Guilding The Lilitu

Enough of this simpering, it’s time to fire up the Patti Smith and perform a barefoot incantation to the Goddess. I whisper to Lilith and smear the bloody sigils above my door which hide the corruption within. I am she of blood fire rising, screech owl haunting my dreams and lay myself newborn and bloodied out for her, a raw sacrifice, a slither of nerve for the pin needle poking the fiber, innervating illness, flinching microscopically from outside stimulus, reacting with fear to male invasion.

Lilith: she is here. Head cocked, old friend smile triggered, a glancing shot across the bowels of fear. My Abrahamic roots are dug fresh over for the shovel and the ho(e). Rich mulch of male derision feeds my fire. She holds my hands, it has been too long: virgin, whore, mother-crone me. Azrael behind me, Jezebel before me.

Women mother figure christened me Jezebel. I ate the cake that she had put out for friends. It was enough to damn me…and I heard Lilith laughing near. You are a danger, screamed the mother-figure. A cuckoo in the nest! You are not like us! You are quite queer. My cuckoo eyes melted the chocolate and dragged the sweetness across my lips and savored the sugar of those words. Did you hear that? I am not like them! The bliss of reassurance! I am always the danger, yet it is me who ends up bleeding in the bed unsure of what new hole has been drilled in me while the one who declares me such terror swaggers off bleating about how dangerous I am. My dangerous child body knew of the enticing danger I was to men, how they despised me for their strange criminal afflictions. My dangerous woman body knew of the immense fatality of living in my sphere of influence. My old crone body dangerously warns me that I have to go slower or pay the price for somebody’s else’s sins.

I lick the words from Patti’s mouth: Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine. That man. That man. That man. People say beware…..you will learn to care. Lilith looks askance, they threaten her with that man all the time and her golem body creaks with the indignity of it all. She is ancient, fell from the heavens to walk the Earth alone, but finds herself whispered to by female mouths begging her for a slice out of life. Rattlesnakes shaking, blood heat rising, pursed lips warning not to be dancing with no devil barely in disguise. They called Lilith dangerous too.

I’d rather be a Lilith than an obedient Leah unloved and discarded for Racheline advances, consoled with children and buried in Hebron, tender eyed and sweet hearted, destined to live without love’s commandments, bound by marriage’s confinements.

I am my own Lenny, fingers on top of strings plucking the lily, gilding the apple of my eye, aiming for the great forbidden chocolate cake pie in the sky dream of living free, dancing through the desert, just another Lilitu with the golden babe in her sight to lean over the cradle of delight to close eyes to the fight of breathing catlike over this stalking world and inhale air dry.

Lilith holds up the mirror to my face, her ribbon bounds unlaced, traces the elements of fire and dirt, a nugget of toothful silver, a bone unground for the potters field. Do you go to the mansion on the hill with Leah? Do you feed the fever? Do you open up your burning solar plexiglass center to the hatred and swallow it black hole and all? Do you poppy-wise abdicate, or send hooks into the noise where the beetles drag the sun under the dung pit dark?

My jaw drops open, dislocates snake-eyes broken, as finger to her lips she bids me silent, as sand and sun and wind wind on to the inevitable conclusion: Exile for the Happy Forgotten, the sisters of destruction, the wild, the untamed, the feral and the free, no peaceful day of rest for them, no sigil mismarked unnoticed. No red stringed babe in her downy bed will pass without words to her spoken:

You may breathe, you may live, you may suffer as you give all of yourself that’s to be given, but by this ankh in my hand, by the rules of this land, you may join us if you are forgotten.