Shhh.

Stop what you are doing.
Empty your mind.
Stay silent.
Pay attention.
LISTEN to my words, follow my voice.

Picture this face:
Dead eye’s masking sorrow.
In a second flash with rage.
Then gone. Out. Like a light.
Dead eye’s again.
Dry lips, chapped and flaking.
Sucking in air as if to scream
but open only to
… suck in more air.
Teeth chipped from clenching,
yellowed from too much coffee,
too many cigarettes,
too much of whatever will dull the pain.
Brittle hair surrounds this face,
tangled with bits of grass and tree,
matted with mud long dried to clay.

Picture that face.
Forged with lines that track the passing of pain.
Eye’s, red rimmed and wild.
Lips, chapped and bleeding.
Teeth, jagged shards of decay.
All framed with barbed wire hair.

There are places where a woman travels
far from hearth and home
there are voices that whisper in her ear
that turn her heart to stone.

I have been that face.
Have you?

Have you known the darkness?
Has Goddess wrenched you from your bed,
grasped you with her cold veined hand
jerked you from the pretty stones,
the soft silk altar cloths and the sparkling scented candles?

Shoved you past these trappings to the door of the cave?
On the darkest night of the year?

Has she laid her ebony velvet cloth over your face,
opened the great yawning hole and pushed you inside?
Left you to your own devices to find your way out?

With nothing to light your way,
but faith?
Sometimes even faith is as dark as pitch.

If you know that cave, have felt that damp emptiness
If you have tasted sweet acid on your tongue
and gagged on heavy sulpher with every breath
than you know that Goddess ain’t always pretty.

Neither are you, neither am I.

Ugly doesn’t even begin to describe
what it is like,
crawling through that cave,
knees scratched to bone,
Sobbing through your mantra’s of “fuck you’s” and
“I don’t deserve this”.
Bellowing, bargaining, begging, bawling.

And it all falls on deaf ears.
It all falls on walls of stone, slick with ice
and thick as forever.

Sister, if She moves you,
passed bewilderment, denial and broken dreams,
to that cave
you better be prepared.

‘Cause there are places where a woman travels
Journeys she makes alone
To meet Goddess in that darkest place
only the frail stay at home.