Ariel, Pacific NW poet

draft

The Devil And Me
(after Ira Wolf)

I’m not a superhero, though I wish to be.

It’s weird when you wake up to The Others just under that first layer of skinand they are claw, clawing to get out, and you hope that your skin is metal like Colossus to keep them from escaping and adamantium bones to keep them from breaking you inside. But you know you’re no superhero, just a child grown who had to raise herself. Certainly not a Jean Gray. Well, maybe a weather witch. For you make the gray clouds roll in and you hear the thunder roll with all the voices in it shouting over each other. Or maybe it’s the fighting fiddles. The flavor of blood-stained brimstone on the tongue.

And you can’t think.

My mother thought me lost to The Devil. Evil she must purge.

I know what it’s like to be dead.

You know part of it is in your genes. The ones you got from Her mother. But then if I was stuck on an isolated Arkansas farm, I would give in to the voices too, embrace them, escape with them to run away from the fields and crops. At least I think that was her origin story. I think anyone would go mad with the isolation of a farm.

I was lost yesterday, today I ground (grind?) myself with music. Hope the fiddles make sense and hope the devils work with me. I hope to walk through everything, phase, merge. Run away to the forest. It a Pac NW thing. Find a river running red as whiskey. Talk to plants like Poison Ivy. Dance with two left feet around a campfire. Wrap the devils in my webs.

I’m no superhero. I’m no villain either.


Ariel