Nightmare Landscape

They came to clean this tainted ground with their fevered dancing. Spinning in circles over the newly turned earth. A hundred of a hundred severed heads of refugees had been buried here. Each mouth gaping in terror spilling into the darkened earth. The stench and the rot seeping into my skin. Silent mouths screaming at me. Each eye a rotting accusation that I had nothing to do with.

They are dancing on this poison ground trying to drive spirits away; appease a hundred of a hundred hungry souls. This earth has been paved over. All clean now. See! No death took place here! It was all in your mind... But they know what happened and dance faster and faster with the movements of a thousand cultures. Spinning with feathers in their hair, fans in their hands, skirts flying, feet pounding... I can feel the skulls of the dead underneath my bare feet crying out for peace.

My god what has happened here? So many heads... but where are their bodies? An endless plot of severed head land underneath the pavement of the driveway. Built into the very foundation of the house. Holding up the rails of the fence. Quick! We must dance faster! Harder! We must clean this land. Send these souls to rest... calm these spirits... sooth these gods... Who did this!? What evil hand took these lives and left this horror beneath the ground? Dance harder! Throw back your head! Wail in pain! Raise your hands to heaven and ask the gods to deliver these souls to peace!

I open my eyes wide and scream... This nightmare landscape firmly burnt behind my eyes I rise and walk on into a burning daylight of a troubled mind lost in a world of terrifying dreams.

A Beautiful Anger

With my anger finally spent, I collapsed into his arms. I had beat my fists with the strength of struggling butterflies against his chest and screamed until my voice dried up like a cracked desert floor. Even though I desperately tried to hold them back, tears streamed down my face, slipping down my neck and pooling along the edge of my breasts.

"Serve with a single heart," he mumbled into my hair as he pressed his lips to my head. I lifted my tear-filled eyes to his and screamed with the voice I thought I had lost. It was not words but a primal growling scream from the very roots of my being. A noise that seemed to grow to fill the entire space around us. The ground vibrated with my irritation shaking me loose from his grip. I closed my mouth and stepped back.

Now standing eye to eye with him and his haunting beauty, I found myself again. My conviction suddenly became clear in the face of his silent indifference. I was not a cog in his machine to be manipulated to his liking. The tears dried in my eyes. My skin hardened to stone and my mouth set it's self hard against my teeth.

I could crack words off like bullets. I could live or die without consequence. I could snap bones. I could stare into the eye of God and not flinch. I could kiss him and feel nothing.

"I am free," I turned on my heel and walked into the sun with no fear left in my beating heart and my anger long since gone.

The Furies Bring the Serpents

"Bring me the skin of David," she said.

We were born into Fury. Every death was preordained. They slit the throats of their innocent victims and we brought them serpents. Tormented them with their own evil as we dogged them through a thousand star lit hillsides and grassy plains.

They had bathed in the blood of virgins and howled with laughter. They had slaughtered their way through the homeland raping young flesh as they burnt down the homes of our countrymen. They killed each of us in the name of a twisted god-king, leaving us for dead in the hills of our motherland.

We were reborn in her image; unable to rest in this soft ground. Unable to join our sisters, for the pain we harbored in our breasts blackened out our sun and veiled the moon. We were reborn in blood and hate and rage. Reborn of the sword and baptized in vengeance. Our name is Justice; look upon our eyes and know your doom.

We have leveled this army. Ripped off their skin and hollowed out their eyes. We drank our victory from their very skulls. God-king now watched his glory fall as we danced in the flesh of our enemies. Our faces twisted in the elation of dispatched evil, we came to his throne in one final act of retribution.

"We want your crowned head and we shall have it. Scream the name of every dead child as you drown in the snakes of our unending pain. Cry in our arms and fear our hands."

And when that king was dead and his army returned to dust we could finally retire to the dreams of every harmed woman to be reborn in the violence of every lifted hand. Know that we are the serpents in the eyes of your victims and our anger will never rest.