Missing Words

How many times will I dig through the mud to find those missing words?  Hands cupped, probing the thick dark folds of silken sludge, I move with the instincts of an animal, all seeing in the darkness. Through the buried remains of world and beast I move, finding remnants which in them contain entire galaxies, though I see them as tiny bits of stone and meadow grasses.

Those words, I released them in an undulating pattern of body convulsions, clicking, and rocking spasms. I sent them up into the air with warm breath and panting and so much fire.
There is still more in me. Deep in the caves guarded by secret mistresses in black hooded robes and pierced pink nipples, hidden in such dark places it might take years or lifetimes to find. There the sound swirls, a deep well of red hot amber, swelling and irrepressible.
Palpitating and prepared for all the fingers of every god who can make the journey. Every beast. Every mountain man covered in fur and curls, white powder on his heels. 
If they walk the thousand steps, slay the thousand dragons, enchant the guardians, they will find it there, swimming through the thick pools of combined water and earth, stone and plant.

Those missing words released in a momentary fluttering, they are tucked into small ponds with tiny golden fish, red and yellow stripes along their bellies. Bubbles and little waves sometimes push them to the surface where I can scoop them up and swallow them whole. There are none left for the wild dogs on the days I wade into the waters, naked and just slightly stiff in the cold air.
Always a bitter wind will sweep down off the mountains, rushing towards me, an avalanche of sound and roaring desperation.  How can it tell?  Finding my body as it moves, coming towards me gracefully as a large-winged bird. It covers me in a frozen embrace and races towards the great ice caps of the north.

I dropped my clothes long ago in the meadow. I walk with red painted toes and black stripes marking my breasts and ribs, barely breaking a blade of grass with my weight. My breathing, smooth and shallow, just enough to keep me alive as I search the waters. There are bees darting and iridescent songbirds and cicadas drowning out the noise of other living creatures, creating an undulating drone which corresponds to the water ripples slapping against my white skin.
Do they react to my rushing heat or do we move together? Desire and bubbles and fish and lost words pushing against each other, naked and sweat covered and moving without language.

Thin purple petals are covered in dew, they sparkle in the brilliant light. The wind keeps racing over and past me and my heart runs after it, a high pitched scream following our decent into the caverns below the sea of time. The ache inside bursts out, swelling outwards towards the sea. 

Gripping the wind for comfort, deep and voluminous snakes emerge from the holes in the ground, from my ears, out my mouth. Overcome by scales and hissing, I finally sink to my knees. They suck on the tiny beads of sweat below my breasts and coil around me, bringing me back into time. Where things happen, where words are formed.

Labyrinth Guardian

I am a Guardian of the Labyrinth, moss dripping from my mane, dew sliding from the tips of my ears to encircle my steely eyes. I stand at the outer edges where the stars touch down upon their own reflection like the dancing flames of candles set upon a black mirror. I stand and I watch. With unblinking eyes, I observe the creatures that go in. Half human and half beast, with the beak and keen eyes of a falcon, the purple breasts of a woman, and the tentacles of a squid, or with the face of a lion, wings of a dove and penis and legs of a man. They wind around the ever spiraling path with its vine like curls, twirls and flourishes, its dead ends and invisible passages. Each twist and turn is a twist and turn into their own innermost being, their darkest depths, their giddiest heights. I see them walking their own unnamed corridors. I see them crawl through their own suffocating tunnels and I see them cower in their own corners. I see them stride fearlessly over their own burning pathways and watch them flee down their own decaying stairways. They take on their beastly gate from time to time. They can't help it. The instinct to preserve the shape most familiar to them, to degenerate back into the most elemental form they can conjure is overwhelming. At other times, they walk heal-toe like a human; the crown of creation, the assemblage point for a distinct universe. They slowly, cautiously, proceed to the center, to the pulsing flaming heart of the Labyrinth.
Some creatures do strange things in the center. Some leave small gifts. Some stand in silence. Some battle Asterion’s son with his fierce horns, and others lay cradled at the mountainous breasts of Europa, while still others dissolve like droplets of water sizzling away upon the surface of a hot cauldron. There are those that stay for a long time, withstanding the heat and myriad of fever dreams that engulf them. There are also those that are thrust immediately away, pressed back to the surface just as a splinter is pushed up and out of a body by layers of new skin cells. What they do in the center is what defines them. It is the crux of the pattern, the point from which they spiral out into the cosmos. The reverberations are far reaching, eternal.
Then, the creatures, half human and half beast, make their way out. The twists and turns repeat in reverse order. This time, the creatures seem renewed, imbued with confidence. Their footfalls are like the beating of a mallet upon a taut drum skin, rhythmic, orderly, assured and commanding of presence. They return to the world with the deep wailing of a blow horn, glowing like a new baby after the tangled cord has been cut and bloody placenta has been washed away.
Out of the Labyrinth come the creatures, each in their own time, each in their own way, the way that makes the labyrinth all that it is for them. They somehow seem whole. After they depart, the question whose answer has always eluded me remains burning within my breast. Is this wholeness because the creature is now fully human or is the creature now fully beast? Has one twin strangled the other in the primordial womb? Or is it, perhaps, that the two emerge as one complete being, a synthesis of the bestial and the celestial. A creature now fully human and fully beast.