Breath of Soul

The breath of your soul
frosty in the winter air
awakens my heart

Devotional

Your distance
is a velvet noose
slipped around my neck,
it strangles me.

I drink the elixir
of your love,
honeyed wine
lingering upon my lips,
your words are
my libation.

Your body
is my temple,
worshiped within
your hands,
you make me divine.

My heart is a reliquary
harboring a sliver of
your rib bone,
silently I carry
my devotional,
every breath drawn
a hymnal.

I am your confessional,
whispering your secrets
within my crevices,
our limbs possess
arcane knowledge.

Take sanctuary
in the spaces between
where I hold you
unyielding.

I Am Probably a Sexist

There is a fairly common trend I have begun to notice. Oftentimes I will read a book of which I will really enjoy, and out of curiosity I will read other reviews, comments, critiques of said book to discover that the book is criticized for being sexist and my natural reflex reaction to such claims is to roll my eyes and think the people are being ridiculously oversensitive. It is true that when I am really enraged in a story and think the book is well crafted, and has a great plot, I am oblivious or desensitized to the nuances of how women or portrayed in the story or how many female characters may or may not be within the book. If it is a good book, I honestly don’t really cared about that. If it is a book I am not enjoying very much than I might become more analytical of it. And I suppose part of it for me is the fact that I do not think the integrity of the art should be comprised by pressure from society to be more politically correct.

I really enjoy the writing of H.G Wells and I have noticed that a lot of people criticize him or do not enjoy his works because of the almost complete lack of woman within many of his books, and for me in a way I find it kind of refreshing to read a book in which there is not this need to create some romantic story line as a way to make the book more interesting, or appealing to women readers.

It is hard to find modern books which don’t have some romantic love interest thrown into the mix somewhere even if that is not really what the main story is actually about and many authors feels the need to do that in order to appeal to women readers.

I am reading the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind, and before I started reading him I have heard him trashed several times as being some kind of woman hating masochists because of the scenes of rape within his books. And yes, there is violence against women and rape within his books, but there is also a lot of war, and anyone who knows anything about history knows that with war there was often raping and pillaging, that was just a fact of life.  It is not as if the rapist in his books are the heroes of the story, the people doing the raping or the bad guys, and it is portrayed in the books as a terrible thing to do. Terry Goodkind does not glorify rape in some positive way. And one of the main characters of the story is a strong, confident, powerful, intelligent woman.

As a reader of historical fiction and reading a lot of comments and criticism about different works of HF there seems to be this common trend that anytime a male author (regardless of context) writes about rape in a novel he is labeled as being a sexist. Obviously I am not defending rape, but just because a man within a work of fiction acknowledges the fact of life that sometimes women are raped does not mean he hates women.

But that is a tirade for a different day.

Mostly recently I have read this book called The Ritual, which I absolutely loved and thought was fantastic, and I was reading some of the reviews of the book and came across one in which this person went off on how sexist the book was.

First of all I will state the book is a horror novel, and it is about a group of four friends who go out on this hiking trip together. Three of them are married one of them seems to be happy in his marriage and the other two are separated from their wives and there is a lot of trash talk about their wives and the fourth is not in a committed relationship but just sleeps around with various different women.  The only female characters to appear in the story are a strange old woman who hardly ever speaks, and a girl who is basically a total psychopath and described frequently as being fat.

So yeah maybe the book does not have very positive portrayals of women but for one thing it wasn’t that kind of book, and I did not perceive it as being that the book and/or author was sexist but rather I saw it more of a reflection of the characters within the story. Yes the author could have had one of the hikers in the group be a strong, independent woman but that would have changed the whole dynamic of the story.

Consequently I will say that times the female characters that I tend to find the most offensive and insulting to women are usually in books that were written by women predominately for women, which everyone else raves about. And I am thinking to myself “really? you think this is a positive image of women?”

It could be a combination of my perhaps having some skewed and twisted views and the fact that I do tend to connect better to men than I do to women. I don’t have any girlfriends. All of my closest friends are guys. So books that are perhaps more male/masculine driven appeal to me more, and do connect with me better than books that are more female/feminine driven.

Only You

You are the only one
who can make my heart beat
and I inhale the nourishment
of your lungs, feel the
warmth of your blood
beneath my fingertips,
pulse under the nakedness
of your skin.

My life is here
within you and I curl
myself around you,
the taste of you upon my lips
is an oasis in the desert.

Only within your arms
can I find the stillness
inside, the quiet of my mind,
your hands holding me together,
I quiver like a feather
in the wind.

The Lament of Gundrun

I recently finished reading the Poetic Edda and I was inspired to write something dedicated to Gundrun. In the name of her vengeance she committed some unthinkable acts but there is something I cannot help find admirable in her unflinching resolve, strength of will and fierce warrior spirit. She suffered much loss, a lot at her hands but she endured terrible acts at the hands of others which bred her hatred.

A brief summary of her story

She was married to Sigurd whom she loved, and was killed by the vengeance of Brunhild who was in love with him as well. Her brother’s hand wed her to Atli, and in a dispute Atli slew her brothers. To avenge her brothers deaths she cut the throats of her own sons and tricked Atli into consuming them and revealed to him what he had done. He was unable to live with the act and died.

She was them married to Jonkar and she had a daughter whom she cherished. Her daughter was trampled to death under the hoves of the man she was sent to be wed to. Gundrun shamed her sons (those of Jonkar and Sigurd) to avenge the death of their sister and she sent them off knowing that they would be killed in the vengeance quest and never return home.

The Lament of Gundrun

As she grieved over
the body of her one
true love her heart
shriveled inside
becoming as dark
as the depths of Hel.

Wrath, chaos, and destruction
was all that was left to
rage inside her,
she walked the war path
awashed in blood
she could never be clean of.

Death followed her
as a shadow on her
quest of vengeance
never finished.

She sent her sons
to the grave by the sword
of her hand, and wickedly watched
her husband unbeknownst
drink the blood of his
begotten.

Terrible she laughed
while she revealed
the unthinkable act
she deceived him to commit.

A spark of hope
was born again
in the face of a daughter
she cherished above all
cruelly the young life
was dashed out
by the heartless act
of another.

Her mother unforgiving
roared with anger and
anguish and shamed
her sons the take the
sword against their
sister’s killer
knowing she sent them
upon a quest
they would never
return from.

She lived with
the weight of
her sorrow,
a pain that would never
fade until perhaps someday
when drawing her last breath
she might be reunited
in Hel with those
once she loved.

Love On Canvas

Let me paint you
on canvas
watch your colors
bleed.

I want to trace
your lines
with my brush,

I could
give you all
geometric angles,
or rearrange your
anatomy, color you
only in shades of blue.

Create you
recognizable
only to me,
place you in a room
with no doors.

I will set you free
with a pair of ink-stained
wings

leaving behind
smudges of my
fingerprints.

Let me wash you
in watercolors,
transformed
into a golden sunrise
over the ocean.

Rites of Sex

To you
I give my
sacrificial blood

rivulets
trail down
my thighs,
crimson
upon the first
breath of snow

this is the
pinnacle of
my vulnerability
awaiting your
judgement

my secret
shame whispered
within your heart

my body
is your confessional
seeking absolution

awashed
in the ancient
blood rites
I am ready
to be accepted
within your
embrace.

Closed Spaces

I reach for you
but the miles between us
are still enough
that our fingertips
barely touch.

What would I give
to have you dancing
on the end of my
tongue.

You have galaxy eyes
so far away and yet
so near, I swim
through your universe
to be with you.

I need your limbs
to fill in my
negative spaces,
the hallow places
in between which
ache for your
reverence.

Your distances
become less daunting
by the minute
and I feel your body
drawing ever closer.

It was written
that we could resist
the gravitational
forces only so long
before collision.