Night Wind, Breathing -- #Poetry #D/s #Magick

 

Logos

By Lisabet Sarai

 

(for GCS)

the word made flesh.
electric whispers
trace the wires
speed of light
the dream takes shape.

(here I am now,
on my knees,
bound and breathless,
open and still,
awaiting your will.)

violet ink
on ivory parchment;
mystic runes
in flickering phosphor
glow and fade;
tangled tales
come alive:
candle light
and velvet shadow,
ruby wine,
leather and steel.

(seductive, real
as the lust in your eyes;
you seem surprised.)

moon embraced
in naked branches,
nightwind breathing
in my hair,
westbound plane
burns through the dark.
I speak your name
and you are there.
fragile walls
between the worlds
melt to mist:
I step beyond
the looking glass.

(eat me. drink me.
all transformed,
logic crumbles,
powers awaken;
offered for
the ritual--
offered, and taken.)

inscribe the signs,
recite the charms,
weave the web
of words. We practice
ancient art:
veritas
in nomine.

(Domine,
you called me, claimed me,
named me with
my secret name,
clasped me
in this circling flame.)

now we reinvent each other,
mage, apprentice, captive, lover,
fashion masks
from the stuff of Story,
words as lens
to focus longing,
coalesce
vision to flesh.

(hand molds breast,
lips taste thigh,
kisses drenched
in silver fire:
forms of
crystallized desire.)

 

Dreaming True (#uncanny #imagination #magick)

By Lisabet Sarai

I’ve always believed in magic.

My dad may have had something to do with this. He used to concoct wild stories about monsters and ghosts, ogres and trolls. I remember sitting cross-legged next to my brother, on the floor by my father’s chair, held spellbound by his tales of heroes tasked with magical trials and elementals battling one another for control of the planet.

Maybe I inherited his imagination.

When I was in elementary school, I had a garnet birthstone ring that I believed could grant wishes. Mostly I remember asking for simple, silly things—like a blizzard, so we’d get the day off from school. Then my mom came down with pneumonia. She was so ill that at eight years old, I had to take over cooking for the family. I was terrified by the sudden helplessness of the woman who was at the center of my world, who could, and did, do everything. The ring got a workout during that period. My mother recovered fully, solidifying my faith in the unseen and the effectiveness of asking for one’s heart’s desire.

I’ve written many times here about the mystical quality of my first BDSMrelationship. At dinner on the night before my initiation, my soon-to-be Master told me he was descended from a family of sorcerers—that his Germanic ancestors had practiced the dark arts back in the old country. I’m still convinced I experienced true magick that night, though he often teased me about being suggestible.

Most of my life has been ordinary and mundane, of course, like everyone else’s. I’ve never been convinced I had any special powers. There’s one area, though, where I have experienced the uncanny, more than once. Every now and then, I have prescient dreams.

The first one I remember involved my Master. We didn’t see one another very often, since we lived on opposite coasts. After not having talked to him for several weeks, I had a deeply disturbing dream about him. In the dream, he was hospitalized, bandaged, unconscious and immobile on the bed. I recall everything being pale white, drained of color and life. I sat beside him, holding his hand, willing him to wake. He roused, at least enough to squeeze my fingers, but on his face was a look of absolute despair. I didn’t know what to do, so I just sat there, being with him, holding him, loving him the best I could.

I called him the next day, worried. He told me his father had hanged himself in the basement the night before. I didn’t tell him about my dream, not then. As I had in the dream, I held him in my thoughts, soothed him with my words, and hoped that he’d heal.

Another, later case involved a dear female friend, a woman I met on a ride board, with whom I drove halfway cross country in the dead of winter. Jeanie was the epitome of a free spirit—an author, artist, actress and musician, a fascinating creature who seemed to exist outside the boring realm of jobs and responsibilities. She married a guy as crazy as she was. They had wild parties, a rock and roll band, and a pet pig.

One night I dreamed that she told me she was going to have a baby. I was astounded. I tried to talk her out of it. “You’re not the motherly type,” I told her. “Think of all the responsibility! The constraints!” In the dream she just shook her head and smiled.

Two days later, I learned she actually was pregnant. (She turned out to be a fabulous, if unorthodox mom, by the way.)

These are two examples that stick with me, but I know they’re not the only ones. Indeed, I’ve had multiple less traumatic dreams about my Master that turned out to have elements of truth. “How did you know her name?” he asked me when I confided I’d dreamed of him with another woman. To be honest, I’m not sure he believes in magick, at least not the way I do.

Over the years I’ve published quite a bit of paranormal erotica, including my newest release Damned If You Do; Necessary Madness, my MM novel about the burden of seeing the future; my urban shifter romance The Eyes of Bast;, and my collection of dark paranormal tales Fourth World. My paranormal worlds are mostly ordinary—mostly indistinguishable from our own. Every so often, however, bright power streaks through them, like lighting illuminating a thundercloud from within. That power—it’s easy for me to write. It feels natural, true. I hardly have to think about it.

In the realm of fiction, my dreams also shape reality.

Dark Magic

By Lisabet Sarai

[This is a repeat of a post I wrote the last time the Grip topic was "the dark side", back in 2012. When I re-read it, though, I knew it was worth sharing again.]

She's so gullible. Over Thanksgiving dinner (an unexpectedly wonderful feast at an atmospheric inn they'd stumbled upon, tucked away in the hills), he'd dropped hints about magical powers inherited from his Celtic ancestors. She'd swallowed his tale as eagerly as the turkey and the red wine, hanging on his words, focused on his face, wet (he knew) as she anticipated what might occur when they returned to his apartment. Her plump, perennially erect nipples teased him through her turtleneck jersey. His nipples, now, to play with, to torture, though perhaps she didn't think of them that way – not yet.

How had he managed to lure her here? He'd surprised himself with the success of his epistolary seduction. Before, in graduate school, they'd been only slightly more than friends. When he vanquished her at chess (despite the distraction of her bra-less state), there had been flickers of something less innocent in their interactions. Then he'd left, moved west, and one day, on a whim, written her a clever, flirtatious letter, fantasizing all the while about her lush breasts, parted lips and the nicely-rounded ass he'd never seen. He hadn't really expected her enthusiastic response, especially not when he broached topics like spanking, bondage, and melted wax. Clearly he'd been right to trust his intuition more than his intellect.

His bedroom is shadowed, lit by a single candle that spikes the air with patchouli. He hovers over her, weight balanced on his arms, the contrast between his big frame and her petite body making him worry. He wants to hurt her, but not in any way that causes damage. A half year's worth of fantasies – both the ones they've shared and the darker ones he doesn't dare expose – have him achingly hard. He jerks a bit, so his cockhead brushes her tangled pubic curls. They both shiver.

Her cunt draws him, but he resists that magnetic pull a while longer, making her wait for what she obviously wants. Control is difficult but necessary. He hasn't bound her (though there are holes drilled in the bed frame and a coil of rope ready in the bed table drawer). He hasn't marked her yet. Candlelight dapples her fair skin, previews of the stripes he hopes to leave there. Tonight though, there's just her voluptuous, eager body and his, primed by hours of self-abuse (the term seems apt, given the images that obsess him). They could be any pair of new lovers. But of course that's not true. What binds them together is more urgent than mere passion, darker than love.

She does not speak, though he has not enjoined her to silence. Her eyes are wide, riveted to his. When he finally allows himself to enter her juicy depths, she gasps, though he's on the down side of average in size. Still, the fit is tight and sweet – it stokes his fever. Pulling back, he rams into her, letting loose all the frustrations built up in month after month of solitary imaginings. He reads her face as he does, ready to stop if she seems to object. They are, after all, practically strangers, despite the explicit letters and breathless phone calls.

There's no resistance in her, though. She keeps her wrists crossed, arms above her head, exactly where he placed them. The position highlights those outrageous nipples she flaunts with such apparent unconcern. Leaning towards her, he catches one in his teeth. Her body ripples and her back arches, driving him deeper.

Fuck me, her eyes say. Use me. So he does, pounding her with his cock again and again, rough and raw, reveling in the slick grip of her cunt around his impossibly hard dick. His thrusts are brutal, but he hears no complaints. Amazed, almost disbelieving, he understands. She wants this as much as he does.

You're mine, he thinks, exulting in his power. He wills his cock to grow and swell. He wants to fill her completely, stretch her to her limits and beyond, tear her apart. It may be suggestion, but he feels huge inside her. Her eyes are pools of wonder.

It's all that he had imagined - no, better, because she's soaked and hungry and more open than he could have dreamed. Then unexpectedly, reality shifts. Some sort of psychic conduit opens between them. Her emotions flood his senses, her desperate need and her profound surrender. All at once, he really can hear her thoughts, and he knows, with complete certainty, that she can read his.

Mine. Mine!

Yes, yes – please...

Be still.

Her writhing ceases. Her tiny moans quiet. He ravages her with his gigantic cock and she takes it - willing, trusting, grateful.

She is truly his slave, bound by his command, and he is her born master, caring or cruel as it suits him. She has died for love of him, and he's taking his last pleasure from her still-warm corpse. He is the devil and she's the soul he has ensnared and lured into darkness.

Yes.

He comes with shout of triumph, pouring his seed into her welcoming heat. Her climax shimmers through her, and he feels that, too, the inevitable welling up of sensation so different from his own sharp release. For an instant he really can't tell which feelings and thoughts are his own and which belong to her.

A spark of fear – a flutter of rebellion – she pulls away from him the tiniest bit, reclaiming her will. The crystalline energy between them clouds. He does not fight the change. No one could bear the intensity of that connection for long. They lie in each other's arms, exhausted and groggy with joy.

The candle gutters and winks out. They sleep. He wakes a bit after dawn to find his bed empty. Did he imagine it all? Was this just another fantasy?

Rubbing his eyes, he wanders out of the bedroom. She is seated at the dining room table, naked in the pearly light of a foggy morning, writing in her journal. Her bowed neck speaks both of submission and strength. He sees that despite her tiny frame, she's anything but delicate.

Barefoot, he steals up behind her, cupping her luscious breasts, twirling her nipples. She leans back with a sigh, her curly locks soft against his bare chest. He nips her earlobe, runs a wet tongue along the line of her jaw.

“What are you writing about, Sarah?” he asks, a bit afraid of the answer.

Her face is luminous as she turns to him.

“Magic.”

The Deeper Gods

As I head out across the parking lot, across the street, heading for the Barton Field parade grounds, I’m blinking back tears. I did this to myself on purpose. I’ve been sitting in the car listening to a CD I bought by the Chieftains called “Voice of Ages”. There’s a song called “School Days Over” which tears me to pieces every time. There’s a handful of songs that do this to me and I reserve them for the days I'm going to write. Listening to one of these personally sacred songs is an act of communion, like standing on a cliff over the sea, blowing a conch shell to invoke the deeper gods. They bring up to the surface that interior part of me with all of its scars and images, up from the dark and the cold, up to the surface where we can commune and look each other in the face. Music is how I conjure the gods and the demons both.

“School Days Over” has to be one of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard, but only because it speaks to me. A Irish father is telling his son to wake up, put on his pit boots and work clothes for the first time. He’ll have to drop out of school, give up whatever he hoped to be, and begin his first days in the coal mine as a laborer who will be old before his time. With a soft mixture of pride and grief he sings "Put on the sark and moleskin trousers, time to be on your way." Trading dreams for the pick and shovel is what men have always done for those who need us to do this and need us to be that. Its how the male soul defines itself to women and children, and ultimately to ourselves. Women do this too in their own way. A man purchases his manhood with his freedom. A woman purchases it with her happiness.

As I reach the two mile dirt track, young men and women go jogging by. A small squad of them gallop past as a sergeant chants cadence. They’re wearing exercise uniforms and sneakers, but the pit boots are there nevertheless.

I take off my shoes, pull off my socks. I stuff the socks in the shoes and roll up my pants cuffs. It’s a warm day in the deep south, with some wet thunderheads on the horizon. I want to walk barefoot. I want to feel the cool oiled sand under my feet, even though I’ll walk with a funny penguin gait. It’s what I want more than anything right now.

Walking under the trees, with my shoes tucked under my arm, thinking about the coal miner and his schoolboy son whose childhood is over. Letting my mind wander anywhere.

Last night I was watching James Cameron’s masterpiece “Titanic”. I don’t know anything about romance, but the passion and poignancy of the romance between Jack and Rose speaks to me. Jack might have been that coal miners son, who decided to step into the unknown and find the world for himself. He refused to let anybody dictate what he would be. Especially the wealthy swells of the time who tread contemptuously on the miners and Irish poor in the steerage. When it was time to man the life boats, the steerage poor were locked down below so that the "people of quality" might have the boats to themselves. All that changed in only a few years. That iceberg may as well have been World War I crashing into British society and sinking it, But the ending bothers me. Rose, the old woman, dies and is reunited with Jack the young man. They are young and on the stair case.

But wait wait.

Who is Rose? Is she the old woman, married at least once and with children and grandchildren, or is she Rose of the Titanic? Who? And who is Jack, frozen in time? Is he a ghost.

But wait wait.

Is that what a ghost is? An image, like the gray of a flashbulb on the retina, of a moment frozen in time? If this is the best possible moment for Jack and Rose will this instant last forever repeating itself endlessly? Is that what a haunted house is? Is this the real meaning of Heaven, life’s best moment repeated in an endless loop. But what is Hell? What of Jack and Rose's worst moment, chained to a pipe as the ship fills with ice water? Is there a frozen ghost of that moment? Is that Hell?

But wait wait.

If we’re sitting at the bottom of a well of circumstance and neurology, who are we really? Who is the real me walking the track?

Freud and Jung together made the conjuring of the unconscious their craft and laboratory. Freud realized that the unconscious doesn’t distinguish values, it doesn’t distinguish between fantasy and reality. If I imagine love making vividly enough, I’ll get hard and feel desire for release. A woman, imagining passion will dilate and become wet, ready to receive. The unconscious doesn’t make a distinction.

Jung understood that the unconscious works in imagery not in words, maybe that's why it doesn't distinguish reality. He was fascinated by tarot cards and dream imagery and the mystery of coincidence.

Magick, ritual magic as opposed to stage magic, is based on the concentrated projection of imagery and imagination. Almost any image will due if it can be imbued with emotional content. It’s the power of a song to make a man cry, when he sees himself there. Its an unspoken language. So much of magick as I’ve read of in books is about focusing the will and the imagination together to bend reality. Very few can do it. But religious people do it with acts of faith all the time. There is a theory in Tibetan Buddhism that the afterlife is composed of the images of our strongest desires and fears made real to us. If there were a Jack and a Rose there is no reason they wouldn’t find themselves on that stair case, frozen in their moment of greatest happiness.

Overhead a red hawk is circling and I feel the great urge upon me, because writing is an urge. Its not just something you do, its something you can’t help but do.

I see the hawk circling above. I’m imagining a room with predatory animals as trophies on the walls. I’m imagining a man with an eye patch and a silver haired girl is talking to him and he tells her of his fascination with predators. That he is a hunter, a predator himself. And what is the ultimate predator? A man? No, he says. There is one greater.

Would she like to meet her?

I’m done walking. I need to write. I’m on my way to find the table, one of three locations I sit at depending on where I am, because I know the sea god is waiting for me there. My rituals are about to begin.


(If you would like to see a performance of "School Days Over" by the Chieftains and The Low Anthem, you may find it here:)

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2012/02/chieftains-low-anthem-school-days-over-video-premiere.html