Death Goals

It began innocently

As a childhood dream

To become a veterinarian

It began

As an aim

For life

This quickly dissolved

In seeing, ironically,

The popularity of using said professionals

To kill for convenience

Her target then moved

Easy breezy

To deep love

Committed to death do we part

This, ironically,

Ended in death almost as soon

As it started

These botched goals under her belt

The girl was feverishly taken over

Leaving the life goal behind

And instead aiming

For the goal

Of death

Starving her way to some place

Some peace, some hopefully ever after

This (somewhat) accomplished,

Lying in her hospital bed

Revived

She had a new goal

A life goal

One to vanquish the evil foe

To help others to find joy again

Free from the dark force

That sought to shackle them

Climbing, goatly

Up that ladder

Immersing herself in the System

Ironically, she saw

That which purported to help

In turn, was actually in the business

Of killing souls

The top, the goal not being what

She aimed it to be

The girl promptly hurled herself

Off the mountain, to die once more

Awakened on the islands

The life goals became smaller

Battered grand aims

Bringing her to her knees

Sipping Ensure at midnight

Feeling music sway her body

Waking to the sound of crashing waters

She made these

Tiny, whispering urges

Her life goals

The girl wasn’t sure she’d survive

So everything became a life goal

But also, a death goal

Her choices became

Rooted in the question:

“What would I do if I died tomorrow?”

The answers, minute by minute

Were her life

And death

Goals

Each day

Growing stronger

Seeing that, yes, today will bring another breath

She saw that maybe

There were broader horizons

And she dreamed of bellydance troupes

And playing bass in a rock band

Of building bohemian caravans

And serving tarot to heavy metal festival fiends

These became her new goals

Her life goals

Her death goals

Bushwacking her way through

All sorts of obstacles

(Including her penchant of slipping over to the other side)

The girl checked them off her list

Then, growing bolder

She aimed for living in clothing optional intentional villages

Onto ancestral pilgrimages in Sweden

Catapulting herself into working for Metallica

Then the scariest and most thrilling

Writing, publishing and releasing

Her spilling-the-guts memoir

Terrifying!

But also, death-goals-type

Amazing

Soon, the aim became less

And the presence became more

And what she did, mostly

Was surrender

And breathe

The things she’d dreamed of

Came without her aim

Backstage with Slayer

The house in the woods

The job at the apothecary

(The chronic pain gift was delivered for contrast)

And eventually the only aim

Became breathing

Presence

Serving

Serving her mother in her death passage

Serving her customers in their health challenges

Serving the person on the street

Who just needed to be looked at

As a human

These

Became her only death goals

Now, however

The girl has felt a rumbling

A strange and pulsing desire

To put the words of an inner/outer wise one

To the page

To carefully craft the words that helped her

Weaving them, leather bound, this grimoire

So that they can serve into posterity

The girl knows not

When she may die

But the clock is ticking

And she’s glad to be racing it, writing

Wondering

Will she succeed?

The aim to serve

The desire to write

The strange cackling wise one

Urging her on

Breathing…

These

Are her only

Death Goals

Now

Solstice Friends

Hail, Green Allies of High Summer!

Thank you for your brightness,

For teaching me how to carry your medicine

Into the long nights of life

Hail, Green Allies of High Summer!

Blessed Be your Beauty and gift

Mugwort, *Artemisia douglasiana* *or suksdorfi*i

The infamous Poison Oak, *Toxicodendron diversilobum*

A blurry shot of Sticky Monkeyflower (but due to a blessed summer breeze), *Diplacus aurantiacus*

Nightmares

*The Nightmare*, Henry Fuseli (1871) By Tulip Hysteria / Go to albums – https://www.flickr.com/photos/36417567@N03/32380012237/, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=111521078

Fun fact

I’m obsessed with Nightmares

Sleeping ones

Waking ones

Those creatures that suffocate in the dark

Those creatures that suffocate

In the light

Repeating

I am obsessed

Fascinated

With why they are

Repeating

Terrorizing

Night Mare

The mythological beast tormenting

The sorcerous demons

The goblins that ride my chest

While I gasp, scream, weep

Hoping for the dawn

Oh, Sleeping, dreaming Mare

Unearthing the gargantuan spectres

That swim in my long-forgotten hollows

Those begging for attention

Begging for engagement

Begging

For a stand-off

Oh, sleeping, dreaming Mare

I am obsessed with how you turn

When I can stop and face you

Those times

When the clock numbers shimmer

And I realize I am not awake

Facing you

The scales and teeth I feel in your pursuit

Smooth out, and there’s a kind look

Pleading

I find in our eyes

Why do you come, Mare?

What do you have to teach?

How long

Repeating

Have you sought for my face?

Night Mares

I’m obsessed

With why they come repeating

With why they kill, suffocate, torture

With how they chase me

Over and over

Until, hopefully, one day

I might turn

Obsessed, also

With you, Day Mare

The patterns that repeat themselves

Over and over again

As if I am waking

And walking

And sludging

Through the same dead dream

The mythological beast

The sorcerous demon

The goblin riding my chest

How are you

Embodying the skins of beings

I am challenged to face each day?

How are you slithering

In the repeating arguments

In the cyclical frustrations

In the same problem

Appearing

In different bodies

What happens if I face you

In the waking hours,

Asking the question

Of what you’ve come to teach me?

Will your scales, your fang-laced suffocation

Reveal pleading and wise eyes

When I stop running away

When I turn to face you

When I recognize the

Repeating

Nightmare

Daymare

Coming to wake me

Fun fact

I’m obsessed with Night Mares

I’m obsessed with Day Mares

I’m obsessed with who you are

And that knife in your hand

And what will happen

If I turn and plunge myself into

Your teaching

It is time

To wake up

It is time

To wake up

It is time

To wake up

Dream Teachers

this is NOT the woman i met, it is a stock Photo by Yulia Rozanova on Pexels.com

It seems I often dream of eastern/Asian symbology when something new is coming to form in my life, yet recently the symbols manifested in my *waking* dream.

An Asian elder came into the apothecary I work in, and we were dialoguing about her symptoms…lo and behold she was dealing with *exactly* the same pain symptoms I have recently been struggling to manage.

She and I recognized the specific nature of the synchronicity and smiled at each other.

She told me about a particular herbal formula that she’d been directed to use by her medicine people, her great trust in that process…and then she left.

Hours later as I was closing up the shoppe, this real/dream elder came back, a bag of strange and mysterious herbs in hand. She told me to decoct the mixture and that we could share about how it was working for both of us.

This is not a totally unusual experience at the apothecary portal, but a beauteous and magickal one nonetheless. I haven’t seen the woman since then. I kind of wonder if I ever will. I kind of wonder if she was real, or if she was a cross-over dream character giving me direction when I most needed it.

Who knows? The line between the waking and sleeping dream has long been hazy for me. All I can say is blessed be to the dream teachers, and to this particular elder that shared so presently with me. I have hopes for how the decoction alchemizes inside

Thanks for reading! I am deciding to vary my consistent poetry structure to include some prose, I would love to know if you’d like to have just poetry or if this is a welcome change?

Teeth

Two weeks ago

Amidst blossoming elder

And beneath circling wings

I found

A body

Picked over

By no doubt the wings above

Its half carcass lie oozing

On the country road before me

Still too new

For retching odors to deter

I brushed past flies

I stooped to look closer

By fur and tooth

By tail and curl

It was you

Opossum

Hello, I said

Greeting this particular and

Synchronistic crossing

And began to explain

How opaque I feel

How imaginary, evanescent

How, although not really so

I feel

Quite dead

You

Your rotting fleshy backbone

Reminded me

Of Kalsched’s concept

Of the internal saboteur

The killer inside

The one who kills

To protect

Your blood-stained claws

Brought the echo of his words

That sometimes

The tactic we learn to survive

Years later can actually kill us

Even if only from inside our dream

I wondered

Gazing upon your decaying snarl

Whether my own miraculous ability

To play dead

To play with

Death

To…Disappear

From a life that threatened

I pondered if you were here

To remind me

This forgetting

This vague sense of empty

Vacuous

Purposeless

Blank void that haunts relentless

Is this

My own internal saboteur

Killing me

Kind of

Before anyone else has the chance to?

This part figuring

Each time I try to rise

That it’s better to live half dead

And hidden

Wiped clean of all of what I know and love

Better

Than to risk the burning

The violation

The utter despair

The consequence

Of what it means to be fully alive

With what I am here to be

Hmm

There’s a thought

And with no real idea what to do with it

Glad for the depth it rendered

I thanked you

And hoped for the wild ones

To leave me your teeth as a reminder

I walked away

Looking back at your sacrifice

And the meaning I made of finding it

In the midst of my hollow wandering

I thanked you

And turned

Towards home

Over the next days

I found myself scraping

The various stages of your

Disappearing corpse

Off the terrible pavement

Back into the brush

Where the process could unfold in beauty

Back and forth

Your body kept showing up on that hot asphalt

Probably a raven

Or a vulture

Pick pick picking away

And by default

The weight of cruel tires

Breaking you

Each time

You were more clean

And more

Gone

Finally

The day came

Where you were no longer there

And I looked into the weed beds

Poison oak cradled just a fluff of your coat

I figured you, dissolved

And sent my blessings to the wind

Continuing

A few steps ahead

A small white object glistened

I came closer and what did I find

The only piece of you remaining

Were your teeth.

Laid out before me

As if to remind

As if to say Yes!

As if to say

Keep Me

This magick

It is Real

And so

Are you.

I rejoiced

Regardless of the wise critic inside

I made meaning

And scooped you up for my own

Thank you, Opossum

For the reminder

And for this piece of substance

It makes me feel real

It makes me feel

Real

This bone left beauty

It sings with your medicinal affirmation

Thank you, wild ones

For leaving me

Teeth

Opossum Spirit Medicine affirmations by Jessica Hagan:

I matter. I cannot be removed from existence. I am a major part of my environment, and my conduct affects others even if they do not acknowledge it.
I do not have to be interesting to everyone. I can learn to not attract certain people’s attention.
I may feel invisible, but my existence is affecting every situation I am in.

The Kitchen Witch’s Way Moves Ahead!

for those of you who don’t know, i am working on a magical realism trilogy called The Kitchen Witch’s Way. this mystical romp is a tale centered around a skeptical young woman, her run-ins with a rascally kitchen witch and her encounters with the grimoire that rewrites everything she’s been programmed to believe about her challenging relationship with food and her body.

there’s some peeks into the actual grimoire matter throughout the series with an eventual goal of releasing the full grimoire as a separate text. plus, it’s cottage-core! the witch’s cabin in the woods, the blossoming herb gardens, and the town setting complete with a tarot-reader’s bohemian caravan, black cat familiars and the town’s happening cafe and music venue, The Bitter End are just a few of the reasons you might want to spend some time in this world. i’m still working on my elevator pitch so judge me if you will but that’s the current jist :}

i am writing here today to share my excitement about having just hired and put in my first deposit for a developmental editor for the first book in the series! they’re all basically written, but this is only the beginning of the trail. i’m not entirely sure how i will finance the entire journey but putting the magick into the pot of possibilities and seeing what happens.

i am working on a Kickstarter campaign and will share those links once the book is actually road-worthy of such things for those who may be interested. a collection of some of the poems i’ve shared here may show up as a gift for supporters. it is honestly a bit overwhelming all the little ins and out of the journey but as always micro-goals are my friend.

it is a long road to self-publishing (see developmental editing stage in the oldie-but-goodie graphic below) but this trilogy is definitely one of my life/death goals and i will pursue it to the ends. stay tuned and thanks for being with me on the ride! ~raVen

Vision

image from Tarot of The Spirit by Joyce and Pamela Eakins

Embarking on yet another quest

To know You in me

To know how to serve this that You are

I stepped out onto the path of the Moon

There I met my demons of insufficiency

Of hobbled inability

To bring myself to health

There I met the wavering wraiths of frustration

Who chide me of my lack of skill

In using my Will

To create fruition

A flowering, fertile garden

Always, they say, it turns to death

I sat with these beings

I toiled with them

There on the path of the Moon

Arguing vehemently my cause

And eventually, I also saw

The truth of their accusations

Wallowing in this mess of uncertainty

I wept

And exhausted

I fell into Moon’s slumber

I woke to a dream

Those images You know how to send me

Lingering in my mind

It was of Father Water

A celestial being

Forging through the churning waters

Of Life

Beaming, he and horse

Both white and strong

Able, somehow, to carry the way

Through

I realized, upon rubbing weary eyes

That You, Father Water

Are the name of my vision

That I had emerged from the path of the Moon

Into your glowing sphere

The sphere of vision

Of broad, expansive views

Giving life direction

You, beaming at me

The Name of my Vision

Whatever could this mean?

As always, The Dreaming’s bombastic displays

Give such vague and indirect feedback

I must sit

And wait

To know what you name

I think it must be

Something of a deeper yearning

A yearning crafted from eons of riding

And drowning

And riding once more

To embody this leader

Who has found a way to hold strong

And who reaches out to others

Struggling in the waters

Who at first places them, as passenger

To feel the girth of the steed

That which can guide them

In their maelstrom

And then, soon

To jump from the reins

And leave passenger to feel themselves riding

Their own dream steed

Through the waters of Life

Something about this

The Name of my Vision

You,

Father Water

Have come

To pull me from the waters

To help these thighs feel the steed

To show then, the path to help others

And, as you disappear before me

To find myself, able, holding the reins

And reaching for a sinking hand

Hollow Bone

Quiet, but for

Chimes swinging in the wind

Sensing into self

There’s no one

Here

Decades of life wringing

All the droplets of what I thought was me

They have somehow seeped

Deep into the ground

And I am left

A Hollow Bone

At first encounter

This vaporous essence

Was seen as malady

Defined by numbers

In the pages of diagnostic

Grimoires

It used to terrify

Sucking me into spirals

And sometimes still does…

But now, mostly

Looking across the Desert Way I’ve travelled

I see it

Is sacred

What would life be

Without pain

Without suffering

To bring us to our knees

To question the unseen

What else would cause us to plead

And open for the magick

Some unexplainably beautiful thing

Trailing on the crest of our tears

How would I Know

The pain, you too, carry

But are required to hide

This is what I (try to) think of

When I wake up to Nothing

Except these burning incapacities

My mind imagines

That I’ve been prepared

That I’m being readied

That I might just always

Have this wizened whittler

Working away against my substance

Readied

For Life?

For Death?

For…Love?

Carved and hollowed

For my eyes to witness the magick

Of Life running through

To feel the ripples

Of words speaking through me

To ease a wounded heart

When the time is right?

There’s no way

I’d be able to do this

Without the wringing

Without the squeezing

Without the midnight wailing

Throbbing pain, learning to hear

It’s as if over all these decades

You’ve been preparing me

To learn to thrive

In this one moment

With no plan

And only Life and Death as my guides

And Love

Each breath

Each prostration on the earth

You breathing me

Through this that you’ve crafted

Quiet, but for

Chimes swinging in the wind

Sensing into self

There’s no one

Here

There’s no one

Here

There’s o one

Here

There’s only

Hollow

Bone

Published Poem!

This just in!

I am honored to be included in the most recent edition of The Fabulist Magazine. My poem, Birch, is now published and alive on their ((fabulous)) website. You may recognize it if you’ve been reading here for a while…it’s an edited version of a poem I posted here a little while back. Check it out here: https://fabulistmagazine.com/birch/

Thanks to Russell Reza-Khaliq Gonzaga, Josh Wilson and Adam Myers at The Fabulist Magazine for helping this dream come into form

Incubation

Photo by Raphael Brasileiro on Pexels.com

Facing you

Nervous, excited as you begin the story

My eyes are open

And fall on your fairness

I’ve come with a question, and

I think you are about to make it all very clear

Then

Our link drops

And I am frantic to re-connect

All else I can access

But not you

You are gone

I am panting, pacing in this vacuum

And then, somehow

I am led

To your home

In the midst of redwoods

And concrete business park modules

I find your door down a pathway

A sign, swinging in the wind

Its Irish words guide me

The threshold is open

And I cross over it

I see it is not only me you’ve invited

There are many families and faces

Circled in the space

They welcome me

They somehow know me

And I can feel your vibration, buzzing

Somewhere in the field

But I cannot see you

Why can I not see you

Anymore?

Then

I am in the circle

Although I only know it by touch now

Two large women flank and hold me

Their large, black breasts cover my eyes

I am cradled, but cannot see

I feel you, but I cannot see

I came to you with a question

And you disappeared

Or did you simply become the tale?

Dropping me away from your visage

Into this strange reality

Is it the answer I really need?

A confusing landscape

This place you’ve led me to –

Your wife, crying, out in the rain

The blind buxom holding, welcoming

Circles, ancestral words

And somehow, your tiny babies

Encased with kittens, dying of thirst

Digging my way to them,

I try to quench

But I cannot see

My hands fumble

And the mother is dry

All this blackness, covering

All this strangeness cradling

All these people, smiling

Welcoming, dying, crying, birthing

I feel you watching, but cannot see you

I want to see you in all of this

So bad

Here, in the Darkness

It is now silent

I feel your vibration yet can’t see the image

I want your shiny, rational curriculum

My teeth grow longer,

Salivation dripping as I think of it

Yet what you immerse me in

Is this the messy answer?

In the Darkness

Swimming in these moon-land images

Why have you brought me here?

I have asked, hoping for a shining light

Now feeling all the more lost

It comforts me, this possibility

That you respond from your absence

That you still, somehow touch me

And that someday

I will see you

And everything

Again