i feel like someone
you last loved on a wednesday,
earlier this week
i feel like someone who was once your intense singular joy/ but now and once again,
just an invisible naturalist, poet, neologist and crone
i feel like someone you forgot to mention the Hilma Af Klint show to
i feel like someone losing “our” intimacy
exponentially, by the second, against a shot clock in an un-united center
i feel like someone whose forehead you won’t kiss; whose hollows you’ll never touch with hands, tongue or tip; like someone who’ll never truly climax again
i feel like someone who upset you with
Dream[ing] and that’s where it all ended; like someone who never listened to your diatribe about Waco, or heard of your plane rituals and four-part fruition
i feel like someone whose mystery you’ll let be; like someone whose content was consumed without gnosis; like cold “leftovers”
i don’t feel like someone you will walk across a frozen Lake or Lake bed to get to anymore, during the apocalypse, Station Eleven-style Continue reading “someone”→
she gently pincers the end of ki’s gorgeous black tail
gingerly pulling kin off the road
redundantly committing ki’s spirit
to the universe, aloud
with apologies for humankind, silently
purposefully committing kin’s body
to a safer spot
for mourning
and carrion feast
Ki’s body was unexpectedly heavy
full of walnuts and seeds
fat and strong for a long winter ahead
so alive just minutes ago, I saw out the window
I’m sorry
I’m sorry
for me
for my kind
for our machines
for our structures
for our carelessness
for our selfishness
for all this,
engineered, manufactured, destroyed
the Sun, Moon, Rain, Wind, Clouds, Sky and Stars kiss me at all hours
did you see me open up this Autumn?
after a Summer spent wailing,
wet, yet fruitless after a Spring spent wading into lies instead of soft blossoms and new grass Winter approaches, maybe the frost will kill this disease,
for good
I bathe
nearly naked in sunshine, cold rainstorms, in wetland pools and moonlight
unapologetically
|out in the open|
unabashedly
baptising my face, hair,
and eyes, my breasts vulva
and legs, my lips, throat, spine,
and my wild heart
ceremonially, first with wine, like Magdalene, anointing and anointed, in the name of the Mother, Sun and holy ghosts
|a cabernet henna|
then, with rainwater from the willow’s edge, like Ophelia, lying in the woodland and meadow, flooded to cleanse or drown [to live, or not to live] in the name of the Moon
|I ponder the stone cistern laden with glacial deposits and ruminant bones|
the woodland is abundant with new mushroom, new overnight growth
the hint of ancient circles supplants my judgment with instinct and overrides decorum with new delights
|and old delights, revisited |
an aged grapevine is rooted deep, climbing, trailing, snaking hidden in plain sight, everywhere and I’ve intuitedItas Ol’ Scratch, I take a hatchet to quell Its influence, here
You, Your windows are not true eyes Your lamps are not enlightenment
So, bless the dark
of the night
of the country night sky
And the Moonset
of my moon
it’s been decades,
but
this place wants to birth or impregnate me,
The violets that remind you of your dear great grandmother’s dining room on Oakdale Avenue African violets in purple, lilac, lavender, and pink on a plant stand near a dark window by the olive green telephone on the wall
The Violets that remind you of your first, truest love’s breath Lavender-perfumed chalky candy squares Choward’s Mints in dark purple foil sleeves from the corner store
/
But you were not one of their truest loves
//
the once-loving matriarch forgot you when the child stolen from El Salvador arrived/ a baby smuggled across nations yet, this was not a rescue mission for an orphan, no, this boy had a living mami / instead, it was a long distance shopping trip for a wom[b][an] whose insides were spoiled by lust and greed For one who coveted, but then drowned in the role of motherhood yet she still swam deep in men, floated in luxurious possessions; everything, everyone, an acquisition to her
The woman unbecame your Grammaw and became the boy’s “Mimi” – solely and wholly his / She once accused you of lifting $20 from her purse when you ran away from home and snuck into her house to rest and pee / She accused you of this – of theft even after her own daughter poached a child from a sovereign state, kited checks, pawned stolen jewelry and defrauded the housing authority / Mimi was silent, or complicit, in all those crimes
I never stole a coin or a child – or a permanent part of anyone’s heart
in 1999, you still went to her home, anointed her hands and face with oil and tenderness, preparing her living body for the grave, while telling her you loved her so much, truthfully. You went because you knew Instinctively that she was dying – alone – in her own house with the boy and his imitation of a mother, her imitation of a daughter
Her violets were wilting fast — thirsty and unpruned from the neglect of her intentionally chosen beloveds and heirs who owned both her home and her heart / she foreseeing her own ghostly humiliation before the mortician’s eyes
She died the very next day
///
The Violets that remind you of Him, your first love, of his breath and kisses in a dark gangway or anywhere hidden that sweet ingredient imbued in the deep amalgam of his scent a pheromonic candy –
yet those same Violets remind Him only of his first, unrequited, true love he, pining for a brown-eyed, olive-skinned , spaniard, brunette girl who virginally metamorphised into a pregnant, 16 year-old sacred cow She only loved boys with slicked-back, jet black hair, the ones who wore silky shirts and baggies Her heart [and legs] wide open only for boys with names like Erasmo, Jorgey, Hector
She made Him godfather to the baby boy instead of the father or stepfather He wanted to be, despite his bended knee, promises, and all the begging, lusting, cuckolding, and undying loving/
silly rabbit.
Even now, He still scours gas stations and neighborhood liquor stores for the rare Violets to send to Her by mail, innocently asking the ‘substitute her’ for postage, a box, and “oh, some packing tape?”
The first Her is slick, broke(n) and old / but She is still the most beautiful of face, skin, voice and heart – to Him / He keeps ancient yarn ribbons from Her hair in a little boy’s treasure box in their now-broken-trust home / He, a pseudo-Nicholas Sparks romantic for Her / but He forgot the poem you wrote for Him just last year, on his birthday: Agape
She sends Him photos of Her vanity days and yesteryear Glamour Shots™️, gun poses and grandkids / While He sends Her photos of our adventures and of the one, truly Golden Boy – my boy – by text message all instantly viewed on the Gulf Coast/
All of this betrayal to garner Her sunnied emoji smiles and shallow sentiments xoxoxo 🙂 ❤️❤️❤️
While the ‘substitute her’ bared her real teeth and wore conflicted emotions on her face in the photos – and in the very moment they were living in/
Now, she just looks and laughs at the the pathetic, silly rabbit – holding his smartphone – googling cures for baldness, grey beards and stamina before Her June visit
////
To the one dead and to the one living : Violets remind me of you
/////
(Pray that ash takes its place, soon Or that I relocate in space, soon)
This feels like an arrow
Made from a tree
That rose from
An acorn
That I gathered and stored
In another life
Scribed with a message continually
piercing my heart
I wasn’t only wounded though,
I was woke
into a clarity
that I was already sighting in my dreams,
writing with words
mortal and eternal
You once said, proclaimed or whispered
Every single thing
that I ever believed
My own truths embarrassed in the shadow of your confidence
My inner voice silenced in your animated persuasion
Believing you so completely – for the better of my years
Becoming like and unlike you because of it,
but not be-coming me,
Un-be-coming me every day
I ain’t even mad
You don’t know this – still,
You don’t want
to hear,
or listen;
Our time is running out
Even this admission
Is sure to haunt me one day,
and guilts me today
But I can’t call you confidant or crone
If you refuse to learn,
to evolve,
From this one archetype
The wide and long view
seems to escape you
You live in the moment in the least way, the worst way
And I don’t worship here or there, any more
The faith in your godliness is gone,
It is unfamiliar
For me to pity you
You, deaf and tone deaf
You had all the answers
In the morning shallows, perhaps
But evaporation revealed even those
Were anchor-less, yet stationary
An algae
Mucking up the colorless perfection of sunlit water
But in the deep, or dark, or quiet pools, you were always so lost
And in the ocean, at night
You drown even in its calm
You have ridden civil swells and storms,
I’ll give you that
But have you ever communed with waves
Allowing them to be part of you
Swallowing and absorbing the mystery
Becoming the colorless perfection of dark water
You seem to stay parched
Your belly’s hollow from impious fasting and pious thirst
You do know that’s where your heart sits?
But let’s agree to come around again, friend
We’ll swap places and next time
I’ll be the mother,
and the son,
and the husband,
and the elder,
and the babe,
and the foreign one,
I’ll become The Other One
because,
I want the chance to know
You
The Well at Kom Ombo AWIB-ISAW: The Well at Kom Ombo A deep well at the Ptolemaic temple at Kom Ombo, which functioned as a nilometer. The well is also thought to have been used in the ritual worship of the crocodile. by Iris Fernandez (2009) copyright: 2009 Iris Fernandez (used with permission) photographed place: Omboi (Kom Ombo) [pleiades.stoa.org/places/606346]
Get to the bottom of this.
This, means You
Get to the bottom – of Your Self
Do you have to be thrown
down the well
through loss, by the grave, or near-grave
What if
instead,
we pulled the rug out from under ourselves
to reveal the formidable trap door
What if we climbed down into the dark cellar, willingly
to enter our infinite interior
to touch the well
the ancient aquifer within
where the gods reside and respite with our Twin Selves,
our other-halves waiting for discovery
This infinite, eternal presence
be-neath our weathered houses
What if we willingly descended
Into it
Unto it
And we learned to crave the Original Dark
and its companionship
Where we delve deep into our imaginations, dreams, nightmares,
That connect us primally
to the pool of imaginations, dreams and nightmares of every one,
Of every being that ever existed
Collective Unconscious
made Self Conscious
The dark, deep well
we may all draw from
Pour out your false light
reveal the truth:
the unbearable emptiness of being
Cup your hands
Or wade into the well
Deeper and deeper
submerge, swallow
you’ve been bone dry for so long
Do you see that now?
Baptize
The only way
To rebirth yourself
Into something worth birthing
Into something worth being
is by this sacrament, anticeremonially, un-ceremonially
Knowing now the bottom is
The only place where alchemy happens
the limineen | earthling, poet & crone 