☆Spinter Swerve☆

Just another day, nothing's any good...

I have to carry on...

I wonder if this grief will ever let me go- I am the king of sorrow...

Will I disappoint my future if I stay?

...I have already paid for all my future sins...

"What surprises me most about humankind is that we get bored of our childhood, rush to grow up, and long to be children again. That we lose our health to make money and then lose our money to restore our health. That by thinking anxiously about the future, we forget the present, such that we live in neither the present nor the future. That we live as if we'll never die and die as though we've never lived."

~Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus

July weekend thoughts...

Circe Invidiosa

They called me witch before

they learned my name.

It is easier to fear a woman who

knows the language of roots,

the language of tides,

the script hidden inside

poisonous flowers.

Odysseus came ashore wearing

the exhausted smile

of every man

who believed the world

owed him another harbor.

They remember how I turned

sailors into swine.

They never ask why.

Some men arrive already rooting

through another's life,

already tusked with entitlement,

already convinced every island

is another body waiting to be entered.

My spells, my magic, were never

transformation

but revelation.

I merely stripped away the skin they

mistook for civilization.

Centuries later they paint me

in emerald light,

pouring poison into the sea.

They call it envy.

They never recognize mourning when it

wears beautiful colors.

The water glows because every curse

begins as a wound.

Scylla was not my enemy.

She was another woman standing

where the eyes of men

had already decided value

must be measured.

We were both condemned long

before the sorcery.

One became a monster of flesh.

The other, a monster of memory.

There are prisons built of stone.

There are prisons built of beauty.

I know the male gaze.

It does not look but consumes.

It arrives clothed as worship while

calculating ownership.

It praises your mouth because it

imagines silence afterward.

It crowns you goddess only until

you speak like one.

Then it reaches for words older than

bronze:

witch, temptress, harlot, monster.

They hung those names around my neck

and wondered why I sank.

Do you know what it is to be

watched

until your own reflection

no longer belongs to you?

To become a mirror

where every passing man

searches only for himself?

To have your kindness

mistaken for invitation,

your solitude mistaken for availability,

your refusal mistaken for cruelty?

So I learned another language

with plants never lied to me.

The sea never mistook my body for

permission.

Odysseus left my island believing

he had survived a witch.

I watched him disappear

knowing the world would always fear

the woman who unmasks beasts more

than the beasts themselves.

I do not pour poison.

I am emptying centuries of being looked at

but never seen.

The sea turns green because grief has its own color.

If I became darkness,

it was because every torch

carried to my door came looking

not for wisdom, but for possession.

Do not ask whether I was good.

Ask instead what kind of

world creates women whose only

Sanctuary

is feared more than