REGRESSION

Appointment on a hot afternoon:
the way to mend a broken mind, they said.
But it felt like Judgement day had come.

This was scarier than anything that came before.
He instructed me to relax, to just think of nothing
to begin with. Then he counted me down into deep hypnosis...

Instantly I'm crouching in the midst of raging fire, my hands
raw with burning weals. Bombardment of flying brick fragments
hitting me, unseen in the suffocating smoke

of cannon and musket fire. The window panes
shatter inwards. Men dying all around me,
shouting, screaming. Cromwell's army

grossly outnumbers ours. It's a hellish
nightmare, to be helplessly witnessing the fall of Basing House.
A hat feather lies crushed and broken on the ground beside me.

With terror-numbed fingers, I carefully take aim.
He's so close I can clearly see his brown eyes and his spartan armour,
cold and impenetrable as his Puritan Soul.

BANG! Dazzled eyes see rainbow stars.
Then shredded flesh gives way to bone
of bloodied skull: beautiful, like ivory.

More and more come to take his place. I'm out of ammunition.
My sword, the final life-line. It's cold steel
animated by hatred for these perpetrators of high treason.

Grey eyes now, and I think of the King
as I stab and stab, frantically seeking armour's slightest chink.
All I see are feet, vague cameos, and faces

contorted by sheer malice - now fading into agony
and dimming consciousness. Row on row
encircling me. Strange how dying now seems

so easy. A mystical transformation, deep and slow.
Sorting corpses into lives, making sense of how
they all fit into place, as if parts of a huge jigsaw puzzle...



NOW I understand
my incapacitating terror of crowded places
and bearded faces, of clamour, of fire, and of battle sites.

No therapist can erase my Karma:
only LOVE holds the key
to the whole meaning of reincarnation's experience.

I, alone, have made my choices, both good and bad
and there is no going back, only retrieval of squandered Soul parts.
Rising from the therapist's couch, my Akashic Record falls wide open.

I feel unbelievably LIGHT.  So much still to achieve
with this new knowledge: atonement,
in the language of Spirit,

is FORGIVENESS.


This post was inspired by a recent visit to the ruins of Basing House.