Fettering Apep

All this long skein of phrases,
Going on for years is based
On what I’ve read or,
As Kenji Miyazawa

Put it, “what I’ve heard
From other people
Or worked out for myself. It
May not be entirely true,

But I, for one, believe it.”
Coils suggest infinity.
We crave it and it scares us.

All those snakes and eels,
Chthonic dragons
And leviathans—

Is this a thread I’m shedding,
A lasso I’m collecting,
A circle around the world,

Shape of sunya, of zero,
Of nothing, ourobouros,
Or a parasitic worm

Escaping the demented
Cricket husk it zombified,
Consumed from inside,

And directed to water
Where the remaining
Cricket would, at long last, drown?

Myth itself conceals
The reason chaos
Is so often underworld

Or serpentine and yet linked
Curiously to knowledge
And creation in our minds.

Myth itself protects
The brood it left within us
By directing us away

And making us wanderers
In our own worlds, our own skulls.
These phrases are just

What I must pull from my skull,
Strand after strand after strand,
So I can be free of them,

And they can be free of me,
To wait as long it takes
To find a new host, to make
A new home under your skin.