i belong

sitting on my bed, eyes closed and jesus was there as a man with dementia and there was fire – a feral cat – red, bright red, scream red, hissing and spitting in my throat, then white, oh white! joan of arc and witches on the pyre, and the cat is electric shocked, my heart lanced with a star picket and terror is pulsing through my blood; i have stood in the fire for years over years but this time i look down and my feet are black, wet ash, mud, my pallor is grey and i am falling, falling through the cavern, the tomb, (the soul exploring the recesses of the grave, antigone bricked in); and now i am standing, the first time! on a fine layer of dust eroded from the ceiling and i think i have landed but no, it is worse – how can it be worse? the mire, the swamp, are gateways to this terrible hollow, and my guide says look around, it is all just desolation and emptiness, it would be a hole but a hole is somewhere to rest and this is malevolent, this is searing, an active prying force, a sly, conniving, sardonic intra-thin; this gets in-between the quick and the will, it mingles with longing and like smoke from a chemical compound on fire, like gas in the garage, it seeps into the cracks of what is good; we think it’s a trick, we think its psychology, we call it neglect; we call it diabolical, maniacal, tyrannical; we call it scapegoating, othering, injustice; but it is a snake, a goblin, a demon spirit, it is of its own, its fingers reach into the bowels of the thick, (it is voldemort which will make you laugh but only from knowing), i say evil, but correct myself because i cannot lose my reason; and i know then that this is addiction, that it would own you, it would have your soul; but the man with dementia holds my hand and the gurruk calls my name and the guide says – where are your feet? – and they are golden now, my mother had twenty-seven buddhas that would sit in your hand and my feet are one of them, and as i stretch up my family shoots through me like a star and i belong all the way back to abraham. i belong.