Covenant

So I wrote this profane feminine prayer in the throes of a no-good, godawful-bad day, let's just say that. Not much going on inside but seething exasperation. If this had been written longhand, it would have been a case of the pen tip never leaving the page, except where it tore it up. In hindsight, I felt like I'd been possessed by the wrath of an Old Testament god, except if that god had been a goddess. Entirely coincidentally, I was listening to some PJ Harvey afterward, and I can imagine this piece accompanied by one of a handful of songs from 1995's To Bring You My Love, even down to those opening lines that echo those of "The Dancer." Elemental and righteous. I might even add a bonus video at the end, because it's my blog and I can do what the hell I want. Yeah, still simmering. Black and empty heart indeed.

***

She came naked out of the eastern desert, eyes blazing with madness and the mirrored flames of sunset, her scorpion arms raised wide as if to grab that holy molten orb and arrest its plunge below the rim of a world too enfeebled to abide the dimming of its fires, as if her livid atrocities had built one upon the next until she'd run howling through sand and sage to escape their loathsome burden, her skin streaked with dark blood but neither tears nor sweat, since the sun had burned those human elixirs from her person, etching on her knowingness the finite nature of all things, despite her quest to preserve every last drop of quantum froth, to make the earth retch itself up in ungodly seizures of fault line and mantle and plate, the scalding orange vomit of its innards gouting down coastal ridges and hissing into a quailing, grimacing sea, as she implored the heavens to be merciful and let her have it all, goddamnit, for she had strained ligament, bone, and sinew to keep it all intact, to keep the infernal ledger balanced, to honour birth while enacting each grim sacrifice as fair payment, to snatch death from the jaws of birth, to goad the saddest clown to smile, to gorge on sin's offspring, to pay homage to the tail-devouring snake of life, to open her parched cunt to the lust of stones (those discarded bones of the world), to shed her scorched and jerk-leather skin beside a dry gulch … and for this—for all this—she was condemned?