The Birth, Life and Death of a Spirit

"She knew they could not fathom her longings, mystifying like an eclipse." (pexels x Altan Kendirc).

Sharing her language was true temptation, her favourite sin

Though she knew she shouldn’t, she gave in

Because her lungs were bursting

Her thoughts were siren lures, water to a man hating that he was thirsting

She knew they could not fathom her longings, mystifying like an eclipse

Yet still, those cosseted words escaped the shelter of her lips

Though the townsmen tried to catch them, they always missed.

She was flung out of society, but what good did that do?

Still forced to marry, just not spoken to

Became a doll, but worthless, riddled with stitches

Yearning to belong, yet neither Earth nor Divinity recognised her wishes

Acceptance turned an annual treat, necessities ungiven

She watched her husband’s unhurried eyes

Glaze over his wife, forced docile

Wondered if it would be a surprise

If she dropped her teacup, or something equally as hostile

Would he even notice it?

Would he attribute it to the wind?

Why did he get to revel in the Earth’s delights?

The breeze, the sun, the colours, and he could think he knew the glory of them all

So day by day her soul carved a tunnel

A hole in her heart shaped into a funnel

When they looked right through her mortal body

They decorated another nail in her coffin, so gaudy

Remember, a spirit bound to its body cannot be taken seriously

She wakes up, deliriously

Watches herself perform her chores

Aided by muscle memories leaving her sore

Her husband did one thing so kind

Cleaved her body from from her mind

Her soul became free.

Light.

She marvels at murderers’ selflessness

Putting people’s needs above their virtuousness

In this visceral imitation of death, she finally gets to exist

Ink finally rushes from her pen

Once forced dry

Now slips out fast from its slender den

Days saturated with the luxury to try.

Bound to nothing except having a good time

She travels the world in seconds and centuries

All that she could not do before, for she had not a dime

Watches them all: labourers, soldiers, noblemen, artists and men in penitentiaries

With the only currency she needs

The form of a spirit, a money she would never cede

She gorges on cakes

Dozes, drowses and delights, sleeping in the field

Lingering on, relishing decadent joy which she does not yield

Gazing unabashedly at the sun unwinding over the lake

Time was a treat, a delicacy for a different people

What she knew of it was looking in through the peephole

Her apparition made it her birthright

Forevermore just tending to her hearth light

She yawns and groans and screams and sighs

Emotions of opulence to dabble in, then dive

But she is a species that, for each desire fulfilled, must pay a price

With each ghostly breath, her lungs work faster and twice

She pulls herself taller

Her back bends

She listens to everything and understands

Her ears shrivel past her nose, then shrink smaller

She sets her sights on each vision she can absorb

Her eyes fall dim, the world going by her ignored

She trains her mind to expand

Her brains leak out on unmarked papers, like a mad man

She becomes divinity beyond

Her mangled being might be the purest Sublimity of them all

She returns back home once

Gasps, wails and empties her lungs for months

Finding her beast of a body, blessed only by her teary rain drops

She grieves how pathetic her bones became, left to replenish the crops

She tries to piece herself back into a familiar shape

To pull herself out of what is surely a dreamscape

But the Devil truly does love idle hands, she sees his passion in front of her

Her limbs are all phantom now

Fingers slick with blood thrashing out from beneath her flesh

Sweat spoils her brow

You could run her body through tight mesh

As watered down as it has become

Her heart beats inside her fists,

Without a hint of reason for it to keep going as it did

Her brain, so unprotected.

She was ghastly

Her body bore burdens that forced her soul to flee

But in tending to her corporeal needs,

She completes

A ritual so sacred

She is timelessly grounded at a house shaking from her hatred

A revenant who never meant to haunt

Tries her best to keep quiet through the ages

But the restriction turns her hedonism gaunt

Starvation needs reprieve; she must be satiated

So, she rages.t be satiated So, she rages.