Shapeshifter
A Beltane Ritual

Here it is the deep of springtime—everything muddy and wet, greening and teeming with sex. The tender blades of grass sing Her name and the unfurling leaves sigh in ecstasy. The sea is burgeoning, roaring, heaving with unselfconscious hunger and lust. The salt-damp of her breath entices. The rains rush to mingle with the earth—entangling themselves until they become One—indistinguishable. And the sun breaks through lazily—like a sweaty, exhausted, satisfied lover reaching for a cigarette—dazed looking and godlike. I walk outside these days—in rain and wind, in mud and along the rocky shoreline—daring to put my toes in the freezing salt-water. I kneel in the dirt and press my face to her skin—breathe in the scent of her warming body—allow the scent to carry me into my animal nature. The mouldering leaves of last year's dying time smell of sex...ripeness.....and I am the green one, the horned one. Her scent intoxicates and overwhelms me—I enter doorways of madness and revel there. I run barefoot over muddy forest floors. My ears prick at the sound of birdsong, frog-call, my own hooves pounding the earth in mesmorizing rhythm. I hunt and am hunted by her. My breath catches—the quickening breath that comes with the recognition that I am being seduced...and am seductress/seductor. Nostrils flare, skin flushes with the blood rushing to the surface, flooding and sensitizing nerve endings—green tendrils. The wind sends ripples of pleasure along the fine hairs of my skin. I press fingers holding seeds into her flesh and she opens to me. I fall into her darkness, her mystery, her musky, ancient secrets.....into the center of herself, the core of fire that is earth.......and I go into the Fire to find the Darkness of Space......cold starless beauty, the void, the Original Cunt of Outer Darkness. She takes me to Her and together we dream, fuck, sleep and drift....my black mirror body of nothingness takes on the hue of darkest cobalt. I shine in the utter nightness of black. She thinks me lovely and she calls me by Name. I long for her, cannot bear to be parted from her. want always to be this close to her. Need with all my needing to be able to brush against her in my turning, find myself tangled in the infinity of her hair. And part of me needs to go—a longing that will not be denied—so I shapeshift into more-than-one and the leaving part is greener and feathered and scaled and proud......and yet another part of me goes wailing into the darkness weeping for the loss of my lover—for the loss of all lovers, and part of him'/me is green and leafy and tender and succulent......and part of him/me is brown/white animal all fur and hooves and strength and horns.... and part of me/him is blinding, maddening firey selfhood.......and we/I tumble and fall and enter through doorways upon doorways, worlds upon worlds where I understand things which are unfathomable.....in one world I see the body of a woman, overcome with ecstasy she lies muddied, exhausted, shivering in the madness of shamanic passion on that narrow strip of earth where first she/I bent to taste her/our springtime elixir......I enter her/myself. I/we quake and moan. The sound of waves crashing over stone, the sense of mist dampening the hair, the taste of earth and salt and silence on my lips. Fur, feathers, hooves, stardust—human skin, blood...and bones.