who Passes Judgment Upon Humanity’s Sins

Enemy of Both Sides

Well

You’ll never guess what I later learned

About the furthest reaches of my matriline

So to recap:

Go get the babies, everyone dies

Right. Okay. Right.

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Endangered

Just to put some respect on my Nahuatl speaking cousins

First I’ll explain Why Jaguars

Absolutely gorgeous and sensual creatures

These are the most powerful of all big cats

Capable of catching prey thrice their own size

Then dragging said prey up a tree to relax

Strongest bite force of all mammals

Skull crushing spine snappers

They can even pierce turtle shells

Excellent swimmers

Jaguars do not roar, they growl and grunt

Cavernous, guttural vocalizations

So imagine that deep, jungle dark

A place so green and thick and ravenous

Where something’s always watching

Digesting

You don’t hear them coming

And even if you do, it’s too late

Jaguar Warriors wielded clubs with obsidian teeth

Designed to slice and shatter on impact

For maximum shrapnel

Trained from an early age to dominate

Tasked with taking lethally hostile targets alive

For human sacrifice

Had to capture a minimum of four to earn their rank

They did not wear heavy armor

And were in extraordinary physical condition

Masters of hand to hand

Their only defense was extreme aggression, control, skill, and terrain

So even though the Aztec population was decimated by smallpox

To which they had no immunity on account of their superior bathing practices

Having taken 90% fatality to the face before they squared up

The Spaniards still lost 66% of their forces

Their metal-armored, mounted, gun and sword slinging forces

Natives and their Jungle

A Jaguar Warrior could decapitate a horse in one swing

And take the rider with his bare hands afterwards

In single combat

Remember what I said

About the rape of the Americas having made Europe what it is?

All the silver, gold, dyes, crops, textiles, so on fattening the mercantile class?

Red in the ledger of every old money fortune?

Fueling the industrial revolution? That wasn’t advancement

Your ancestors owe a horrific debt

You can never repay it. Shall we evict you from your land?

Sign you up for indenture?

Anyways, back to combat prowess

See the best way to counter a gun

Is at close range

If you’ve got the cojones

You’re easier to shoot running away

But the caveat here is

Once you have him on the ground

You have to end it

When they get to overstepping

Men keep pushing until they can’t

It’s like what Xena says

That once you openly carry a sword

You’re a threat

If you’re a threat, you’re a target

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Diadh-anam

There’s a triple trilogy by Jaqueline Carey

Tolerable prose and a bit bodice-ripper

These are not high brow

Quite the yarn nonetheless

She’s got some moments

There’s a God-Touched girl named Moirin mac Fainche

From the people of the Brown Bear in Alba

And for reasons she cannot understand

And often wishes she weren’t

She is favored by the gods

From multiple lands, multiple pantheons

Possessed of the divine spark

An agent of fate

As such she must leave her home

And go…wherever that spark bid she go

Bridge vastly different peoples

Often through her bedchamber

Thanks Naamah

Hell, she fucks an Asian dragon once

Somehow

Something about synchronized storms

Overwhelming and unstoppable desire

Pleasure her mind doesn’t even have receptors for

What a way to go

Go Semele or go home

She works small magics, summons the twilight, becomes invisible

Anyways it’s been a hot minute

But there’s a part I’ll never forget

Where she encounters the people of Terra Nova

Who perform human sacrifice

She of D’Angeline training

From a land of opulence, sensuality, and intrigue

Must question what it is to be civilized

The Emperor asserts that death is how you honor life

You are not owed the sunrise

Sometimes the gods just Thirst

And blood is the only way to make it right

Of course her manipulative Ex

Who forced a naive girl into a soul-sworn oath

To never reveal his dabbling in occult summoning circles

Had been given the “gift” of the language of ants

Which he’d taken as an insult

And was subsequently driven mad by their thoughts

He went to Terra Nova to become a god-king

Controlled the region with his cult and a black river

A massive swarm of ants

Leveraged Moirin into summoning a fallen angel and in the end

With the help of Mother Bear and the surrounding nature spirits

Moirin commands the jungle to consume him

And he is skeletonized by ants

It always made me think, you know?

That to hear and truly understand

As many lives as possible

Or even just one

No matter how “insignificant”

Is that not what it means to be a god?

Real power is this humbleness

And if we could hear and see each other

Without barriers or interference

The mask of our bodies

The trappings of societal expectation

Raw, pure, unfiltered

How many of us would speak the same language?

Could touch each other regardless?

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Close Quarters

In the first cycle we’re introduced to a people

Descended from angels who chose to remain on Earth

With their mother

Rather than leave for Heaven

Reveling in their senses

Interbreeding with humans

And when they finally tired of this

Their mother the Earth in her wisdom suggested

A separate resting place for them and their descendants

Where they retired as regional gods

Their gifts passed down their respective houses

Well one such angel was Kushiel

The punisher

Phedre was born with blood in her eye

Known as Kushiel’s Dart

Which hadn’t been seen for quite some time

This dubious gift had the following effects:

Her body healed faster than everyone else’s

She felt pleasure when she should feel pain

Regardless of personal feelings or consent

Yeah.

So aside from the fact

That I am strongly against BDSM

And prostitution, this

Becomes an interesting plot device

She fetched a high price

They really put her to work, took advantage

But one day a foreigner pointed out

That the Dart isn’t a curse, it’s a weapon

Phedre was deeply troubled by that

And troubles surely ensued

A brewing war, a festering rot

Dark revolution in the Caucasus mountains

Where a brutal purge once left a boy

Buried under a pile of corpses with a head wound

And he stared into that void until his eyes turned black

A people who once worshiped Ahurha Mazda

The Lord of Light

Good thoughts, good words, good deeds

Were not saved

When the Akkadians came for them

So this Mahrkagir showed them another path

The path of Angra Mainyu

Aimed to bring Him into the world

Where He would rein for 10,000 years

He and his Bone Priests would sacrifice what they loved most in a ritual

To see it done

But the Mahrkagir was incapable of love

Until

Phedre infiltrated the Zenana harem

To rescue her former enemy’s beautiful son

And to be clear she did not want to

But the D’Angeline gods chose her moment of stark doubt

To show her in no uncertain terms

That they were real

And if she did not do this, she would never feel their light again

The Mahrkagir and his Bone Priests accumulated magical power

Through suffering and terror

The Zenana was a place of putrescence and abject despair

And she became his favorite

He used a special barbed instrument

To violate her

Enacted all manner of sadistic pleasure

And because her body betrayed her with pleasure

Until she fainted from blood loss

He became obsessed

The Mahrkagir even gave her a small dog figurine

As a token of his affection

For he had a dog as a boy, before everything

And twisted up in her hair

Phedre hid an ivory shiv gifted by another woman

He decided that she was his perfect victim

His perfect sacrifice

And her lifetime of bitter, grueling endurance

Attracting the worst of humanity

Led her to the moment he lay beside her

Fully asleep in absolute trust

Exposed

She put that shiv through his throat

The only person she ever killed

Sometime…after, she wondered

If the gods don’t have among themselves

A system of checks and balances

Crossing borders when stakes are highest

The right tool for the job

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Rainforest Mind

Coatlicue is the Aztec Mother of All Creation

She of the ecstatic shivering serpent skirt to indicate

Her immense fertility, long in the teat

Having nursed so very many

Clawed hands and feet to dig her children’s graves

Whose corpses she eats

Skull face

Brings life as a virgin, from nothing

Or by touching anything at all that gives her pleasure

All around her is the cloying glut of birth

Mother and Devourer

For in regions with a snowy winter

It suggests a separate office

A barrier between life and death

Some delicate whisper of approaching spring

A relief, a caress

But along the equator the truth is front and center

Separation is an illusion

You live and die by your mother’s skirt

Who is it that will answer

When she has need of warriors?

I often think of her

As the ultimate front liner

Hope is a grisly bitch to know

Not for the faint of heart, the lily-livered

While metacognitive management of multiple concurrent processing streams

Might have you thinking my ability

To dig a grave and memorialize

To step aside

As a moment occurs

No matter how dire

Borders on psychopathy

That somehow I must feel less

I assure you, I feel plenty

Every dream is lucid for me

In fact there’s families of dreams

I recall those relatives preceding

During each new branch of the tree

I know I’m asleep, and rather busy

But I also know

My cat wants her litter changed

I have an itch

Mom is awake

Gotta eat more carbohydrates

Because my glycogen is depleted

And sometimes I’m able to know or do a thing

In waking life I can’t explain

Blind predictions with frightening accuracy

Extrapolate, induce, or deduce minute specifics like I majored in a region’s history

I randomly spout some fanciful bullshit and it really happened that way

Make a character and it’s like I’ve known you personally from infancy

And also read every word you ever put to a page

The bulk of the information your mind collects throughout the day

Remains hidden from sight

But in my case

I can always feel its presence

The hungry earth

A panther’s fur

There’s something moving in the dark

And when I pore over you I remember

Every data point I’ve ever been told, observed, or absorbed

Sense intricate webs of cause and effect

Gauge microslippages

You know how people are rarely telling you what they think they’re telling you

When you’ve been paying attention

But what they think they’re telling you also tells you something

That’s all just instinct for me

I’m always thinking what you need

What you might like, your development

How your bones set

If ever you rankle at a suggestion

Remember I am Aware of the Variables

All of Them

And Also the One’s I’m Not

I will only push you when it is absolutely necessary

Push no more than I would hack a tree’s limbs

Expect a parrot to be a cat

Whatever’s relevant to your growth habits

Maximizes fulfillment and performance

You are a thing in my jungle

Lover I want it all

Beauty is a biome

Some plants live one season

A handful, annual, perennial

And others stand for thousands of years

Shelter everyone who comes after

Inform the entire landscape

No effort is wasted here

Decay should not beget despair

There’s always more, so much more

This is known as deep systems

It’s all useful biomass

Everything has a purpose and an end

My weapon of choice has always been

A shovel

I will serve my purpose on the right ground

Somewhere there’s a grave with my name on it

Or I have yours

I guess you could call that faith

You could also call that love

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Nurture

They call it the warrior gene

Carried on the X chromosome

And activated by childhood trauma

Or extremely adverse conditions

It is a key precursor of hair trigger reactive violence, self destruction, and impulsive behavior

In men

Who do not possess a second X to buffer its effects

And are testosterone dominant

In a sense when severely mishandled

They become berserkers

Gangsters. Delinquents.

A biological class of shock troops

Whose only lasting solace is death

Like when an autistic person smashes their own head

One must acknowledge the true nature of a thing

Not what Hollywood and sheltered writers caught in a circle jerk would have you believe

This class functions best

When facing existential threats

These men must be put to work

And trained to follow orders

That is bypass the prefrontal cortex

As these guys run at a deficit

They are not sent abroad

You keep the leash in your hand

And if you want peace throughout the land

That hand is always a woman’s

I’ve said the difference between death and annihilation

A thriving ecosystem and lesions of fields

Is a woman who knows how and when

To sic the dogs of war

And men who are loyal without question

Know whose skirt they came out from

Now when a particular variant of that gene occurs in a woman

Especially when it occurs twice

Something very interesting happens

Neuroplasticity from estrogen dominance

Allows unchallenged accumulation of excess serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine

And is very slow to break these down

While working double time on dissipating adrenaline

So once she heals from her trauma

Having evaded litany misdiagnoses and inappropriate interventions

Amid the disarray of acute distress while trapped in a hostile social construct

And is instead placed in a nourishing environment

She practically glows with joy and affection

Attains a generally sustained euphoria

Utter calmness and focus

Even in situations that would have everyone else puking and shitting their pants

And the very second survival lines are crossed

Someone menaces the nest

Thinks to try a bitch

She identifies and eliminates the threat

Without an ounce hesitation or remorse

Only a woman can embody this contradiction

Men do not enjoy these pleasant benefits

At least not without a woman’s help

Plenty of patience for babies, their chatter and grabby hands and little teefs

No mercy

Granted, healing is messy, there’s a million ways

This goes terribly awry

You know this world hates a woman with an appetite

Spirits gotta get her bones just right

Stars gotta align

What I’m saying is

Sometimes you just gotta close your eyes

This ain’t Turned Out In The End

This ain’t Pain Made You A Better Person

This ain’t Everything Happens For A Reason

This ain’t God Has A Plan

But sometimes, just sometimes

Your ancestors are playing the long game