Freedom Prayer

Feel the itch to

Shed some old skin

Live in the transformation

Let the Serpent back in

Watch as it coils around you

Until you can’t breathe

Your bones begin to crack

While your gender, age, height, race…

Those defining characteristics

Begin to deconstruct as your body condenses

Wrapped in the coils tight

The Serpent then begs the question

Of your identity

Before swallowing you whole

You’d be surprised just how seductive

That kiss of death could be

It strikes at you quickly

Without warning

Leaving you forever changed

The old you was far too safe

Too boring

Death comes in to set you free

Pray.

I am not my body

I am not my past

I am not my religion

I am not my sex

I am not my eyes

I am not my university

I am not my career

I am not my family
I am not even my poetry

If you could only remember

Death sits behind your left shoulder

What’s worth fighting for?

What’s left to cling to?

Comes a time

That you just can’t carry it around anymore

I pray to the Crows

Scavengers of the sky

I offer my body

If only to free my soul

Open my pumping heart

Satisfy their thirst

I am but my Father’s daughter

Came into this world with no possessions

This is all I have to offer

Tired of clinging to a false sense of autonomy

Freedom is the unhinged and unsecured

A floating leaf; subject to God’s will

The Wind’s doing

I’d lay naked before Her

This is how I pray

Lay bare enticing the Serpents, Crows

And Wind to come to me

I smoke the tobacco for all my relations

The animals too

Om

Aho

Hallelujah

And if I could strip down

Be delivered an empty vessel

For Spirit to live through

I would

Surrender completely

And watch how the Serpent saves you

A transmutation of DNA

An evolution of grandiose proportions

Don’t let the fear of death hold you back

For self preservation means nothing

Compared to this final sacrifice

I will never be anything more;

Anything less;

Than this.