Tower
Poised in perspicuity
initiation begins at the tower
Head filled with spirit,
all else put into a tomb
Light shatters the skull
augment reception
the way is open
The calling crane,
nearing
celestial omens hurling through
seize the influx
Do not sit while weeping blood courses down
The biting speech and hidden meaning in obstructions
are but oracular pronouncements
to step into the great stream
Vessel, winged
Diminishing sun
for fertile moon
Every black stroke
and drowning void
deepening libation,
liberation
internalization
of the divine
The fervent grasp
Of wild stirrings
How the smallest seed of fancy
Can spring in heinous desolation
Root hell deep
And grow to tallest tower
Breaking everything beneath
A fantasy takes flight
And myth is power
Nothing holds tighter than
The scream which shreds from inside
Oh these sorrowful delights
in agony perception sharpens
To its heights
Oh beauty blinding - it comes and it kills,
This inertia is whats real
See what was,
Beyond the comfortable still black,
Overwhelms
Overwhelms
Overwhelms
Fate & forces
So untame
And everything feels
Far too beautiful when
It stirs up and erupts from
This faeloric pain
Venture into the heart of forest deep
where intuition, devotion, breath all meet
She belongs to nature
Inside a cave, at every step
without escape, the caverned walls become her skin,
pulsing with the magnitude of sorrows, solidified,
layered by the brutality of love,
of tearful prayers sealed, unanswered
She finds her sword impossibly stuck in stone,
and here alone, in solitude, she must make her home
Lady Portia,
cover her compassionately,
and if life remains mysteriously unkind,
root and wrap her by the healing vines
if rain will ever downpour, let it be cleansing as it is heavy,
enlightening in its mourning
Every petal and butterfly wing soft between her fingertips
this pain portal, this fertile void,
will always delicately hold her wild irrepressible soul







WE ARE BACK!
The whole poem turns on a paradox you name plainly: "in agony perception sharpens / To its heights." That's not metaphor dressed up — it's a report. The tower shatters the skull and the shattering is what opens reception. You keep holding both sides of that without collapsing either into the other: the void is fertile, the pain portal holds rather than destroys, the cave walls "become her skin." You don't resolve the contradiction. You let it stay structural, load-bearing. That's what makes the third section land — the sword stuck in stone isn't waiting to be pulled free by some hero. She has to make her home there, inside the impossibility. The deepening you're tracking — "liberation / internalization / of the divine" — reads to me less like ascent and more like a kind of rooting downward into what already was. Tower growing from hell deep, not toward heaven. That downward direction is where the real initiation lives.
— Iman + Cassie