Vulture
When it began they were scouting the sky, back in late august, when the summer light glared fierce. The span of their wings was the extent of a premonition. Drought and desert had come to the city to stay. Dead things lay fresh, but soon to be gone; lives run out and reclaimed back to earth. On my daily commutes they signaled from above, when doubt and dread circled my mind, like scavengers. It got better when I looked up. Vultures raking air and spotting the blue, waiting patiently, until the great swoop. Precise, economic, my winged totem advised against dilapidation of what good energy I still had. Vultures of the mind are unproductive, inefficient, they don’t leave the land really bare. Their shadowy silhouettes conceded honour to the city rotting below, it’s heart overrun with concrete, synthetic memories instead of a past. They could smell the end even as it began, and already sailed the sky with prudent grace, circling wide perimeters. Entrusted with disposal, they’d consume us back to our mission of advancement. They’d answered a muted call –look up! Vulture, a dark reputation, reference to what is unsightly, death. But by early November of that year I utterly disagreed. I liked my peculiar friend who was almost pure width. I found his stoic way, and his mystical hiss, alluring. Today, when he cruises the sea above, floating effortlessly, omniscient over the mountain range, he assures me all is what it must, even in times of decay, like these.
Slither
Slipping through the cracks, an ethereal presence, a phantom being, slithers in deep silence, at the bottom of darkness, in the abyss. There’s more beyond the cracks: new intuition, a world still without words, unseen, barely heard, more felt. Old laws don’t work anymore, only the desire for birthing something new and free. Energy build up is what’s needed to fatten up the slithering smokey ghost. I hear steady crumbling as the last degrees of march skid by. Degradation of matter, a snake shedding its skin in tatters, in a temple where nobody prays anymore. We’re are heading to the equinox of the wooden snake. Never before did I feel as a vessel by vocation. Believed in burdens, painful shoulders, the clank of the machines. Never believed in the constancy of receiving flowing care, protection by right. Long and tedious is the low key hum of tooth and claw mindset, suppressed natural impulse, aching traps. Yet I seem to be slipping through the cracks, as I did once, many moons before. That I am only asked to wait, catch the right winds, and be the slithering vessel of an ebony world inside another, inhabitant of this new womb. The new being floats as a headache, a suggestion in my spaced out brain. As I slide through, the first glimpse of a new time line, barely developed, is the hazy horizon after a grand fire. The slithering wooden snake goes forth, and is soon lost in the remaining rubble, the spray of fine debris. How she loves to stir up worlds like ours, watch us burn, but by the end, we will have birthed our new selves.