Passing Ideation

The room is full of death, full of detours.

Turning to you, eager for the sun in the shades of these shadows,

you correspond only to my death desire.

You are primal urges and impulses, the silence of the room,

the vacant altar, where I yearn to worship.

Your soft, feminine features etched in the blood of my memory

now pulse to their climax in the raging sea of ​​my body.

Mountains of denial stretch for centuries over the half-millennium of this genocidal war. 
I surrender to you. I, the rebellious bastard of the badlands.

I cry out for mercy condemning the sun, to perpetually burn,
burn in this chamber of death, this chamber of turnings.

I carry within an entire unloved history, an unmarked,

ground-penetrating secret that remains buried in the depths,

in the turning, death churning of my private chamber.

Each time your name falls in painful whispers, from my half-bitten lips,

where the taste of minerals lies laden under layers of soft and sensual flesh,

a sorrowful cry and a joyous song plays its dialectical melody within me.

Black Moon Lilith

This page is intentionally left blank.
I left it there.
You were the cosmos.
I was a canvas of white.
You projected light into the places where I was blind.
In my blindness, I saw only blank possibilities.
The dark was my dialect.
You had not been versed in the shadows.
You were all halo and horn.
You were taurean, Venusian,
the seeker of earthly pleasures.
I was an excavator of the hidden treasures within my own psyche.

Psyche transmuted
Psyche as a flicker of candlelight
Psyche in the 2 am shadows
Psyche in the tarot.

I was the high priestess of the chthonic.

You were all tonic and laughter orchestrating the battle between intellect and heart.

I gave you the stone and you tossed it out across the lake.

I watched myself skipping across the pristine surface of the water.

I saw flashes of myself and heard the ripple effect of my fragmented persona breaking the silence.

Now I walk into the underworld without a guide, banished by Zeus into Hades, a God to my own dead children.

One by one I eat them, swallowing their eyes. Digesting their visions.

Rapid as the eyes of a deer, the images come in and out of me.
Bilaterally, a flicker between
two planets,
two worlds
two small daughters
two fathers
a Siamese birth rite,
A double vision.

An incision in the side,
where I tried
in vain to bandage the damage
of Chiron’s thigh.

You left a triad open in our dyad.
It must have been destined in my Grand trine.

Now I orbit my own outer planets, navigating my way through space as a solo traveler.

Every morning I awake with this pain in my side, where they separated me from you.

It’s my abandonment ache.
My mother kicked me in the ribs
and it left a break in my 12th house.
A black moon Lilith in my Gemini.

Clear As Quartz

While I sit here pulling poisoned arrows from my skin: you say the ice needs to thaw. You say I need to be sharpened somehow, to wake up to the pain all over again.

To chisel away at my ego. So I can shoot straight ahead like an Apache warrior. Be like Lozen, aiming for the heart while dodging the enemy’s bullets.

I got my deer medicine and I’m an empath, its a deep healing energy, and they say the medicine must go deeper than the poison, but I’m a deer that has been wounded and the predators are still fresh in my mind’s view. I think I’ll die, but I know that’s the fawn in me, the frightened deer child bleating.

I must not forget;
“A wounded deer leaps highest.”

My hands shake. I remember her stony face, she wants me to collect her from the roadside. She wants these healing hands to touch her tanned body and call back her lost soul fragments, and I know I will one day.

One day I will find a shaman to call back those parts to make myself integrated and whole again. For now, I am digging out these bloody arrows and sucking hard at the bitterness, for now I’m taking the yarrow and the moss agate, and filling my pockets with crystals.

For now I got my sage and my hand full of rage. Yet I know those days are numbered, I know it doesn’t belong in my medicine bag anymore.

This anger has to go. This redness, this edge, this hurt temperament. I’m taking out the fire stones now, removing the Apache tears, and working on cleansing the smoke from my aura, so that my vision can be clear as quartz.

Body As A Burial

My body is an ancient burial ground

It gets desecrated by someone else’s

idea of progress.

When you enter me, you stir the dead,

the anger of a century in red

pours out in tainted rivers,

the Red River,

where the missing ones were buried,

floods over and curses any attempt

I might make to love you.

Your heart gets haunted

by something unnamed,

something buried

too deep to be translated.

Your hands are the only evidence

that I exist beyond this.

You frack me without a thought

for what you take,

but what hurts most

is what you leave behind,

was once so sacred.

Stalemate

I don’t understand chess, I never learned it, but I do get that there are Queens and Kings and pawns, and I understand the concept of a stalemate. I think all my past relationships ended that way. “I can’t make any moves, seems like a dead-end here, you copy?” “Over and out I read you, no moves to be made, all possible moves cancelled out.” It’s like being on a two-way radio playing chess. How the hell did this happen? Fuck my life as they say. I’ve never had luck with women and I never had a real desire to learn chess. To me it seems like something old people do, like golf, golf, chess, and ballroom dancing. If I ever get that stale mate, check me off the board. I’d rather not continue, I’d rather find myself at the end with no more moves left to make and a pocket full of memories of how things used to be fun, and I’ll take those and sit in the sun with a drink and a book, and stare at hot young Greek girl’s asses by the beach in Mykonos, no wait that’s something my ex girlfriend did when I was with her in the sun on a Greek island. She told me quite frankly, as we watched a young woman walking on the beach. “she has a nice ass,” and I thought this girl sure doesn’t hold back her thoughts, but she was right, I suppose, only those things never much mattered to me, maybe when I’m really old I’ll miss being young enough to imagine waking up in a spoon position with some Greek girl’s tight ass against my pelvis, but if she’s one of those carefree bitches, I’ll feel worse rather than better, and if she’s got too much of a tortured mind to have fun, then I’ll be equally tormented, so who cares about her ass, it’s only good to look at and imagine something better. But I got her back later at the café that evening, a lovely waitress came out to serve our coffee, and as she walked away I declared “wow, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a woman so hot in my whole damn life, what a Goddess!” And my ex just looked at me and said “thanks a lot.” I aim to please I guess, but then you know, we hit that place of no going forward and no going back, and as I reflect, there was never anything for us to go forward to together, and never a reason for me to go back, except maybe to sit in the sun, on a gorgeous Greek island, and enjoy the view.

Feeling less alone, (on the nature of depression and butterflies)

Today I learned that the deep depression on the inner center of a human skull resembles a butterfly. Peering within, it’s as though at some time, this transitory beauty was meant to forever imprint upon us the delicate nature of a fleeting journey. Only if the skull is cremated or destroyed, does the memory of that gentle flower-seeker disappear. Within the hemisphere, the pituitary signaler of hormones, transmits chemicals to her butterfly mate, who lives innate in our throats, where the ability to speak, from time maternal, depends upon the migration of the one butterfly, straying south, and the other staying north, for without their separation, the vital energy it takes to live would cease. Such sacrificial love in nature creates brilliancy, but what’s more, it is the lack of electrical current that defines depression, as inhibitory. If this myopic view excludes further truth, it may one day be discovered that the real origin of our cranial pain, and mental suffering are related to this separation, to this lack of excitation within the neuronal center. It’s not the fact that there is a lack of stimulation, it is instead a lack of attention, a lack of response. “Soak me in serotonin, and watch me cry,” sings the butterfly. “No,” cries the other butterfly, “you are mistaken, I am that shadow, existing within the grey area, where the cloud formation never dissipates, do not think I can dissolve into elation. I journeyed once, more than a day, which in my time was forever, and I knew feeling and taste as vividly as each step one takes. Although I live in the echo from phonemes breaking, my real truth lies in the upper regions, where words form in synaptic response to thought, dark, enduring thought, which keeps my soul from dying, much like your heart beat keeps your body from flying. Through resonance and dissonance I am cocooned inside of you, always.”

The nurse sits with the patient as they discuss the power of non-verbal communication, ie; touch. “When you hold my hand,” she tells her, “I know you are there, it’s like a flower growing in my spine, I can feel it, I can sense it growing there, and though I know it will die once you let go, it helps me to feel less alone, it’s like a thousand astrocytes lighting up the dark sky inside of me.”

Memory’s Marrow

206, and yours were in the lower lumbar, I lie in the slumber of codependency, and when the nurse walks in on me, curled fetally near your rib cage, she assumes I’m your daughter, no use in bothering that it’s 4 a.m., as the old man in room 12b calls for more morphine. Without each other there’s the great depression, you’re the haploid cell in my gene expression, I’m like the repression of two faulty chromosomes along a y-axis, which really means nothing, except that I was the girl who risked death for you. You were the sweetness of tea where the drip of honey diffused viscously between warm thighs. Deeply is how I break in your arms, where they fused steel on epiphyseal lines. I ask God why I’m so easily fractured, and she says it must be love, love like warmth spilling out. They drew lines across your body, where the scalpel wrote poetry from your inability to keep normalcy. Faithfully we love, though the heart could mend or break us. Like natural selection, you ossified and died, as I went on to evolve beyond the collagenous glare of these scars. When the doctor sketched the image of your shattered spine, I thought of majestic butterflies lining the trunk of a tree, as the first harsh breeze of autumn tore them away from each other, and I felt some day, I’ll make my way back and pour my heart out in a cup and you will drink yourself sober, wake up without balding, without the wrinkles dissolving youth, pale skin in the morning, the sputum from toxic lungs, God knows I need a way out of this.

Control, Alt, Delete

You are born in ethereal light, funereal flow through vessel of heart, where  room holds caskets, bassinets, tourniquets, places to sleep, to dream, to waken. On the day of your departure from veins, warmth of crimson, rush of celebration, permeates receptor cells, life the mournful fall, death the joyful rise, pulling coins from your eyes, toll for the boatman, an atheist bent on sinking, cargo of karmic, a vessicle of rebirth, bursting forth, dissolving the old self and its former memories, dreams, hopes, and procreation. Reversal of ego, the fluidity of self. They give you a name, a place, a face, a position between two poles, a selective offering of chromosomes, and then they take it all away, leave you as a blank slate, you the great author, illiterate, inarticulate, mouthing desires, forming fears. Before you get here you are complete, experience erases data-
control, alt delete.

Women of the waters that are never still

The missing and murdered indigenous women all gathered together at the lost city of Atlantis.

“No one believes we are real,” said one to the other, “they will never try to find us here.”

“If they never believe then we are free. If they start to remember is when we have to worry.” Said another.

“Yes the great spirit has made an ocean of oblivion and in all their crossings they forget..

They think their cities are real and ours is a myth.”

“Yes.” spoke the chief.
“We are safe here.”

They are distracted by the stars. The stars that died centuries ago.
The apocalypse has happened already. They just don’t know it yet.

They are all dancing together in a Matrix of dreams.

They wake up with new scars and wonder how those wounds ever healed.

“Sometimes they forget to hurt when we touch them,” spoke the child of agile deer, “and they mistake this pain for pleasure.”

The turtle will rise once more. When the time is right.

“The time is close,” spoke the hungry hawk girl. I see rust over the towers of progress, it stains their rivers and kills their fish. The white men in their polished houses laugh louder now. They laugh with terrorist eyes. And all the world is quiet in disbelief.

We are safe for now, but it won’t last. This time when they come dressed as brothers we will know the truth in that horse’s eyes.

We won’t drink the fire.

We won’t accept their dirty blankets.

We know how to keep warm. We are the keepers of the fire. We must never forget who we are, even if they have. They have all fallen asleep. When the sun rises it will be too late.

“It has already come to be,” spoke the ominous owl. It has already been written. They will burn the treaties. There is no honour in sickly pacts. They are a lost tribe.

“We have already been found what is there to search for now?” The sad squaw pleaded.

We must find ourselves here. We must honour our mother and father and give our respects to our grandfathers. One day all our relations will come together and they will lose their blindness.

Only when they have regained this vision can we be one again.

“One tribe under one sky” spoke the eager eagle.

So it is has been spoken.

They passed the peace pipe from hand to hand as they gathered around the roaring fire and danced.

You could hear the echo of their drums in the lost world where the rhythm of life was mute, their voices carried in the cries of the wild.

The forgotten ones were there and they remembered. Some of them had wolf eyes that lit a path through the dark.

You could never go hungry if you followed them.

But the eyes of the others were a deep abyss surrounding an ancient island, where they held a sacred vigil in honour of our fallen sisters

The Enigma

Each day I am becoming,
I am also unbecoming,
becoming who I am,
unbecoming who you want me to be.
The hero in you, is the hero in me,
cut flower bleeding pure.

I am steel gaze of blazing spirit.
I will myself into what I envision.
Puff of opium, syringe of heroin,
this clean body, that never
succumbed to the dragon.

I am wizard woman on mountain,
casting spells to bring you out of
your last heroic nod, poppy seed
in eyes of foreign God.

I will learn the art of resuscitation,
resurrect the fallen, the street man,
who held my photograph in his hand,
wondering what I might become,
the mystery man, with braided hair
and dark skin, the one who never
found his way out of the stem.

My father, the enigma.

Eternity

Can the lizard crawling out from the wall, refuged in coolness be a transformation of the stone, from which it emerges? Is it possible my heart surges with the voltage to ignite a storm, but not the velocity required to light up a city? With enough electricity it could black out the entirety of our world. Lightning crash of black over vision of future. Apocalypse of heart under glare of sun flare. Or is it merely stillness through a crack, where the perception of feeling jolts us back to the presence of this power, thunderclaps through scorched synapses, fusing where the heart clenches, heavy like the fist of Poseidon? Take the heart out of the equation and there is only the still and cool observation of things that emerge and return, seeking asylum from the vagaries of these moods, the inhale and exhale of cyclic energy repressed in the psyche. What does it mean to miss me? What transformation occurs between head and heart when I hear the succour of your voice in child-like tones, asking if I miss you? What does it mean to miss someone who has curled in the alcove of your most ardent organ? What of the restless reptilian that molted through the heart’s eruption and shapeshifted into the skin of a cold blooded amphibian crawling out from the wall on the balcony, overlooking Eden? Would you know to avoid the temptation, else would all the world turn black again? Would the obsidian shores of Santorini crystalize under the sun, whose bright rays lay buried beneath the blistered basalt of a solidified flow? We might never know more than what draws tide to shore, what causes spark to ignite, what kills the light of our universe, yet the mystery of that most vital organ, remains as arcane as the flint of our gaze through a crack in the wall of eternity.

Stained Thoughts

Never thought we’d dance together, the way your eyes gazed through me, leaving me to squirm self-consciously, wet from my walk in the rain. And you smiled that really dumb blonde smile, that said “blonde enough to have fun, but brunette enough to know better.”  The element of danger, the risk when I tightened my fist and you smiled the know better smile and chatted about the weather, the obvious, yes it’s wet, yes then, yes now, still. I pulled a pained face and your hand ran down my arm as I stared at the photographs on the desk, three grown children, your phone vibrating, the certainty of that gleam where I knew better this time, and I wondered how does one stay in a marriage so long, subdued. You penetrated me right through to my veins. I felt it up there on the makeshift mobile bed, spinning it’s wheels to a far away land, through the green blue heaven of your eyes, and the stillness of your lipstick silence, hiding the crease of age under beige. There in the travel clinic, with images of exotic world’s,  never ventured to, and the smell of coffee on your breath, taking me back to eleven, when I had a crush on the school librarian. Questions of where I’d planned to go, and when I might return again. From you, who vaccinated my body and contaminated my thoughts.

(About a travel clinic nurse.)

An Echo, A Stain

Beautiful refrain,
hearing her voice again,
an echo, a stain,
out from the depths of a sensual carnage.
She wrecks me with her cadence, 
(tone & pace)
the lyrical grace of her tongue,
the memory of what it did to you,
what she did, under cover of night,
cover of white sheets, so pristine,
in the same bed we shared years later,
when the wrinkle of time,
unwinds in my chest,
unravels from under me,
as tendrils, pushing me up,
pulling me under.
Pushing me up, pulling me down to you,
soft child of the tides,
releasing poison from her heart,
your cleanliness, makes me crave
no other sorrow.

Sleeping in a haunted bed, in a room full of ghosts,
I choke on your love for me.

“Dead to me, dead to me.
I could never be free of you,
without having to lose you.”

Extinguish a cigarette on her tongue,
watch her in motion under the light,
vinyl hands, overlapping
intravenous music,
skip and repeat, skip and repeat.
Her voice a drop of rain
in the desert heat,
the slow flow of euphoria,
the wreckless beauty of the ones
who left me in their seductive shadows,
finger inside of you, tongue in your mouth, synchronized
with the needle’s rhythm.

Is it possible I feel nothing because I’ve built a tolerance to heaven?

The next kiss or word could be a fatal overdose.

The sunflowers push up
from under your bed,
covering us in a yellow sea.
She stands over us naked,
spitting seeds.

We all have our versions of paradise.

You are mine.

You are mine

 παρακαλώ,
 παρακαλώ.

You are mine.

Variations on Black

In a world of shallow we know the cost of everything and the value of nothing-
no thing of worth from this accidental birth.

When I came here I laughed.
“It’s a box” I said,
a coffin, “I’ll take it.”

“A box of darkness, a gift.”

I was oblivious to the black scuttle bug living under my counter, it was oblivious to me also. The beetle had flown in from outside and thought he could occupy my place. I caught him trying to eat spilled sugar on the floor, then the black bastard was no more, swept up and flushed down into the waste waters.

For a moment I thought I might meet a similar fate..

voices, bumps in the night, a strange new world to inhabit, “take the belt” it said, “tie it around your door, be here evermore.”

Fuck you black bastard, no!

I won’t join you.

I burned sage through open windows, brushing away the decay,
and since that day, no more,
not often anyway,
only when the world of obligations gets tight around my neck do I think I might hang on a revolving door
between heaven and hell,
all the same.

A moth the size of my hand and white like a ghost flutters by my window,
I hear it’s wings flap up & down,
it’s fascination flickers
in the dark hollow where I drown.

Undercurrents

Temporary transmutation, permeable, impermeable, opaque & translucent.
You paint my grey sky with dreams of colour! You alter my landscape irrevocably. It is deathless in it’s flight. Black bird of night and scorpions eyes. Everything changes, nothing dies. You are twilight tearing a hole through my cocoon, I feel I can bloom into white orchids, poison your throat with deep songs, right all the wrongs into music that stains silence like an elixir of the soul. I can be the antidote to make your laughter pure like sunsets over tragic world’s, where careless girls dangle their lifeless hands, mute to this orchestra in my blood. Touch me electric, steel blue currents break my pulse, trigger tears. Colour my lips purple with love that bruises inevitably. I want you in me, want to swim in endless oceans of you.

Kōna (Snow)

kanakēs- For a brief moment
kaskēyimēw-she is lonesome for her
kaskina- break it off like a twig,
kācikēwin- something hidden.
kām¯wātan-It is quiet,
kāsēcihcē-wash your hands
kehcināho- make certain; be sure,
kinwēs- for a long time
kisin-it is cold.

The cold, brief certainty of silence.
rapidly flowing down stream, within.
The dim solitude of a broken boat.

Orphan child, at the edge of a forest, butterfly spirit, my hands fold inward to my heart, origami bird, snow star love, the great withholding of a dam, (state of vulnerablity,) before we make fire we must conquer the cold. Hidden in the dark, you grow lonesome for the light. Lonesome for her, you pine, lost in a forest of hurt. You wash your hands of her and the quiet kona falls heavy, river caller of the long snows moon, under ice in the woods of a perpetual winter…

love in a frozen state of longing,
crystal cure for obsidian heart.

We depart this way her and I, North and South in opposite directions, the wolf medicine stings at my heels, where the untouchable wound breaks open, all the world thunders in my heart.

bursting open

I cry
I cry

Eons back in time,
when the long snows moon
was new,
before the ice age,
when firebird was risen,
in her orange deception,
I loved her volcano hot
raining white ash
over
dissolving
continents.

We are ice people,
people of the falling snow,
white clay people
people of the clouds,
river people who hear and see,
fierce people with cold hands
and burned out hearts.

Ebb & Flow

My blood origin is water but thicker than any oil. We were the people of the rapids, always following the tides in and out, as far as they could carry us in our birch bark boats. My grandfather the great Eagle spirit, who could be called on the wind at will, would carry the message of love across the rivers. My father the feathered dancer, always ran with the shadows, ran with the quick horses, wild across the prairie sky, far on towards the high hills, westward to the mountains. He caught the rapids in his veins, the eagle song rushed through him too fast, and I lost his tracks on the wind, it beat quick through his heart like that rabbit on the rails who cried from the weight of the train cutting across his leg. Love is mercurial this is what I chased. I danced with strangers who I hoped could show me deeper into what I felt behind my eyes, spirits passing by like clouds, dark over my head, deer child in storms, under cover of night, crying to the pleiades, snared beneath a thousand shooting stars, willing forward. This is who we are, these are my kin, wild on the hunt, with a scent in us that says love is of this, caught between these river rocks, these feathers, this sky. We follow that scent towards eachother like wild animals marking their journey home again, we will meet at the shore one day. My father visits me in dreams, speaks through the others, offers symbols to guide me closer to the turtle of truth who rises up towards the light. He told me of the 7 teachings, the sacred ways we follow, a path of shells. The beaver works hard to build up these twig towers of hydro electric power that allow us to connect. But the buffalo speaks of respect, tells me “we all have a gift, don’t waste yours, for if beaver did, he would grow long in the tooth and die,” and then we would have a great loss of life, a loss of light to lead us through these dark times.

Sorrow

My mother is glacial. It must come from eons of emotional tundra, no antifreeze to keep from the below thirty arctic breeze that blows over this country. In winter I wrap my body in a coat of down, the geese have shed their warm feathers for my survival. It’s them or me. I liken myself to a polar bear whose padded steps crush the compacted snow and leave a trail for the others to follow. We get blinded by white when visibility is cut to zero, it’s flailing arms and falling flakes of crystallized beauty, it’s albino city. The skyscrapers are lighthouse beacons in a sea of snow, scrape the windows, scrape my heart, peer out at the drifts of accumulated sorrow, it falls heavy, we’re up to our necks in it, buried 6 feet under without a shovel. The highways are treacherous with black ice, driving is not advised, there’s a windchill warning, less than 3 minutes and your skin will form ice crystals and die, it will blacken beyond repair, like your arms were never there, they break off like chiseled bricks of empty onyx.

Infidelity

You are mother bird returned to nest,
the foreign scent from hands molest,
heart, smothered to death
No desire for love impure.

No hunt for further mating.
The tip of weaved sky
swallows
lust for life.

Contamination of body
on sheets of white
down.

Suicide.
Infanticide.

Kill your baby
Kiss your jugular.

Peck out the past
pluck out the future.

Invisible

Thank you for not loving me.
This is only my hand, hold on to it and it becomes no hand, no star, no worldly offering or other thing of meaning, such as a limb that is suspended near my body and lays meaningless without the desire to heal or mend this heart that gushes quietly and violently within…

I can get by on lesser organs than the sun, so vital to one’s existence.

One never knows what she misses, my mouth you press into wishes that blow off like pinwheels from branches and hit the earth spinning

Your leg twisted on air, as a dancer’s thigh gets by on physics alone, no chemistry can be found between the earth and sky.

There is no her.
No I.

An eye peers deep and dissecting into my soul.

What is there remains
invisible.

Kintsukuroi

I have a cracked soul that no amount of gold can fill.
Swell of childhood,
wave, water, reflection.
Propensity pouring into probable personality traits;
narcissism, histrionics, scars stricken against sulphuric self, flare in sea of black, no return from darkness.
Ears ring out like cathedral bells at the gavel fall of postured people, straight upstanding citizen I’m not.
Chaos’ child curtailing comets.
Mulch of weeds where flowers chance to bloom outward from mossy memories, in places the sun neglected. Damaged seed, uprooted,
convoluted scream shooting agony into pillow of down.
Muted madness on the surface, appearing calm, floating along like an unruptured swan.
Dusk descends like a ceramic sun on the verge of shattering.

Jesus Christ of Urgent Care

Sky colossal in it’s charcoal depth,
mouth pitched black where they forced me to drink my salvation,
nurses at the station laugh at my situation,
another O.D for ward 3.
Neon sign over heaven reads; “closed.” 

Stripped down,
dressed in gown & gauze,
no fluffy clouds,
only a chalky film on my tongue,
distorting my words into something disgraceful,
distasteful.

I.V drip,
sanity slip,
curse of concavity weighing
down my soul,
mouth full of charcoal.

Heavy nod,
intercom
paging God,
white lights,
fluorescent glare,
Jesus Christ of urgent care.

Anhedonia

Being sober is like waking up in a dry desert after owning the sea. I must’ve sold a million waves in my days just to find the shore again. Put me back in a trance, it’s the only way I can feel the music, everything else is just the discordant cry of black birds in a grey sky of clouds, this absence of pleasure, this terror of crowds.

I’ve been thinking of silver and grey, they are nearly the same, except one sparkles and the other is dull..reflective of how the scars of our past are what sharpen us against the darkness..

“..the silvered piercing which leaves a hole that’s sometimes a wound, sometimes an aperture through which we fill ourselves with light”

C.B +
L.A.R

Enigma

It was easy in the beginning when you were open,

further on I needed
a secret password and permission to enter,

near the end I found myself in a limitless labyrinth with a thousand locked doors, where you sent me to find the key.

The further I searched, the more lost you became to me,

at last I saw a sign that read; freedom station straight ahead,

I opened the door on
an empty room,
a spiral of smoke and mirrors, the enigma of what we become when love locks us out and throws the key down into the darkest place,
where we’d never think to look,
our
own
hearts.

Too Sober

Too sober to fuck stars bright so they fade, fade in the night without gold. 

Too close to want to hold if you see in me this black sky,
that makes wishes die.

” But I will turn my eyes from you  
 As women turn to put away 
The jewels they have worn at night  
And cannot wear in sober day.”

C. Barthelette 
S. Teasdale

Transference

I’d long ago escaped impact,
using anybody as selves,
wants opening poems into a very
structured form of other,
war, blood, rose,
stilettos on whores under
the electric lights
of Europe,
yes
that.

Then love got in my blood, and they said my type was so rare, it might not exist in the veins of any living other.

So I sought out the corpse of words, ashes of tongues entering other mouths, long ago erased from history.

The Anglo- Saxon and Roman bred with Greek and Latin, to invent English and enforce it on savage lipped strangers from other shores.

Somewhere in a hidden cavern under a Spanish night, the one person who held my secret laughed reckless off the edge of a cliff into nothing, and they could never find a cure for this thing that lives in my veins, I tried to bleed it out of me, I tried to make it fly, but it never fled, as much as it bled, it never escaped me.

I only learned to lessen the blow of it as it trailed behind me on the wind, always with a newly transfused smile of joy and a fresh cut of agony.

Wake me when the world is over

No one to lay next to me, put your hand on my side and tell me do you think I’m going to die? It feels abnormal, where I hurt, but the ultrasound showed nothing, still I worry over the non-pliableness near my ribcage, that foreigner I love trying to break free from the civil unrest in my chest. Maybe the reason it showed nothing is because the bird perches at the threshold, muted; no soundwaves, nothing to hear anymore but the dark murmur of this  undetectable song.Tell me do you think I’ll live this way always, afraid of what’s inside of me,? The blackness that pours out at night when there’s no one there to hold, no one to affirm normalcy or improve my chance of survival. You can’t migrate anywhere when a tumor swell weighs you down. It’s just about how many vials they need to make sure they are doing the job right in killing you. When it’s all said and done, there will be a giant arch over earth; M for Monsanto; 8 billion served. They won’t go out of business until all the bees are dead and the aliens take over, a world that oozes green radioactivity. Then the bird will sing for all to listen, but it will be too late. A world without honey is uninhabitable to humans. I lay here in bed with this malady in my head, and no one to kiss it better, not one sweet soul on earth out of the billions of lonely travelers, At least there’s always dreamland, wake me when the world is over. I don’t want to die alone.

Snakeskin Alley

This was once a body lived in, now it’s only snakeskin. The way love entered, the way it withdrew, leaving a dry coat leached of colour, as a pale reminder of what we once were. Twisted bark, the spiral hereafter marked on trees, please do not soften to the point of collapse. I want my hand back, the one made to fit the brittle place where love broke between us, let me fit back in that place where your need for me shone like silver nickels tossed in a fountain of dreams. I wish when I left the garden I could return to the sea and withdraw the venom of love’s bitter recalcitrance, so it would never poison me. Serpent servant, rebel reptile, reconcile. This is not the way bodies leave souls, without clothes, raw & broken on jagged elements, empty shells on beaches that are muted. My flesh screams red where you filled me beyond the capacity of holding, fingers slipped out like the first boulder that caused an avalanche in the Appalachians. The last time they saw poor Johnny, he was walking up that old dirt road in nothing but denim shorts and a pair of cowboy boots that glittered green and silver, that was when he had an epiphany, love should not, love should not, then the crushing blow of snow, love should not let go, buried in the memory of what we held close. Years later they found his snakeskin boots, but they never recovered his body. They renamed the road Snakeskin Alley. People used the road for logging, now it’s all clear-cut and too narrow to cross, too constricted, you can’t breathe in places like that, time to move on, burn all the cedar and embark on something new, discard what is no longer necessary.

Silver Lining

Birth is that crystallized moment when form emerging from dark is grown mistakenly into slavery, the brutality where we are hopelessly adopted into a pulsing world without love, delivered into the possessive hands of a stranger, encompassing us in liquid mercury, dissolving as we strive to gather cohesively, the quicksilver self that eludes us our entire lives into the fluid freedom of death’s sterling soul.

Blason

Eyes richer than gold, with their velvet fold of emerald, and lips that leave rubies envious of ruddy days, days beholden to such fools with jewels. I want to excavate the ruins of you with the patience of a cautious archaeologist in search of the truth to the marvelous mystery of your soul, hidden deep, like pearls of lustrous wonder, those sparkling  stars in the sea of your body that I discover on my slow descent to paradise.

“in the realm of you, my child-like fingers in paste, until qualified for pearl, learned gem tactics in the sands of a slowly awakening memory, an amethyst remembrance of treasurous times.” Emily said and I revised.

It’s true, I’m but a foolish child at the shores of you.

A word to be born by

Softly, fully we bloom into these bodies
And boom and womb are atomic.

What can one say for the abrasion of our violent arrival into brighter worlds?

In a field at night I saw my mother gather stars, picking each like a red ripe cherry from the sky

And her smile is what captured me.

That was when I knew I wanted to be electricity in her veins.

I traveled from the world of the cosmic divine, made a steep decline down onto my fathers inarticulate tongue and sang through his ribs as the explosion of white travelers fought for their positions in the atmosphere of her body.

I wanted to be there to greet you first, but darkness drowned you away from my life like a wave and the thirst for strangers followed me like a sexual awakening when the sun burns your eyes and the man by your side asks if it was alright, but you can’t recall his name in the light of day, because they all say they love you, it’s a word used to open the sky, a word to be born by.

Invincible

Blood rushed
Aphrodite blushed.
And the morning rain fell
outside my window.

I recall trying to hook a minnow on a line when I was about nine. My grandfather said this was what one did to lure the bigger fish one hoped to catch, they made a splash and their silver slip of fear is what drew the hungry ones near. So we gathered round and waited by the water. The white rush of waves and the violent current roaring past made it all seem so fast, but the waiting and the hunger persisted. Yet he insisted on being still. My grandfather had the patience of granite on a day of rain, which promised an arch of colour in the grey distance of the sky. Why couldn’t I be like that man? He used to hold vigil with the battalion. When his father died, they hailed him a hero of the skies and named a lake after him here in Manitoba “Lake Barthelette” He spoke broken French and then with a swift pull he filled the bucket of ice with our breakfast. I recall huddling around the fire for warmth and black tea, he always drank his tea so strong. Strength and patience were two of his greatest attributes. Up until a few years ago he was still out catching pickerel, picking wild blueberries and chanterelles, hunting a deer or a rabbit, gathering nuts and fixing something with his rough hands…

Perhaps I have that, the power of lightening bolts in my hands on rainy spring mornings, and the patience of granite as I try to silence this hunger swimming inside of me, silvery and uncatchable. The wave of loneliness overlaps the wave of ecstasy, causing a rush that pulls me under into deep places, where emerging I regain my breath as I ponder life and death before the big swell drowns out my consciousness.

Blood rushed
Aphrodite blushed.
And the morning rain fell
outside my window…

I’m a helpless minnow striving to break free, blood gushing out of me as they track my metallic scent in the water, mercurial, rust coloured and dangling from a hook, this hook that holds me between life and death as the hungry world centers in with a bone-chilling calm in the midst of all this chaos. I am of the sea, of algae and long vines emerging from entwined blackness, pulling me back to the watery remembrance of a  wilderness where I was once invincible.

Her eyes are a dark cave

Her eyes are a dark cave where I gaze deeply at a thousand stars, traveling in progression through the centuries, a written documentary of our souls. On stone walls I carve out these symbols of affection and she interprets my love for her with searching fingers in the night, tracing those arcane lines into light.

We are each in the other seeking an answer to our own being before the sea rises and washes away our poems, etching our memories like fossils on stones, translating our dreams into beautiful beams that pass from the ash of that dusty distance to our present existence.

The deepest form of hypocrisy

If a whore is the worst a woman can be is that not inequity? But that she crawl cave-ward, face veiled by niqab and pray for mercy? But that man crawl from cave to cave lunatic raved taking as many precious jewels one can claim, should be his manly fame?! Were woman to submit willingly, she would be bathed in scarlet shame and marked unworthy for eternity. That which makes man idol banishes woman to hell. He sees woman’s body his right to take and conquer, something over which she has no power. That by man she could lose face and be so disgraced is the deepest form of hypocrisy. Men remain ageless in their power and sexuality, yet women fade from the sky at the high tide of their maturity. She has no worth outside her youthful body, which she never had mastery over by such base and backward standards as these, but to please man. Condemned to death in old days for being the king’s unwilling mistress, her body became a hindrance, worthy of praise only in the gaze of lust, a cat call, leading to her downfall. In modern days, the countless cases of women in places where red lights glow with sirens as blue flashes immerse, she is locked away for selling her only worth to the men who are spared their part in the crime for which they pay. Even in this day and age we live in an outrage against love all the more because real love cannot exist where such dominance breathes down the neck of a whore.

Chaos Theory

A voice never to be heard. (things absurd.) The giving up of moments into memories, the sacrifice of self into nothingness, like the self was nothing to begin with, and it wasn’t, it is and it is not dependent on mood. But a mood can create & destroy. What was that they told us? First the thought, then the mood, then the action. But what if I was without thought or feeling? What if I was all id, seething along on impulse, impervious to the outcome, recklessly burning the night alive like a dying star? What if that’s all we are? These cellular beams of nothing, creating self from thought & illusion. The play of existence is transitory, so we can opt to live or die, or merge into another self at random, according to our own will, that gets governed by the heart and guided by the soul, which is immortal. Then this body is a choice and so is yours but are we really free or is that also illusory?  We carry our prisons like luggage or occupations, from one destination to the next, deep in our inner cores, where we fear to tread. Freedom is a state of mind they say, so I can be locked away and still fly, or I can roam forever and never feel alive. It doesn’t matter either way. I dreamt we had a long conversation. I dreamt I heard your voice. I dreamt you meant to tell me something. We had met for the first time in the flesh, and there was nothing to be said that couldn’t be expressed by our bodies, so you said hello with a long and fatal kiss and in that same breath I said goodbye to life and death, I was born in you, anew. Because real love makes us lose our vision and real love makes us see things as they are, in a way we were blind to before. All that pollutes us from the past transmutes into a white light of undying purity in which we create each other, rhythmically like planets, aligned to a divine order, that appears to us as chaos.

Love’s Lament

The gossamer grace of beautiful butterflies,

Their sad souls streaming
across cloudy citadels of silence

Their silky brush of brilliance
alighting upon me always

In velvet violence,
the regretful remembrance
of love
gets torn on thorns
of lamented time.

My true colours

I’m reminded of the opacity of the river at night, under moonlight.
The silver glow of the undertow and the mystery of what lies below.
I would skate out far, under the brightest stars and never reach beyond the depth and darkness.

Skating in circles, with sudden leaps into the air, then falling effortlessly down on solid water. “We skate around the truth of who we are,” out here in the dark, but more will be revealed they tell us.

I hadn’t yet known you, couldn’t conceive of things a world away, blinded by the glare of those serrated tips, carving dreams out of ice, sculpting our future one gliding moment at a time, cutting through layer upon layer of falsity to the divine mystery of who you are.

Visions of self reflected on the sparkling surface, emerging complete, defined, loved into the translucency of truth and beauty.

Your army green eyes camouflage our inner war, never to lose each other in love’s battle. I am your gypsy child forgiving the gaps and the distance, forging our world anew each day.

You are my grand spy master, averting me from disaster, reshaping my love for you always.

You must be a chameleon, the one that so fascinated me in science books as a child, able to blend into the scene at will, emerging with hand outstretched, ready to take in my true colours.

Red Ochre

Her hair is stained by the 56th nucleon of an Orion constellation, surrounding a planet that rains pure silver.

Curled into long locks by the graceful fingers of a Jupiterian Queen.

Her eyes are green, like emeralds plucked from the Nile in Egypt.

Her body was formed on an ancient land under the sea, somewhere long ago and far away from me.

Gravity

Can you catch death from an owl, or freedom from a butterfly?

Wisdom & transcendence.

I have walked along the palace walls and witnessed the loneliness of the queen; the things she has seen and been above, and the absence of true love in all the stars we wish upon. Saw princes turn into demons and princesses hide away in dark places, praying to false saviours in the sky.

I have rode trains near ancient remains and felt the sorrow of the broken stone goddesses, who are a testament to the war we wage against all that is different.

I sat with you one winter night and you held my arm tight, trying to catch my pulse. It froze like a piece of glass and lodged into my heart.

Midnight arrives and I skate down the river, to the edge of the city. I stare up at the lights in the sky and wonder if it matters that there’s life on other planets if it’s all the same as this.

When I was twenty I drank a bottle of vodka and disappeared. The truth appeared to be nothing but a blur on the horizon. When I woke up I was sober and nearing forty. I found I had missed nothing. Being awake or asleep, life still carries on in the same way with or without us. We have gravity to blame.

I decided to become an astronaut and float above the world, alone. Out here in the dark no one sees me. I hear the desperate pleas of the lost ones back on earth, crying for something, anything to take it all away. Some pray for little  things; like jobs, children, and marriage. Some pray for bigger things; like freedom, truth and love. Not one of them sees how futile their efforts are. Not one of them cares for the things beyond.

In space you are weightless and mute. You can’t hear the sound of bombs going off in the name of love, because bombs don’t even matter and love is only a word. Nothing can touch you when you are free, not even gravity.

Death to Angels

Speak the truth you bloody romantic! And be more honest in your poetry, more confessional like Bukowski. Throw in the guts or don’t fucking come to me and claim you’re a writer. I want blood smeared on your fingertips when you drop the pen after having spilled out a sea of wretched beauty. Don’t waste the good stuff, the resin in the glass you need to scrape out and smoke or inject like electricity burning your veins. And after you spend the day at your porcelain palace, emptying the remains of your poisonous debauchery into dry heaves of nothing, then tell me, tell me what you really felt. What was it like truly? Was it a pretty flower garden or an ugly decaying heartbreak? Don’t get ornate and make pretty marks on the page, rage rage and stain the paper with blood, spill it out and make it real. Quit painting flowers where corpses lie. Pin the angel of the house by her throat like a sick songbird and choke the music out of her-who is mute to this orchestra in your blood. Get in the center of your gut like a fist. Don’t worry about the words, they will work themselves out like bone splinters.

“Words are just a stain on Silence.”-Beckett

On that Victorian phantom known as the Angel in the House (borrowed from Coventry Patmore’s poem celebrating domestic bliss)—that selfless, sacrificial woman in the nineteenth century whose sole purpose in life was to soothe, to flatter, and to comfort the male half of the world’s population.  “Killing the Angel in the House,” wrote Virginia Woolf, “was part of the occupation of a woman writer.”  That has proved to be a prophetic statement, for today, —

It’s about not being nice. As Difranco says “being a pretty girl, that is not what I do.”

It’s metaphoric for being real and speaking truth, even if it offends, but not necessarily with the intention to offend. Many women ( myself included) spend too much time subdued in their darker emotions, in writing and in life in general, and then when such thoughts & feelings are expressed or brought to light, the angel dies, so to speak and that is when one can get candid about the real shit one feels or thinks.

Moon Break

You told me you love me to the moon and then the moon shattered in three crescent pieces on my floor. (The crimson moon necklace made of clay, you bought me on the island that day.) Where will you love me to now that our moon is broken?

Ovid said that although all things are temporary, nothing perishes. Everything is flowing. It’s sink or swim.

I doubt this was an accident.

I meant to replace the picture I had hung in my kitchen that reads:” those who love passionately teach us how to live.” I was going to hang the calendar you sent me for this new year, the one about unlikely friendships in the animal kingdom, and then smash, down from the nail, like a fallen Christ.

Is there really a Hades? Can we take a boat there? What will Persephone say when she hears the news?

We may never see another spring.

What a tragedy.

And I walked about my small coffin of an apartment repeating “I broke our moon, I broke our moon.” Bury my heart at the Acropolis.

Vacant

Tracing circles in a backward motion, creating spirals between the darkness and light. Erasing the lines that connect our hearts, those same lines that separate our bodies. I should have known in the first breath so that I would not need to stifle the last. Your plane is always bound for foreign places, tickets and stopovers, none of which include me in their destination. I was a slave to the clock and I would have worked until my heart stopped beating as long as it brought me to your door. I lay here with an open window on the night, wind blows into an empty room allowing enough air so that I can breathe a breath that belongs to me and me alone. I grieve a million stars. I swallow an entire continent and digest it slow, it comes up in my throat and lingers there, provoking earthquakes, body tremors. I think I’ll lay here swallowing clouds and oceans, I think my veins are the Great lakes that twist into the Atlantic far on the other side and my arms are the great divide between here and there, between this and nothing, I am bleeding currents, I am flooding cities, this is Venice, or the lost Atlantis we will never recover, this is the death of a lover. The meals we won’t share on the terrace overlooking the Acropolis, the amazing sun setting over the island that has forgotten our silhouettes under the tall palms. The ancient pulse of stone and the emergence of night blossoms will never welcome us together anymore. What I am remains on the tracks where the train carried us home, it never finds its way again, it never inhabits the same perfume of our two souls. One is a breeze passing through a station where the other does not exist to feel it. We are light posts on separate streets in different worlds. Sometimes the same girl wanders in our shadow as if she remembers something and then she keeps walking until she forgets to care whether it is dark or light or if the moon even shines anymore, because none of it matters, none of it ever mattered. I once dreamt I bought a ticket and boarded a plane and when I arrived the sign hanging over the city read “Vacant but for our dreams. Empty but for our memories. ” This is life, this is the welcome we all receive at the beginning and end of our journey and this is also what we carry inside us, everywhere we go and with everyone we meet. The same sad urgency of our departure and the unexpected joy of our arrival.

The ancient quest to capture time

When I first set foot on the landscape of Greece, something became more apparent to me than anything I had experienced prior to that time, that something was a profound inner awareness of myself in relation to time, in relation to the past, in particular, that ancient, elusive past of our ancestors. I felt this connection to a spirit of the past, in such a way that was akin to an out of body experience, but instead of being out of my body, in a metaphysical sense, I felt that I had entered my body for the first time. It is difficult to describe, except to say that my sense of awareness became lucid and more keen than I had ever experienced before.I was immediately whisked away to an ethereal world beyond the capaciousness of my mind’s view. I could not have anticipated this level of awareness, which was exceptionally expansive and all-encompassing to me. I had travelled for twenty hours across the world, lost in another realm of consciousness, more commonly known as jet-lag, when I arrived at the home of my Greek friend, immediately she embraced me, and I felt a warmth and loving magnitude, which flowed into me as a limitless stream of love and inspiration. She closed the bedroom door, to leave me in solitude, and I drifted off to sleep, then hours later, as night was descending on the city of Athens, she woke me and invited me to take a walk in the neighborhood of Galatsi. It was nearing the end of April, the air was fresh with the vigour and vitality of spring and a cool breeze blew over us as we walked down the narrow, cobble-stone sidewalk. The scent of jasmine flowers, whose petals open to the vibrations of the moon, and permeate the air with an ambience of melliferous and soft beauty, lay among our path. The lights of the city could be seen below us, a long, steep stretch of wonder, lit up the mountain side, and people were everywhere, promenading on the streets. “Everything here is covered by an imaginary aura, it has its own temperature, it lives in an endless dream, it is flooded by an imperceptible music…”I felt a sudden sense of infatuation, my pupils dilated, the pace of my heart quickened, all of my senses were deeply attuned to my surroundings. There were marble structures and a rustic, earthiness seemed to be etched into the landscape, covering everything with a dark veil of romanticism, but at certain points as the moon shone over us, the veil was lifted, and I saw the world in a way that was mystical, as though an arcane whisper from the past echoed through my soul.

“..so it is the Country of the moon; I mean, lit by a dead sun.”wrote Virginia Woolf of Greece.

The Greeks haunted Woolf. Her essay “On Not Knowing Greek” stresses both their aloofness and unfamiliarity and our ignorance of how their minds worked, of how and why their literature was written: as a woman, she found them more primitive, puzzling, and alluring than their legitimate male heirs in Cambridge and Bloomsbury could imagine. Woolf’s essay also conveys a profound sense of intimacy and recognition. Greek worked its way into her imagination, elusive but persistent: “how Greek sticks, darts, eels in & out!” A solid “grounding” gave way to shifting and unbidden moments of insight: “A strange thing-when you come to think of it-this love of Greek, flourishing in such obscurity, distorted, discouraged, yet leaping out, all of a sudden.”

“Times change, years pass
the river of the world clouds over
but I go out on the balcony of a dream..”
~Nikos Gatsos

The Greek concept of time and space is unique.
material value is not afforded to time as much as it is here, it has it’s own essence.

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”

This statement by Virginia, on how our minds perceive time, how we process time, space, thought and emotion, is such an accurate depiction. I believe it is particularly true of those who have been through trauma; there is a contrast between one’s experience and one’s interpretation of the experience, a way in which our memory processes the information we receive from our environment and from the events which leap out before us. Take for example, a play; consider the varying aspects from which those involved in the play, conceive it. The director, the actors and the audience are each bound to have similar yet varying concepts of it. The director takes the plot and interprets her own understanding of it, which she conveys to the actors, imprinting her ideas on them. The actors then fit into the roles and embody the characters, while appealing to the audience’s own inference and reaction. There are multiple methods of portrayal and a skilled director knows how to draw on this, with the use of space, time, metaphor, props, stage design, etc. The director and the actors aspire to perfect their technique and talent, in order to capture and convey the pathos of the play in such a way that it becomes a catharsis, this varies depending on the style of direction. The playwright Sarah Kane once wrote that she was attracted to the stage because “theatre has no memory, which makes it the most existential of the arts…I keep coming back in the hope that someone in a darkened room somewhere will show me an image that burns itself into my mind.” The style likened to Kane was known as “in-yer-face” theatre, a method of shocking the audience into reacting, a way of “invading one’s personal space,” thereby delivering a visceral kick to the stomach. Victims of trauma and those with depression experience a numbing of emotions. They become disassociated and desensitized, and it is not unusual for them to seek what can be deemed as “peak” experiences in order to confirm their existence, because in essence life is about feeling and when one ceases feeling, it is as though a terrible shadow covers everything, a fragmented consciousness, a sort of “perpetual equinox,” where time stands still, days, weeks, months, even seasons, no longer retain their significance. Life becomes a series of flashes, a seeking after something which will “burn into our minds,” “theatre has no memory,” and this is a reprieve to one seeking an escape from their memories. When we view life with the sense that all is fleeting and ephemeral, and that our feelings are frozen in time, “the environing subsoil of our embodiment, the bedrock of our being-in-the-world,” gives way to a feeling of displacement (…)

Woman of the Water

A woman appears on the island, along the shores of the quay, the fishermen see her there each day, disheveled, a scavenger. “They must think me some kind of a vulture. I traveled here ages ago over an incredible distance. I was never anyone of importance, why should it matter now how I wear my hair, how I’m dressed, whether I smile, or if the shimmer is gone from my gaze? The sea is my lover, and the crystal expanse of her liquid beauty embraces me. The silver sand of this land gives me all the treasure I need, she nourishes me on the pieces others refuse to keep. I am the captured, the loved and the discarded, but who would understand such aquatic affections as these?” She journeys by bus to Kini, exiting the ramp, she is greeted by a young boy, enfolded in the arms of a mermaid. Many who see this statue are inspired by its charm, but what they don’t see is the devastating loss, the boy is a phantom, the fantasy of a mother, who refused to let him go when he drifted too far into the depths. It was a wave that caught him and swallowed him under not a sirène of the sea, but the second version is more romantic, so beautiful and enchanting that we create statues to express the pleasure of our dreams. I recall the story of an artist, who spent his entire life sculpting the image of his true love, an altar to the religion of his heart. We want to immortalize that which we admire, in an attempt at possession, but in doing so, we sacrifice the ultimate journey of our freedom, instead we become anchored to the material world, as though the bird song gets plucked from our hearts. I tried to tell her how my gaze was not fixed on any one place, how sometimes in the course of domesticity I felt like a dove, pinned by the throat. It was nothing she could be faulted for, my freedom loving spirit. It was her daily quest for order that led me to a place of frozen chaos. I felt most alive when I made love to her, because then she would relinquish her control. Her body would contract and tighten hard enough to pull me deep inside, and then came the inevitable release. The release is what annihilated me, it left me in a state of ecstasy, it was as though a part of her wanted to show me how powerful she was, while the other left me dangling by her side, as she exhaled and surrendered. She held such immense power and I was at her mercy. I wonder how different is a woman’s uterus from the sea? She held the force of the tide, like she had a direct link to the moon, and her every movement cycled around the turning of the clock, the ticking of my heart, or the throbbing of my inexhaustible passion for her. I set out on a mission to capture her, only now she was my captor, and I was the captive of her heart, the hostage of her body, drowning in a watery cavern on the edge of paradise, that is how I felt each time I stared into the dilated darkness of her eyes.

PHOTO:  Kini Beach Syros: The beach of Kini is close to Kini village, about 9 km from Ermoupoulis town and can be reached by bus.
Kini is a nice beach with pebbled seashore and crystal waters. There are many accommodation options close to the beach as well as fish taverns. Kini is famous for its fresh sea food, which is caught in Kini harbour by the locals. However, Kini beach is mostly known for its sunset, which is considered as the best sunset on Syros island; the sky is painted in a pale orange color and the sun dives slowly into the sea.

Pareidolia

Plaster on the wall- where someone botched their attempt at perfection, that was all I could see, some crooked agency trying to cut corners, but in truth, the further I contemplated it, the more it began to make sense. The lady who was the caretaker of this building was Greek, a woman from Greece, whose family came here in search of a better life when she was just a girl, long before she lost her spirit. In ancient times her ancestors were masters of such creation, their strong but graceful Hellenic hands, carved many a masterpiece from simple white stone, into works of marvellous beauty, but somewhere along the way, hope gets drowned. It took a day like today for me to be able to have seen through her eyes, and to realize the mistake was not a mistake at all. In her frenzy to repair the spot on the wall, and to ready the apartment for new tenants, she had not consciously known what she was creating, for how could she? I have recently returned from my first trip to Greece. I spent two months in her homeland, and she would have loved to have heard all about it. She would have loved to try the many treats I brought back, and to have seen the souvenirs- a rare rock shaped like a tiny temple, found on an island, off the Aegean sea, and honey coloured like amber, with golden remnants of the sun sinking in it; but nature swallowed her under, because somewhere along the way, we all drown, and lately I have been contemplating such a fate. These days had passed with me trying to resurface. I had eaten only the most simple remnants of what could be found in this empty place, and I had not had a cigarette in days, and when I am without a cigarette, my nerves are like wires that get singed from lack of power, lack of fire, lack of vitality. I stared at the spot on the wall in a state of despondency and weakness. It’s interesting how our own suffering can put us in touch with that of the world. I can’t imagine what it must be like for people who never lack anything, but especially those who always have somewhere peaceful to sleep, and something to fill the void inside of them. I have always known lack, but it had been some time since we were acquainted. As I stared at this blotchy mess of plaster, this spot on the wall; an image stood out, an image of a frail woman, holding out her hands, the woman has her head down and her hands out, in a humble gesture, perhaps she is walking in alignment with the spirit, as opposed to the multitude of others here on earth, who are so deeply disconnected. What strikes me most is that she reminds me of a woman I love, a woman I traveled so many miles across the world to be with, and who I am now so distant from, she is frail like her, and her profile is strikingly similar, and isn’t it strange that such beauty can arise out of such a mess, as a careless spot on the wall, and that most people would view it as a mistake, and never see the real beauty in it? It takes suffering to elicit empathy and a keen vision of the world, but it also takes suffering to wake us up to the true depths of beauty, which we are all drowning in.

Fragmentation

(~Cento~)

Bring me to where my blood moves
Limpid treacherous swimmer
This is the fluid in which we meet each other 
In visions of the dark night
In my dream, drilling into the marrow of my entire bone 
In the wave-strike over unquiet stones
Have patience, O my sorrow, and be still.

Wanda Coleman
Stéphane Mallarmé
Sylvia Plath
Edgar Allen Poe
Anne Sexton
Pablo Neruda
Charles Baudelaire

This is my first attempt at a poetic collage, and I’m moved by how these words convey the emotions that were swelling in me when I pieced them together. I like the interplay between movement and stillness. The word limpid in the context of this poem is best defined as; “completely calm; without distress or worry: a limpid, emotionless existence.” At times one’s emotions may reach a peak of ecstasy or joy, only to be followed by a crash, akin to the “wave-strike,” on an otherwise calm shore, then one’s thoughts can be compared to the “unquiet stones,” that get disrupted by the flood of sorrow, these profoundly fragmented breaks in our hearts, likened to chasms. It is during these moments; when the blood rushes deep and overwhelms us, that we most long for stillness. I am also reminded of the writing of Virginia Woolf, when she speaks of these “chasms in the continuity of our ways.” It’s as though we are going through the mundane motion of our prosaic days when something tears us from our perennial roots, (like a reed on the bed of the sea, that can no longer grasp the earth,) and flings us skyward, leaving us to die or adapt. We are like emotional shape-shifters, who travel from the depths to the heights, from the calm to the storm, and all that empty space in between is the limpidity in the grey interim of our existence. It’s like a parasite that gets in our minds and gnaws away at our complacent attachment to life, until part of us detaches from that particular mode of consciousness, and is abruptly awakened to another, unexpected one. Not being able to make this adaptation is tragic. We can be so inculcated by these static roles of existence, that we are like stubborn reeds that refuse to let go; the harder we cling, the more volatile is the force against us. Softness and acceptance, a fluidity, and a willingness to surrender to the shifting seasons, are what give us the most potential to grow. Emotions are like waves, and waves are an accumulation of transitory energy that flows through our thriving souls. “This is the fluid in which we meet eachother,” in the currents of life, that uproot us, this is where we are born anew, in the intermingling of two souls on a journey of the heart, fresh with feeling and hope.

*”Bring me to where my blood moves,” or take me to the heart of my emotions.