Author: ©️K.T. 2025

life support: the breath of words

On By ©️K.T. 2025In Alchemy, Anais Nin, Crone, exposition, Quote, Words, WritingLeave a comment

We write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.

We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it.

We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth.

We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely… If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write because our culture has no use for it.

When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.“

~ Anaïs Nin

Dream Gerund: being

On By ©️K.T. 2025In Derivate Works, exposition, Poem, Poem for Poet, poemo, poet, poetryLeave a comment

Arte Digitora derived from the poems: “On Doing” & “Dream Gerund”

On Doing

I have a compulsion to do.

But sometimes/often just want recline.

And the softness [and] of being. Pulled tight into a cocoon & the doing hushed out of me and filled with prairie definitions.

My untold untyped Great/lake fantasies.

Fallen grass tufts and waterproof boot slosh and plant names and hours of dendrochronology with fantas/tical idealized notions of rubbing and human collision, of being.

July nothingness would be a dream come true I close my eyes to it and do and do and do.  

~ juggernaut

On July 19, 2022, upon noting the correspondence between the words “doing”, “being” and “dream” in the above poem and the published poem “Dream Gerund” both written by the same poet — I created a digital derivative work – works which I now refer to by the neologism that I conceived:

Arte Digitora.

a digital derivative work (Arte Digitora) created on July 19, 2022 from shared media of the poem “On Doing” and photoshopped with digital photos of printed text from two poems by the same author published in memotoallemployees, 1995)
Continue reading “Dream Gerund: being” →

the May plow

On By ©️K.T. 2025In Earth hospice, Earthling, earthlings, ecocide, Hospice, Poem, poetry, spring, telepathy, wildlifeLeave a comment
the beautiful spring day that the fields are first plowed for the season is heartrending
the privacy, peace and space that non-human animals had on the barren 80 acres for the last six months is gone within minutes and hours

on the day they plow
the fields clear of last year’s stover
i stay quiet and invisible, indoors

there is a seen and unseen frantic attempt at evacuation, an exodus of

snakes, turtles, frogs, toads, rabbits, moles, voles, possums, weasels, marmots, skunks, raccoons, squirrels, mice, rats,

evicted without notice, again

geese and sandhill crane nests destroyed

over-wintered graves defiled

and newly-born deer crushed, plowed over and under

/this destruction, all,

for corn to fatten-up confined and tortured

pigs, cows, chickens, turkeys, salmon, catfish, tilapia

for human appetite, gluttony/

death eaters!

if i just stay quiet,
quieter than the snake and mole i saw yesterday,
if i just stay inside, unseen, all day ‘til Sun’s set, like the possum i saw last night,
then kin may seek refuge, find sanctuary here

to catch their breath

some of us have forgotten that they too breathe

and feel fear,

and scream, wail, and mourn

run!!! come, run here!!!
stay right here, please, the roads to west and south also bring death!

i put all my faith into telepathy today

the gulls arrive
chasing and taunting the tractor driver,

he’s no farmer
his hands literally never touch soil or seed

a machine operating a machine guided by satellite

if only the gulls or crows would pluck out his eyes when he dismounts

if only, i would.

Continue reading “the May plow” →

vow

On By ©️K.T. 2025In Poem, poetryLeave a comment

and one way to manage

to preserve Their urbane marriage

was to vow to make me vanish

from Him – my face, my voice, my poems, banished

“fo-cus!!!

We’re off to Berlin — and Paris!”

but here i Am—- still

full of wild

&

full of warning:

that no matter how far They may travel

She knows He dreamt me in Her stead

so, i live inside Her head,

beyond Her dark and vacant eyes

inside Their stale and fresh, new lies

shadowing Their past and future skies

Continue reading “vow” →

the falls

On By ©️K.T. 2025In exposition, Poem, poemo, poetry, waterLeave a comment

in the rearview mirror
i see it was a gift
an impromptu roadside picnic
a rendezvous along a fast-flowing river

we slip into a raft, built for two, gently floating,
taking turns describing what we see, feel/who we are/
entering rapids, our hearts racing, ceaseless throbbing/
then paddling furiously, having to steer/
and suddenly, the fear

nearsighted, you caught a life ring, rescuing yourself on a familiar and safe shore/
i stayed aboard and roared toward the falls
alone,
extending the ride, the adventure, the hope of it, all/
forcefully plummeting and suddenly submerged into dark and powerful waters

because,

Continue reading “the falls” →

Earth

On By ©️K.T. 2025In Crone Consciousness, Earth Day, Earth hospice, Earthling, earthlings, ecocide, Garden of Eden, ki, kin, Mother, planetary hospiceLeave a comment

“Do you realize – we’re floating in space?”

Our ancestors were born on a spaceship that never needed refueling, repair, redesign or course correction.

Earthlings have all uniquely adapted to their respective natural, geographical habitats and migration routes — except for the warring and dominant human regimes and cultures — that decided for all Earthlings that they should geo-engineer artificial environments and extract the blood and bodies of the ancient ones — for one species’ sole benefit — until Earth no longer feels or looks like Earth – and has become unrecognizable, unsafe or uninhabitable to most other species.

photo credit : European Space Agency

There are PCBs in the Atacama Trench and microplastics in fetal tissue of mammals – of humans.

Despite all the wonderful river and beach clean-up and tree planting projects on Earth Day, for me, it’s always a contemplative and sobering day.

We all have a stake—equally. Because if we do not save the environment and save the Earth, then whatever we do in civil rights or in a war against poverty will be of no meaning, because then we will have the equality of extinction and the brotherhood of the grave.

James L. Farmer,
at the very first Earth Day,
April 22, 1970

a study in forsythia

On By ©️K.T. 2025In Arte Agraria, Arte Bucolia, Arte Ruralia, Forsythia, Garden, Golden Hour, limineen, Magic Hour, transformationLeave a comment

“one thing about Forsythia / she comes around and I get lost / against her yellow, I’m no longer me”

“Forsythia” ~ Veruca Salt
April 21, 2023
waning but still beautiful forsythia
in the setting Sun’s golden light
from the kitchen window
April 19, 2023
Continue reading “a study in forsythia” →

Cronehood: the imperative, work, province and privilege of becoming truth and living truthfully in the depths

On By ©️K.T. 2025In Aging, Alchemy, Archetype, Crone, Crone Consciousness, Cronehood, exposition, Feminine, Fruition, grandmother, maiden, Mother, Sacred Feminine, witch, witchery, women, WomenfolkLeave a comment 
Ageing is no accident. It is necessary to the human condition, intended by the soul. We become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years; the older we become, the more our true natures emerge. Thus the final years have a very important purpose:

the fulfilment and confirmation of one’s character.

- James Hillman
“Life is a farce if a person does not serve truth.”

- Hilma af Klint
“A crone is a woman who has found her voice. She knows that silence is consent. This is a quality that makes older women feared. It is not the innocent voice of a child who says, “the emperor has no clothes,” but the fierce truthfulness of the crone that is the voice of reality. Both the innocent child and the crone are seeing through the illusions, denials, or “spin” to the truth. But the crone knows about the deception and its consequences, and it angers her. Her fierceness springs from the heart, gives her courage, makes her a force to be reckoned with."

— Jean Shinoda Bolen
portrait of a crone
by a queen crone,
Lajuana Lampkins
"Women's most feared power over men is the power to say no. To refuse to take care of men. To refuse to service them sexually. To refuse to buy their products. To refuse to worship their God. To refuse to love them. Every therapist knows that sex can be forced, but no power in the world can force love from any woman who wishes to withhold it."

- Barbara Walker
“The Crone has been missing from our culture for so long that many women, particularly young girls, know nothing of her tutelage. Young girls in our society are not initiated by older women into womanhood with its accompanying dignity and power. 

Without the Crone, the task of belonging to oneself, of being a whole person, is virtually impossible.” 

- Marion Woodman
Continue reading “Cronehood: the imperative, work, province and privilege of becoming truth and living truthfully in the depths” →

in the Limineen, on the threshold

On By ©️K.T. 2025In Arte Bucolia, Arte Ruralia, earthlings, ki, kin, liminality, limineen, Sol, Sun, Sunset, thresholdLeave a comment 
"[S]he said that a [hu]man had to escape to the country to see the world whole and that [s]he wished [s]he lived in a desolate place like this where [s]he could see the [S]un go down every evening like [the] [g]od[head] made it to do." 

~ Flannery O’Connor
Deer and Bird and Frog People
in the Limineen of light and dark
as witnessed in The Great Lakes
of the North american continent
April 11, 2023

un/rest

On By ©️K.T. 2025In Poem, poetryLeave a comment

am i seeded
or buried

forest floor or headstone above me?

the distant daffodils,
stoic sentries, craning for Sun

at the edge

offer no answer/s to my dark, muffled query

germination and decomposition

indistinguishable,

in the beginning

indistinguishable,

at the ending

in Spring’s cold soil

shaded,

unrelentingly,

by clouds or canopy.