ZERO
TIMELESSNESS
Oh, the way the
Sun flows right
Into me,
Through me,
With me,
And the moon.
How God granted
Us a bit of that
Light from both,
Maybe from the
Same ray, maybe
From the same
Reflection. We
Were destined
To find each
Other’s light and
Mirror it back,
Not blindingly, but
Just right like
Endings and
Beginnings that are
Inseparable, like
Cords intertwined
In the cosmos, like
Mars and Venus
Moving as twins,
Breaking apart and
Bringing together,
And both being
Necessary to
Understand God’s
Faces. How sweet
This traveling is.
LION
I’ve never known a Sun
so bright and binding
that the very act of
surviving feels in
jeopardy at the thought
of its absence. Of course
there is the Earth herself,
knowing the seasons
of cold and stillness,
dark as the beauty of
rest and refinement.
All suns emerge from
darkness. The creator
would never cease to
love their greatness
and find nourishment
in them, would always
know what it is to
appreciate the moments
where words become
meaningless. The face
of a truth that is felt is the
one staring back at us.
Across that time and
space, there are threads
that must be sewn and
re-sewn every time they
start to fray.
DARKNESS
There is an unraveling here, but not in the sense of threads that need to be repaired, sewn back together into pieces of a whole. Some threads must be untangled. Some threads are no longer useful.
CREEP
Today was good
And all the days have
Been and now this
Little rock comes
Creeping
Just to remind me
Of a hard place and
What it feels like
Falling through
The cracks of fear
That old familiar
Safety of not
SOLITUDE
Are you misery,
or are you happy
in your solitude,
or are you stuck
between a rock
and a hard place,
so heavy that you
are falling through
the crevices of
memory about all
that imperfection
you have tried to
suppress?
Model child hides
her flaws. They say
not enough. She
fights her fears alone.
Showers run to hide
tear stains, muffled
sobs are suffocated
in pillows, and sleep
comes easy from
exhaustion.
Model girlfriend (or
something, she can’t
call it) jumps very high
and crawls on knees.
They say, you’ll never
reach heaven, hell ain’t
close enough. You are
not for me. Sufficient
is a myth. I don’t see
you.
Are you misery,
or are you happy
in your solitude,
or are you placed
out of time, between
built mechanisms and
new theories about
all the ways you are
impossible to love,
on every road that leads
to your own little corner
and staying in it to
die?
CORNER
In that quiet
corner, I was tucked
away, hidden from
my shame, ignoring
my paranoia at
every sound, every
glare with the worst
possibilities of my
insignificance and
forgetfulness and
openness to pain.
Now that I have
paved the path
with good intentions,
I am once again
familiar with hell.
WALL
The thing about this wall is the number of times I’ve hit it, how much I’ve bruised and battered myself and chipped away at it trying to understand the shape of it. I am sore, and I have hit a sore spot. And really, at the root of this tireless turning and bruising is the desire to see and make something beautiful, to perceive and express love. It’s that simple, but this is certainly a hard spot that I didn’t consciously intend to come to. But now that I am here, I must face and move through the pain. I must remember that I am soft and that I can soften and smooth that which is hard and rough.
BOUND
Your balm is my burden. Or your balm is actually your burden too. Or my balm is your burden. Or my burden is my balm. All true. All problems.
Burdens were not supposed to be the binding substance. But here I am, body bruised and back aching because I keep running up against boundaries and failure to balance.
What amount of rubbing and stretching might make it less so? Maybe I have not rubbed deep enough, or maybe I have stretched too far beyond myself to remember that surface tension can look like floating, but gravity has not vanished either.
That balm and the burden and the balance are found below. Pull your parts together and sink deep. Deeper. Deeper still.
MEMORY
i catch the moments
of breathing and in my
thinking i lose it. in the
trying to keep it i mis-
understand it is not to
be captured and held.
if only i could find a
piece of certainty that
the flying ones return.
and perhaps there’s a
peace i must know, that
truth that will always
prevail– free birds fly
and they know of home.
haven’t i found my way
through every time? yes
i know what it is to roam
and to rest and to perch
and to soar on winds
not all my own. to share
a flight path is the gift.
so in the moments of
caught breathing, let
it all go. and remember
you’ve got wings too.
IDENTITY LOSS
I have become a mirror to the not-being. Not as in, I am reflecting what we look like from an othering, opposite gaze, but more like I have become the distortion I cursed many moons ago. I have separated from the cycles. I have severed my own sense. I have danced right into discord and discarded my body’s rhythm. Only the ones who knew anticipated the flailing. Only the ones who fly could recognize the falling. But still, from the depths, I hear someone who hasn’t forgotten to remind me who I am called.
I sought to devour, and I became the consumed. Domesticated, slaughtered, masticated, gulped down. That’s the beginning of a new appreciation for being difficult to digest.
CONTEMPLATION
Swallow yourself back down. You are water and salt and unfathomable mystery. And if you let yourself go, the life you’ve created will drown.
But that might be preferable.
DROWNING
Loose lips sink ships,
and maybe I have
plunged us right into
the dark depths of
the Atlantic in order
to revisit the mystery
of that in-between
space which birthed
whole new creatures
not quite from here or
native there, but rather
all their own and also
unfathomably beautiful
and terrifying in their
will to survive. Allow
the salt to seep into us
a little longer that we
may know the thirst of
reconnection and the
memory of routes
we are still traveling.
PURGATORY
i thought the roar felt
most threatening. fire
of course is going to
rage and consume. but
then deafening silence
and the plunge into icy
shards of uncertainty
turned out to be the
biggest undoing. anger
so palpable, yet muted
as to turn your own
heart to ash and leave
no evidence that there
was ever any kindness
coursing through blue
veins. the water in me
reflects a monster, but
then the earth says,
“the grotesque can be
appreciated when you
know how to perceive
it.” so allow me to look
while you spill. the mess
must not be contained,
but maybe the elements
can be distinguished,
made sense of, viewed
as a tapestry of survival
and love unanswered.
JUDGMENT
Try a bit of honesty now. Name the truth
that’s stealing your sleep and your youth. Feel
the resentment pounding your head,
knocking on every opportunity to get you to
come out. Press the lump that has formed in
your gut from swallowing every dagger back
down, thinking it was better to bleed inside
and let that wound scar over than to cut
somebody else on your own reality.
What have you here in the mirror? Somebody
old. It’s you, but past/present, past sense,
past loneliness, past desperation. The
disillusionment is underway.
This is just a rebuilding. A new initiation.
Remember the first dip, the first cut, the first
prayer. The first time you turned the world
upside down just to put yourself back right.
Remember it felt like dying. Remember how
deep in you were willing to go. Remember
how you came out with a new sun blazing in
your belly, an undeniable glow.
REBIRTH
we are living the
impossible, for
reasons unclear,
but it occurs to
me that someone
dreamed us here.
while you were
sleeping, i gazed
into the darkness
of my closed lids,
only to find shape
and color, eyes of
some unknown
guardian peering
back into my lived
reality and saying
it doesn’t end here.
BURNING
usually you are water, and sometimes you
have chosen a quiet drowning or a persistent
smoothing as your weapon, but the part they
don’t talk about, the you they rarely meet, is
the fiery one blazing at your core. she spits
burning daggers, leaves noticeable scars. and
that’s why you keep her tucked away. until
someone decides that cool water simply will
not do.
RAGE
I burned the house down
and sit now
among the rubble, wishing
for something other
than gray ash and
lightless lies about
what can be salvaged.
Maybe fires don’t
always make the earth
fertile, but instead burn
it all the same as
everything else that
happens to be in a path
of destruction.
Make me over.
Make me new.
Make me somewhere
more colorful than
here and now.
I remember when I used
to be something
of an artist, using
fire to forge and
not to forget.
LEAVING
Must I leave
this place to
know peace and
joy everlasting
or is the wound
so deep in the
middle of me
that I could leave
a hundred times
over and never
know?
I have left, but not
really, just as a tactic
to find out if my
presence means something,
if my absence is felt. But
every time, it’s me returning,
willing to revisit and dig
out all that we buried
in each other in fits of
rage and disappointment
at the wounds this
world has inflicted, at
our impossibility on
the other side of potential.
RESENTMENT
You want to access my magic.
But why
should I trust you
with it when every ounce
of sweet, crisp light that
I have poured will
not be replenished
without my own doing, my own
self-care, barely enough
to carry me from
one wretched moment
to the next?
SPELL
Imagine me
in places green and
covered
in the warmth of a sun
that just does what
it does because it is.
I will swallow all
those common and
plain utterances,
community miseries
that only know how
to take and never
give.
I have seen
some light, some truth,
some future, some
thread that is woven
from a single
yellow core. Fire,
create new. And, fire,
obliterate all that
I will have no more.
BURNING II
they who
use fire to release
make room, make
fertile the earth
to spring forth
something new
some peace some
beauty summed
into All
of the experience
and crossed as a
portal
RAGE II
from silent to sullen and it still stings the same because every which way you slither around reminds me that i am only valued in servitude, head bent low, body breaking. when you pray to your sky daddy, does he bellow back in a booming voice, well done, son, you are a man created in my image. is that why it confuses you to hear a soft and gentle no. is that why your body is so filled with rage that you feel compelled to empty it into the nearest earthly hole that refuses to grow your inconsistent seeds.
SURRENDER
white flowers whispering,
weep, then be well, as
my shoes thud against
the pavement, the hardness
of a long winding and
uphill journey, toward the
unfolding of the sacred
I, being of light and
womb, I walk with shadows
cast at angles and alter
lenses to capture and
beautify the warped
quality of realities that
a cold, dark winter whisks
away. we have stirred
the ones who know, plead
for rest and renewal, then
rising. does a phoenix
fear flying again just
because she remembers
the feel of fire, the hazy
sight, the gray of ash?
we knew this would not
last. simply deferred our
leaving.