Kathodos

Life here, with the things of earth, is a sinking, a defeat, a failing of the wing

- Plotinus

With the gathering of rainclouds and the resurrection of petrichor from shallow graves

I dragged my leaden heart and limbs into the clearing of the forest

And waited for the downpour's denouement and my own kathodos 

By the fistfuls, the rain came down hard pummelling my sides and kneading my flesh

I turned the other cheek and bared my ribs for it to break

Caged within the hope that this is what a heavenly scrubbing entailed

I was wet, I was assaulted, and yet I remained unwashed

I could hear the thunder in me moving my entrails out of the way

for my anger to storm in and cause a scene

The lightning coiled in my hair like snakes with anticipatory and agitated forked tongues

ready to strike, lash out, sense the direction from which disappointments come 

and swallow them whole, only to regurgitate them whole again 

covered with a slippery intestinal film making them hard to grasp

I bellowed, summoning crows to murder and frightening falcons out of solitude

I bared teeth, knuckle, claw, eyeball and snarled 

The wind siphoned all the breath from my body and my legs gave way beneath me

My strings have been severed with a blunt blade, bone by intractable bone, I fell apart

Prone, and my face caked with mud, I spitted muffled obscenities into Chthon 

Flickering the lights of hades with my belaboured breath 

The lotus in me summoned the little strength I could harness to flip myself over 

I am all ark, wet and undrowned, wooden with soul unsplintered

The smell of filth stretches itself out languidly on my upper lip

wrapping itself in a blanket made of the hair in my nostrils

Fat maggots feed off the rot within me of the things I should have discarded a long time ago

I've let my body be a landfill of things supressed and repressed and they are growing legs

I have to remind myself daily that I am all ark, all second chance, and not all coffin

That I keep the deluge out, and surf it, I am too titanic for the bottom of the ocean

I took the dirt and chalked my hands, preparing to lift the heavy off me and power clean

To snatch the bar of divine soap and fight for my cleansing

To empty myself into the earth and fertilize the ground, I would wrestle for this blessing 

I would limp, oedipally, out of the clearing, sodden and with a broken ankle

But like Jacob who stole Esau's birthright, I would leave, steeled, and with a different name 

Katharos.