I. FIRE: PROLOGUE

SURRENDER

Ever since you can remember
They have been telling you
SURRENDER

Just let go!
You are holding an egg…well drop it!
Come on now! COME!

SUR-REN-DER
Three syllables shouted across a battlefield
White flags held high above human wreckage
Your flag is red, stained with blood

SURRENDER! bellowed Pluto
Squelching Persephone’s last gasp
Before the chasm

SUR – REN – DER
Three vicious yelps in her ear
Poised to the Great Below
As she swooned before the Narcissus
Her slip of a skirt ---it was the height of summer—
inching up her milky white bottom

Intoxicated with the scent of passion
Cold hand of fate crucifying virgin flesh
With the rasping SURRENDER!

You could never surrender
Not in the open picture you painted
Persephone’s spiraling Song of Sovereignty
Snake spiraling through the spinal chord
From obscurity to celebrity

Her greatest desire is to meet her match
Says MP, the Seer re-visioning her from the depths
Light in Dark and Shadowed in Light
A man that can keep her guessing.

Six pomegranate seeds
Six for the Lovers
Six months underground
Rising at the Winter Solstice

Six are the seeds sending you downwards
To the depths of Alphabetland
Where clarity was obscured by darkness
Lovers were enemies
Male was female; female was male
Evil/live an equation for self-destruction

Pluto framing your innocence in his sweaty palm
Guiding your trusting face, your robust lips downward
Below the heart
Where you hope for love
Below the naval
Where you expect camaraderie
Below the womb
Where you long for connection
To the Great Below
Where you ingested the seeds
Doomed forever to this cycle
Alternating darkness and light

Until the head on confrontation with Lord of Darkness
A birthday celebration and impending engagement
Sacred marriage of Sun & Moon
Bar A with the undulating snake on its portal
Site of liberation of the Sun Goddess
Women in red dancing with hands in the air
Inhabiting their bodies as personal flags of surrender
“Lots of celebrities in this room” Pluto says
Staring right at you

Hail Persephone!
Visionary Wanderer
Queen of Night and Princess of Day
You ride the dimensional shift,
Says your seer/daughter

Underworld Queen giving birth
To the Aquarian Goddess
Who waves the Freedom Flag
White banner stained pink by memory
Of desire