The Key in the Lion's Mouth

Strength: a wild beast is tamed with calming, loving energy. The lion is a symbol of raw passions and desires, and in taming him, this card shows that animal instinct and raw passion can be expressed in positive ways through the cultivation of mental and emotional, rather than physical, resilience. There is no force or coercion here; the tamer channels inner strength to subdue and subtly control the lion.

I’ve been so love-drunk lately

  making less sense as time goes by

  but really not missing it

Because it's so much more honest to be absurd in the middle of the night

  True things become strange 

  Strange things become clear

  And anything could become prophecy so be fucking careful, but

Here I uncluttered some kinetic space 

   and found myself laying a golden key

   gently on your tongue like a sacrament. 

Such a dramatic way for my lustful little heart to make such a vividly charming point

   about the freedom in your mouth
  about storing something precious and powerful in the safest place
  about rituals serving as the nexus of the things we feel and the things that make us feel. 

And in the darkness and in the good kind of loneliness

  I now realize I have spent years creating an opportunity that I never planned to share

   before right now.
I’ve bonded with my fetish collars

Utterly showing off my reclaimed sense of self-possession to anyone who would dare to look

  adoring myself in public

  inverting expectations about ownership

  in chains and locks too light and elegant for adequate restraint 

   but perfectly effective as reminders of whatever kind of love I choose to remember. 

So after years of this ritual where I

   brazenly flaunt my vulnerability 

   openly rejecting the shame of desiring myself in this conspicuous, lavish way

   and falling slowly
  deeply in love with myself
  even on the most brutal days, 

I leave no part of myself behind when I dissolve into the distance between bodies created by an airborne epidemic 

   and redefine what it is to want something

   what it is to be close to someone

   what it is to look forward

I rediscover the memory of holding your hand 

   of holding my breath
  of giving you a gift

And I realize I’m holding one more key than I need

   and you’re kneeling before me with your mouth open

   waiting so patiently.   

the Leo-Virgo Cusp

I wanna hold your aching swelling heart in my hands

It feels like mine.

Do you know the soft crush in your chest is contagious

And that I feel it

And that it leads me back to a place where I've prayed before?

It's a map I know by heart

By the aching swelling heart in my hands

That I'm not sure if it's yours or mine

But either way I recognize.

Let me find you a longer fall

Let me me find you a longer fall,
one that will break your infatuation with the stars and the soil.
I know your reasons to live are scattered in the glittering grass
because I saw you looking down for which ones might still grow and which had already been eaten.
Know that I will repopulate your sky with
New, more corporate constellations
Let me find you a longer fall
Than the one that starts every day with your waking breath
Graciously allowing you a new chance to re-earn 

your own body over the course of the descent

until your bones smash on the rocks at nightfall again.
Let me find you a longer fall
than the parking lot
than the bedroom floor

from the very best of your highs.
A longer fall than the shame of your broken trust,
than my stone down your cliffside
than skin turned against itself again.
Let me find you

No moment

I am skin on scrap metal and thinking about being something sheer over something sharp.

I become suddenly willing to rip myself apart for freedom one more time. One more time, different than the other times, the last time.

I am in deep love with the moment there is nothing left to be afraid of- bold and stupid.

I am at the mercy of a million feelings that defy each other, I am their will to fight. I am the insatiable agnosticism that keeps going.

On a thunderstorm during a new moon I remembered how I find things that are full of life to be beautiful because it's the only survival mechanism I won't live to regret.

Spite

Every ivory day
Precious, living, taken
Crafted into something luxurious
Musical, elegant
Something flowing caught in solid state,
Exploited, then protected, repeat.
The elephants adapted quickly,
born with smaller tusks to avoid covetous attention
in just a few generations.
So what does it say about me
that I have evolved more splendor out of spite?