discarding the sackcloth

what i learned of being human those years spent speaking through the bars of golden cages did not serve me in the mountain-forest or in the home of she who haunts it: the fear of a fallen nature - when all i have ever prayed for is to sink into the earth, the slipping off my green mantle to don the sackcloth of the penitent -- dishonoring the wild gods and feral human ghosts who wove their dreams…