OhSam Triple Play 2015!
The comm hosted this little event a couple of years ago, and as November 2 is an auspicious day for our darling Sam, today would be the perfect time to revisit this challenge. Welcome to the Triple Play 2015!
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You’ve always faithed yourself dry, boy; to a powder, to dust.
*
The trees are ash, the insects locust; the voice of the cunning-man lisps geomancy, nine directions for the body's blood.
No use anymore for humours, but here you are, another deal; a day mausoleum’d in the book, diviner-herbalists, plant-animal-mineral, blood; find yourself a dreamer, a sleep-flyer, bone-thrower who knows the roots of the blood-words and even the ur-stain might be--
“You come to be cleansed, boy?”
Yes, you say, and kneel in the pasture, hand over the broke-necked sacrifice; put your head, hairs a spill, into your marrow-bruised elbows.
If in the Biblical sense you’re lost, go back before; go back before.
Didn’t take as long as you’d think--
to find a cunning-man in Kansas.
*
The blade’s a sickle; the moon’s down. Cunning-man has eyes like flytraps.Two-Sisters and Two-Brothers, horned assists, stand by in the cowfield, heifers long gone, bantam-spirits in the coop; help him cut.
“Plethora-blood of two kinds, boy, yours and the other.”
Get it out, what holy fire can’t. For good.
Your ligaments leap, drink their own weight. There’s a nightjar. There’s the edge. The suspension of plasmancy. There’s earth, manure-viscera; this is the place.
“This,” says the cunning-man, “’ll keep the whispers out.”
The power from your shame-taped mesentery; what do they know.
Go deeper. More, you might say.
God’s a predator, you scream, maybe, to the missing moon.
Two-Sisters and Two-Brothers, respectful, bend to the rivulets, cup your pulses, hand the cunning-man the skin-bags, blow the century-dust high, eyeward.
Cunning-man dusts the cuts, hums phonemes you can’t catch.
Something rushes out. You flatten, go down.
Screech-owl sounds in the glade; snap of a shrew-spine. You lose time.
You lose time.
Wake to faces, six irides, horns, manus settled in your deepest scores.
“Go,” says the cunning-man, to your grassy back.
You stumble, a hemorrhage, to the verge.
*
Your brother's been searching since midnight. Finds you at dawn in the drive, half-slid from the driver’s of the runt of the bunker-fleet, with a raised brow and a where have--
“Sam, where've you been?” Your sleeves brush the cuts; you breathe a kind of--
Fresh fire. To the edge of the hanging road, to the edge of the Empty, where we’ve been, where we’re going.
“Dean.” You might list left.
Your brother’s arms catch; cloud claws horizon, crosses the hatch of home.
“Sam.”
Maybe you thought you’d rise, dry-
you'd walk together into the new day.
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In this one, especially, the conjuring of a vague half-glimpsed ritual, the birds, desperation and shame, "cutting-man has eyes like flytraps", the alliteration of Screech-owl sounds in the glade; snap of a shrew-spine. Love it! Thank you so much :)
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Thank you for sharing :)
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