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.
.
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
.
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?
.
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
.
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
.
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
wyrdwind 