Persephone sits on her dark throne lamenting her loss of the light. Why did I do it? she asks herself, pouting, sulking. This is the pits. How could I be so dumb. How can I get out of here. I don’t want this initiation, I don’t want this headache all I want is to have it be a bad dream and wake up from it. How did I get tricked into this? How can I get out of it? Three pomegranate seeds, my eye! What a pisser. Is this all there is? Is this what I’m really supposed to do, my destiny? It’s a shadow, a dim shade of what I expected life to be. Life was supposed to be meaningful and exciting and full of opportunities to shine and be loving and loved. And here I am with a timid lover who misled me into thinking he was the great glamourous god who would sweep me off my feet but as it turns out he hides out here, and I have to pursue him if I want to do anything with him. And what is there to do? Sex, sex, sex.. and what else. Is it possible to have a child in this lifeless place? Is it possible to have a relationship? There seems to be no nourishment of any kind going on here, everyone has to fall back on their own resources. A community of the dead? What would that be? Is it my job to make it happen? Why am I here!!?

There had been an energy, at the beginning: rising from the earth like the xylem in a treetrunk, overwhelming me, inspiring me with its dark power. Where is it now? From time to time the earth shakes with small tremors, there must be power there still, but they are weak, tired, frustrated, couldn’t move a hill much less a mountain, they just inspire boredom and frustration and kill the inspiration that once rose. Then they subside, shuddering, and the earth seems to take a lower level, settle to a flatter profile, subsiding as the energy vanishes down, down lower than this hell, to the subterannean sources I can not now reach, that I yearn to reach, to command, to raise and wield. Passion! Creativity! Soul! What is stultifying this natural force? What has damaged my dark lover? What has faded the intensity of all here in this underground semi-life? What oppression holds it down, defuses it, sends it back to the great volcanic core of heat that still roils down there somewhere but does not now loom, rise, flow, erupt in orgasm?