Blessed Fury

I see you, Fury, my much maligned mistress, lascivious and lean, hungry as a panther, stalking from the shadows with your rings carved from old bones.

Waking in your embrace brings the blood to my face, the heat to my eyes. I loose like some dark arrow into this painted day with its glorious gilded waterfalls of light limning wave and hair alike. I long to snap these beams into shards of wicked razor and with them, carve myself to the core, but I cannot, so instead I dance, my breath hot and red in my mouth, and with each step I fall deeper into the inky velvet cave of your heart; Fury, my mistress, my lover.

Why are we so afraid of you? I know why, because you’ll burn the whole house down and laugh as you flick the match. Reason has no hold on you, you can’t be talked from the ledge once your bare feet slice along its arrogant blade.

When you dance with me, I do not feel the cuts.
I feel only the power of the crimson river, melting the lead from my limbs into mercury and light. You are the wings at my heels, stretching my stride. You chew away dead and dying swamp-rot so from the jagged black stumps of frostbitten bone something new may grow.

Or not, and I’ll be playing the piano with one less finger.

But you don’t care, because either way there is change, either way I have to learn some new dance step, and that is your job, to fling me from my trajectory, from the silk-safe bosom of complacency. Do or die, you whisper in my ear like some fell angel, and your fire in my veins reminds me that I love life with a deep and devoted passion, your tigress tongue rips my cheek with a fetid kiss and spurs me on and in and through.

You demand that I move, and so move I must, carried by the wave of you, the cresting, hideous wall of greasy green that pulls back from wet sand and black-toothed rock, curling me up and over until I finally spear down into the dark and the full crushing force of you drives all the air from my lungs, snapping limbs, tearing flesh, piling tonnes of weight until I drown in the delicious tide, you fill my lungs, my heart, my belly.

You sanctify all my tears.

When the wave of you subsides I am a puling mess, all my strivings crushed to dust, all dignity gone, curled like a cicada’s discarded husk on a beach awash with weed, trembling and weak and grateful to move at all.

You stand over me, salt-perfumed, careless, akimbo, silhouetted against the sun. I see each individual grain of sand on your feet, reflecting light like tiny diamonds.

And then you leave as suddenly as you arrived, slinging over your shoulder all my drunken tales, taking out the trash, leaving me spent and bereft and draped in wonder. My skin is soft and new and my eyes fill with a timeless sunshine that does not burn, but simply sighs that this day, at least, right now,
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I am alive.