Flowers and Owls

I woke around 4 AM and wrote:

I'll be your Prometheus and sin against the gods and feed you my liver every day, I'm a woman and a glutton for punishment and I like to be generous, I'll give what I'm not supposed to give and you'll take what you're not supposed to take and this will be the expression of my love, I like being the thing you taste and I like growing organs back from dreams, I like the distant glint of men's fires as you tear me open, I like the stone beneath me and the sky above me and the pain within me and I was made to be punished, my body trumps love and my pain trumps fire and the eagle comes at dawn, I envy the eagle its appetite and I envy men their need, I need nothing and I hunger for nothing and I was made for giving, I'll be a woman and I'll be made for giving and take my joy in the stone I'm chained to, growing an organ hurts more than yielding it, the liver carries its own knowledge, you're warm as fire in me and so's my blood, my blood cooling on stone is the expression of my love, you'll never taste these other organs though I try to give them, so much is left intact as you fly away, every night I am left to my dreams.

Writing about plague today. Which isn’t anything new, but I’m always finding something else to say. I’m like a child again, dreaming of plagues and natural disasters, storms, fires, catastrophe, more than boys. My feelings towards both intermingle in similarity, dread and longing, knowing I’m unlikely to be touched by the object of my dreams, knowing I probably wouldn’t want to be anyway. I like to dream of love and disaster to prepare myself for either. For what cannot be prepared for. You cannot prepare yourself to be touched by plague. You cannot prepare yourself to be touched by desire. At least one is likely to kill you, at least plague tends to have a logical conclusion. My luck would be to survive a plague, come out on the other side of fever unsure of the why or the what comes next, lost. If plague won’t have me, what will? Maybe that’s why it’s my favorite sign of an apocalypse, since I want something to have faith in, and I can have faith in the body’s ability to fail. Or maybe the Venus side of me tires of Mars, tires of War, and death is too general, and I don’t like hunger. I like something physical, that’s not so much the domain of men, as war is - plague is for anyone, and it becomes an individual thing, something within you, a singular touch, intimate, you are chosen. A coupling, the most significant coupling, the last. But it’s something you can still survive, like a fire or an earthquake, a flood, a tornado. As a child I also dreamt of gangrenous limbs, fearing the little scratches and scrapes on my shins would fester, and I’d have my leg cut off, screaming, unanesthetized. I might bleed to death, or the rot keep rotting upwards, or I might survive, changed. A flood might come, or a tornado, or a fire, and destroy my home, destroy my town, and I might survive, lost, wandering. I could prepare myself by dreaming of it. I could dream of fever and buboes and a black tongue and ragged breath, and it might kill me, or I might wake up alive, still alive. I could dream both dreams, I could die and survive. I don’t know what the options are with love, with desire.