Amor Fati

“you cannot flee from yourself.”
                 C. G. Jung, The Red Book

Hello imp,
Hello demon, tormentor,
                                                       friend.
You are dear to me.
I wear you like a cap of wires,
live snakes that needle me,
jam fire down each nerve,
make me hop to.
You are a match, scraped
up and down my gullet,
spurt of sulfur and flame.
You live there, where my heart
burns within me, unquenchable.
I have followed you
until my feet were cinders
and my thoughts a flutter
                                                    of ash.
And you are dear to me.
You have spent my days
as if they were yours,
jerked me away from every joy,
to leave it half-eaten, spoiled.
I am bound to your flaming wheel.
When you roll, I must turn
with you, speeding along a rutted track,
hardly touching the earth. You are
the hummingbird’s iridescent
motion— not deliberate,
but quick, light,
                                    intemperate.
Your pulse beats
like wings. You are dear to me,
sponge soaked in vinegar,
live coal, thumbscrew.
You open your mouth
and I see galaxies spill
down your throat like milk.
After following you to ruin
& beyond, I stand
before you now, you
who never stand still,
I take your hand. You
burn like lithium: in air,
in haste. What will happen if I stop
your spinning, stopper your
impatience, step down your
                                                            voltage?
Today you are pure potential
and I am the grounded wire
that will carry a charge.

Priscilla Frake is the author of Correspondence, a book of epistolary poems. She has work in Verse Daily, The Sun, Nimrod, The Midwest Quarterly, Medical Literary Messenger, The Wayfarer, Whale Road, Spoon River Poetry Review, and The New Welsh Review, among others. Anthology publications include Weaving the Terrain: 100 Word Southwestern Poems, Enchantment of the Ordinary, and Women. Period. She lives in Asheville, NC, where she is a studio jeweler.