ADAMANTINE'S MANDATE
2024-01-01

***

before, in your grief, the heavens you beseech
"direct my actions; the world I want's beyond reach"
just remember all the men who ever deemed you "leech"

between terror and wildfire's rage you oscillated
unsure if in reach was your own liberation
or if it was too much to hope for, craven

call it patriarchal reversal, projection,
but even bearing the blood of your mother's chaotic kin
the world that you seek is one where you escape
where theirs is one where they've made women their slaves

your first reaction to this realization is to declare war:
"I can't tolerate this lifelessness! I won't take it anymore!"
but piles of generations stronger than you have tried that very same:
but what if the men threw a war, and this time not a single gyne came?

think about this year past, of all the blessings I bestowed
when you stopped wasting all your energies on the fruitless hope
that you could convince your parents through tears and self-abandonment
to change and instead refocused on what you could do to circumvent

you kept your promises to Luce: you got your high employment
and now work from home in a self-sovereign apartment
that you needed no help to acquire, no hand-holding, no debt
so, considering this: instead of war, what if you made a world instead?

like you wanted five years ago as you write this:
a world free of coercion and sickness
the likes of which can barely be imagined:
as startling as you stand now compared to "just moved in"?

you've got to remember: you've survived every "moid"
who beseeched their god that you'd succumb to the void
I'll be your shield: black, gold, adamantine
if you'll still be my Anima Mundi

***

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (c) Vane Vander