The Intelligence in Silence
"I stopped performing for the light and started eating the dark. It turns out, hunger isn't a weakness—it’s an initiation."
I did not fall.
I wanted to know.
The surface world was thin
polite light, curated smiles,
rooms arranged for approval.
I could feel something beneath it
like a pulse under marble.
So I went down.
Not dragged.
Not tricked.
Drawn.
The wheat parted around my body
as if I were returning to something
older than memory.
Gold against my cheek.
Dry stalks whispering
this is where the roots speak.
The pages pinned behind me,
fragments of script, abandoned drafts,
ink pressed into paper like breath into skin ,
were not relics.
They were versions of me
that stopped halfway.
I lay among them
and let the ravens come.
They did not circle.
They landed.
Black weight on my shoulder,
sharp intelligence against my throat.
One pressed its beak
to the soft place below my collarbone
and asked without sound:
How far will you go?
I answered by eating.
The fruit was not sweetness.
It was density.
It was heat.
It was the sudden awareness
that hunger is not weakness,
it is the mind entering the body.
The red on my mouth
was knowledge passing through flesh.
I wanted to know what desire is
when it is not edited for someone else.
When it is not shaped for applause.
When it is not restrained into virtue.
In the underworld
nothing flatters you.
Nothing performs for you.
There, shadow does not accuse.
It reveals.
I met my animus there,
not as a man,
but as iron in my spine,
as the unflinching voice that said:
Take up your own depth.
Do not borrow power.
Generate it.
I lay in sacred aloneness
until solitude stopped feeling like exile
and began to feel like initiation.
The ravens did not leave.
They became language.
The wheat did not wither.
It rooted in my body.
I will carry the underworld in my mouth
like a secret lover,
and nothing that touches me
will remain untouched.
Poetry and Image © Gesso Cocteau
