Kiyâm

• 

You were an infant crying. I was 13 and babysitting while our folks were out drinking together. You had colic and I had no idea of what that even was at the time.

I just held you in my arms and spun in a circle until I was dizzy. I looked in your eyes and you had a dazed stare, but the crying stopped and you fixed your gaze on mine in that curious state.

Maybe you saw the stars.

Maybe in that moment you actualized the power of the universe. Maybe some people are like stars that burn too fast and maybe the world sometimes spins out of control and we can’t get our balance. Whatever the case I held you until the tears were gone and we both remained in that state of kiyâm until eventually you went to sleep.

The Cree word kiyâm is “a root for various verbs meaning to be quiet, to move quietly, to sit quietly and so on. However the “quietness” of the word kiyâm is not just in the action of avoiding making noise. It very much includes a quietness of the spirit, echoed in the body.”

It’s like a point of surrender.

I look back and recall your fits as you grew into a small girl and threw some wicked temper tantrums which could have given my own childhood tantrums a run for their money.

And what I think is many things that are neither here nor there that I won’t ever have the gift of sharing with you except as an echo between worlds, but one is, to ask Mary Daly to give you the definition of spinster, and she’ll say something along the lines of: a whirling dervish witchy web-weaving woman who creates her own time-space continuum.

Long ago, your dad shared a story of your premature birth and his fear of losing you too soon when you had a close call. I never forgot the heaviness of his heart when he spoke of that fear, because that feeling was like a comet which rose in his chest and shot up through the sky.

There are so many comets shooting through the sky now. May they “burn, burn, burn, ” so that those who are “lost and in the dark may see the astonishing light of their own being.”

While growing up, we were told to stop our crying, but some cries are so loud that they tear a hole through the universe and shatter the silence between us.

So many of those cries come through our smiles, those brave faces we are taught to wear like war paint in our battle against the world.

If there is one thing I could tell you now it would be: kiyâm.

Kiyâm.. kiyâm.. kiyâm.

Rest your weary head and may you find peace and comfort among our relatives in the spirit world.

Until we meet again..
Hiy Hiy.

–For B

Another Lonely Winter

I am thinking I could go anywhere,

I could go now,

turn the brass knob and step out

into the blistering night,

but I would suddenly become aware

of how my blood was not so cold

It was not meant

for the unforgiving arctic

whose winds now blow

endless lines of powder

and formulate daggers of ice

on the roof across the street,

creating cocaine crystals

as white as the skin of an anglosaxon

 

Instead she lies in bed,

an alabaster statue,

her love for me unconfessed,

like an egg incubating in a nest

I can see her through a crack in the

blinds, as I pull her close and absorb

the heat from her somnolent body

 

I am thinking I could go anywhere

I could pack a bag and disappear

and the chasm would cease in time..

love might never come,

but there’s nothing to keep

one from searching

 

For all the time we spend waiting,

we spend so much time escaping

we don’t think about the body

beside us if love is vacant,

we are mere corpses

getting by on time and nocturnal urges,

nightly desires to disappear,

moments when we should stay,

moments when all that has the nerve

to travel at this hour, in this bitterness,

is the rabbit who scurries faster than the train

out of harms way

I tuck myself in safe
I am safe
complacent as a chalice of glass

You love me
You don’t

It doesn’t matter
I am here with you

The seasons pass

I am thinking I could go anywhere,

else I could just sleep in your arms

sheltered from the deathly embrace

of another lonely winter.

How To Love A Flower

 

Many a manner of flowers, bewildering in their beauty
were passed through your hands, encoding zeros.
At such time, I was the one.
perfect beauty
no other flower could emulate.
A stunning blossom, grown from your desire.
The moment you reached for me, the darkness ceased.

You picked me from the womb of earth, and
I was given this new birth.
In that fatal moment your eye flickered,
and the sun screamed for me.

narcissi….

Your appreciation
is the weight of the rock
Sisyphus knows…
constantly pushed uphill,
until it rolls down
too heavy to bear
Itself.

Your eyes were immortal orbs of power, which melted molten into ash…

Tell me we can have them back…
!!!
Take the obsidian,
make it shine again..
make you mine again.

 

 

Confession

I got the results of my x-ray back today,

there are roses growing in me,

and it seems they can never die,

they found butterflies on the thorns

where they made cocoons,

only our lovemaking can heal these wounds.

[~C]

There are roses growing in you;

I will always remember that August morning when you told me that there were roses growing in you.

Since that day, when they need light, I give them the sparkle of my eyes transformed into sunlight.

When they are thirsty, I empty my body of blood and I become their dew.

When they feel lonely, I serenade them under the full moon

When they are hungry, I offer them my tenderness,

and I cut my arms so they can keep my caresses.

Today, I have a secret to reveal to you; there are roses growing in me too.

Only my roses can live in your garden and yours are always welcome in mine,

but never offer roses to a stranger and never accept roses from someone else’s garden,

because the pain in my soul will provoke thorns to tear my skin off

and a rain of petals will cover my empty & naked body

that lies lost on a pyramid of thorns amid a sea of blood.

[~M]

Written by Crystal Kinistino & Mada Rose

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.”

On reading the diary of Virginia Woolf

A small bird flies into the pupil of her eyes, from where it begins to rise, as her tears fall. The wooded path, down which she travels, on her late night rambles, where the colour of the deer match the brambles. It rises there in green light,flooding through thick curtain, collapsing, wingspent on the forest floor, where it comes to rest in the thicket evermore.

Yesterday she was gold plated, gold is not meant to crack in thin line, where falsity falls from fingers, grasping at quill, until this sentence takes flight, by a height of such altitude, paving way for a depth of demise. The bird in her eyes does not rise any more, will not gather in tangled domesticity, will not show signs of sanity, i.e, does not behave obediently.

She shines the silver carefully, and minds the manner of her tongue, lest it be kindling for flame, as smoky sentences rise from pages, where she leaves behind traces of truth, until the waves open the sea, swallowing her heavily under. Outwards and inwards, with no warning of the incoherent tide within her mind.

New dress replaces old, she says she inhabits it for 10 and 11p, at the table forlornly, she scribbles down her reality, what to me can only be a memory, preceding an emotional Holocaust, as the gas chamber glare of her vacant stare, goes unbroken for a century.

The Battlefield of Music

I am your song, bury me in the coffin of your guitar, then once you come to the end of the bar, strum me hard. Strum me through the streets of downtrodden, strum me where the spiritlands are, in cedar and bark, in the steel echo of heart, strum until your fingers bleed crimson, strum me slow, strum me imprisoned, then when you find yourself at the end of loving, strum me free. Strum me the wings of ravens, strum me eagles and vultures. hawks in all cultures, strum me Hispanic, strum me black, strum me exotic on islands where girls wear dresses made from leaves, strum me electric, amplify my soul, strum me hungry and full, with a handful of change and some tea for the tillerman, strum me like a busker who plays for his favourite shot of rye, strum me high baby, strum me high, then bring me down a key, like a Southern comfort melody, lay me on the grass slow and melodiously, in the oppressive summer heat, play me through all seasons, play me without reason like I’m going to die, because every song has a refrain, refrain from touching me, leave me alone, then let me vibrate in the carpal memory of your bones, where splinters and marrow record the solo pitch of my soul. Coda, codine, codeine, crave and despise every chord, but the one that takes you out of this world, honey that’s the one you gotta find, find it and hold it, cradle it from neck to navel, then strum it alive, strum it like neurons sparking through dark, let it resonate like a scream, like the death cry of a warrior on the battlefield of music.

Violation

A voice is an echo on the shores of a river, cry of the loon. It is a new moon, a full moon, followed by the long snows moon. Ice encapsulates our memories as we tread the surface of a deep forgetting. To remember is to drown. My heart lives in this perpetual spring, melting into currents that violate the very rhythm of this cold season.

.

Love Crisis

“What do you think? I’m not a starfish or a pepper tree. I’m a living, breathing human being. Of course I’ve been in love.”—Haruki Murakami–

And that’s why I get tense when you ask me who I love, who I have loved. I wish I could take your hand and lead you to a secluded place far above a big city, looking down I’d tell you, “that, over there!! I love the way the moon shines full and rustic in the shadows.” If I could become a particle of light or an ion of black, I’d marry that moon. Look, look over there where strangers walk, the one with the gaze of sadness, you know that feeling of being alone and distant even though you are right next to someone? I could marry that girl. I love his red car, the one he worked and saved so hard for to impress her. I love the way the bakery smells at 4am when all the city sleeps and this warm sweet air wisps up to me as I stand on the terrace, smoking a cigarette, drinking a strong cup of coffee that I made in the French press as my girlfriend slept. I love the way she is unaware of my awakeness. How if she heard me, she would wake up and scream as though she were facing a life crisis at 4am. I should not be awake, don’t I know the time?! But back home on another continent I am at work, punching the clock, tolling the hours, working so hard to make my way back to her again. I arrive on her birthday, it’s nearing Christmas and I’m sick. I’m sick and I have been through holiday travel hell, but I did it all for her, and when morning arrives too soon, and the time zones haven’t worked their way into my system, all I’m asking for is a little consideration. Just a little understanding baby. That’s all I want. I love everything and then when it becomes too much, I empty my cup in the sink and laugh at her dramatics. I love no one and everyone and nothing at all. But am I in love? I am in love with the way I imagine your eyes as they search mine for an answer. That’s what I most love. I love your searching, the way you seek meaning, as if to say, all this, all that we love which is going to fall and shatter like a broken cup on the street below us, would suddenly matter somehow, that the break, the injury would be tolerable as long as it held meaning, as long as it didn’t lie or become enraged and strike you when you got out of place. As long as there was hope of loving further, loving more, loving always.

Loving You Close

You say I should love what’s close. Tonight the sky is black because clouds show no mercy in storms. The joy, the rushing euphoria has crashed out on the tracks in a deep dark tunnel underground, fire is all around. I have to tell you because you are the one who shines, you’re the one with gold light in a halo above you. I am that little girl who dropped her doll on the tracks and jumped down like a frantic deer to catch her. It’s okay though, when what you love close falls far away, there’s always a way to catch it, and that’s why I bleed out under skies where stars die and I blow on fading flowers, as the seeds pollinate other worlds, where gardens blossom over us, and your hand is in mine, never letting go.

Myth

What is it I want to tell you? That this red throb is nothing, that this air can perpetuate without your breath, either inhale or exhale. That you exist in a swirl of random chaos like a flowing current of fierce rhythm that pulls you further down into the black miasma, or the blood stained sky. That there is no you and I. No nothing there where honey flows from crafty hands of chemosynthetic mind, longing for something, untouchable, unnameable, blind. Creating energy out of dark, when there is absence of sun light. That you are a rare night blossom, whose jasmine scent permeates all it touches with the potential of hope, of meaning, of a calm receding, where all life draws in it’s chaotic tides, and the swell of the sea inside releases me, frees me to love you in dreams. In dreams I am a stranger to myself, mirrors cast back reflections of lies. I close my eyes and draw in the darkness, emitting red beacons across the islands that separate us, blink and they dissolve, breathe and they depart. Her small hand heals my infinite ache. Her soft lips take me in, her searching tongue is without speech, in my mouth, where silence falls between two disarmed warriors, with their sharp thrusting. Your eyes are my shelter, they shine on this sorrow, penetrating where nothing else ever could. I leave you as quietly as I arrived, on a bitter winter night, bound for an arctic city, far from the magic and myth of your body with it’s warmth and it’s velvet reprieve. Returning again to the scrape of these lonely hours, the raw, the red, the crimson that throbs under this empty facade.

Synesthesia

On a red Wednesday far away.
How far must one feel before it is real? The smell of vanilla reminds me of the creamy sky when the shape of a dinosaur floats by, reminding me then of old caves deeply unearthed, vapour clouds and the reach of Everest the cataclysm of continents drifting and shifting. I think of you who existed in the same world where eggs were fertilized. The time when our species made the great leap, structurally adapting our homologous bodies, from wings, to fins, to the epic void of these empty arms that never held you. We breathed the same air during the same era and yet it’s as if you are a character in a book that existed in a time I can only imagine. So it is that blue is synonymous with the mountain crest where the roaring Pacific faultline pulls like two magnetic forces, an entire separate continent into the arms of another, that time when cultures collide and adapt into common ancestors of different origins, and you smile that orbital smile as the ozone of your affections protects me from the radiation that threatens complete eradication of our species. I love you duplicitous flower, love you black tar highway whose deceit makes the sky appear deep.

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.

When You Are Far

A Distance
Exists

When you are far
words grow feathers
coo in soft spectacle
eyes flicking fast
checking flight path

Longitude, latitude,
aerial distance,
scanning path of
least resistance.

When you are far
silence jars wings
suspended in want
the heart feels fluent
this voiceless truancy

When you are far
a distance there is
from North to South
where lauded affection
migrates mute mouth

We rise for a moment
Land for an eternity
in each other

for my love..

When you are far,
your closeness felt
like music,
Deafening
all distance,

when you
are near
Sings,
in harmony
with this heart.

Crystal Kinistino and Candice Daquin

Disintegration

The latte scalds my tongue ,
hot as the tears that flow from
somewhere untouched,
somewhere unseen,
somewhere you are ,
somewhere you’ve been
somewhere disintegrates
somewhere evaporates,
like steam.

When you vanish I disintegrate
When I stay I disintegrate
All life disintegrates
into nothing.
Burn my heart out
like the flame
of the candle,
whose dark
phantom
dissolves me.

Without You

The whir of the air-conditoner,
the taste of cigarette smoke,
tea, honey, milk,
a warm inner glow, a cool exterior.

The lights from the building
across the way,
myself alone this way.

A book in hand,
opened to a world
that only exists
in my mind,
like you and I,
and our
verbose love.

What about silence
and the body,
with it’s vast vocabulary
of expressions
and meanings
that come as real
and true as this
moment, now
without you?

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.

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.

Patience

My hands I call patience,
so still they could be mistaken
for statues of hands.

Does the bee get anxious for the flower?

Imprint them in cement on the sidewalk of a big city,
tell them I was here and I waited to touch you.

Encase a star in a golden plaque.

I waited.

I would wait
until they aged and
cracked with loneliness,
like the bee whose wings cease
at the discovery of a rose.

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.

The Effigy

In Tinos where you were baptized, they took the cap off the sky and light poured into the watchful eyes of a virgin dove. They bathed you in such pure water that Mary herself held a shell up for your christening, it cracked in the centre like porcelain and you smiled, that sharp smile of annihilation, hard and cold as the marble, where they laid your body.

As a child I wanted my own girl to hold, like the dolls my grandmother kept in the attic from her childhood years in England, pristine, dressed in cotton and wool, and buttoned up to perfection. She told me that one day they would all be mine if I could prove my love for only one .

I chose the most delicate doll, made of porcelain, with a lace dress and silk stockings , she had dark hair and green eyes, her mouth was painted blood red, and her skin was as white and fragile as egg shells. My own beautiful Κούκλα to hold when I felt lonely.

I placed her on a shelf in my room and stared admiringly at her countenance . One day a sadness incubated in her throat that was as colossal as a Trojan horse filled with a thousand warriors , it broke open and choked me into silence.

I felt the swell of it flood my room and sink down on my chest like a pile of rocks from a well where a man fell down and drowned. Every night he entered me like an avalanche until my heart cracked and love fled from me like a startled bird on a ledge, away from the view of everyone.

As I matured a hunger grew inside that threatened to shatter me. Her pale skin was stained with the markings of a monstrous molestation. Fingerprints from crimson tarnishings smeared over her body like stigmata. She methodically guided my hand down to the centre of the world and I was swallowed there inside of her until I too became as porcelain.

I lay next to her frail frame and entered a wolfishness that no tenderness could tame. She lay motionless as I caressed her and she fed me her despair until my teeth broke and my eyes fell on the floor. My left hand lay groping in the cellar, while my right hand held the edge of the balcony, parts of me lay scattered everywhere like broken shells.

The day of reckoning came and my grandmother smashed a gavel on my hand. The DNA strand of three generations unravelled from my wrist in a long purple tendril and crawled under the rocks, deep beneath a seabed of sunken dreams.

They carried my body like an effigy through the streets, burned candles in a cloud of smoke that shadowed my soul. I am destined to belong to none, a fallen messiah, a dark pariah, possessed by every girl I meet, love fills me with a fullness none can keep from shattering.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sparrows

Sparrows slowly swoon in sorrowful silence from the south as winds wither the flowers in her mouth.

Time lies slowly dying for those immortal sparrows.

Deep in a grave of  lost love my girl withers also.

Her hands, now bones, no longer able to touch me, flowers fading, kisses gone, bleeding through this living memory, that fades with my ageing body.

But the sparrows remain ceaseless with the passing seasons.

I want to be a vine, be a root, or a branch, that winds through the earth, reaching for her.

For us

I’d like to get some platform boots, a silky pair of black nylons and a strapless strapon. Red and full is how I feel when I see your hard nipple & thirsty mouth, want to take a slow trip South, biting and licking my way through your valleys to the highest peak of pleasure in you, in me, where it hurts, transmit this anti into climax, encircle your shiny pearl with my tongue, the swirl of paradox, the soft endless ness of your velvet body when I enter you slow, rhythmic, then gradually harder, until I need to hold your braided hair, pulling on the reins of paradise, each thrust pushing deeper into you, into me, I need your eyes on mine, so I can journey back and forth between those  parallel worlds where you are both woman and girl. My soul pulsing into that death, that emptiness, that place at the threshold, where there’s no turning back. Brush away the butterfly fluttering in me so constantly, the bird trapped in my ribcage, the viper in my spine, all these things that twist & tangle and unwind me, set them free for you, for us

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.

Lost in the memory of another

I never told you I spoke about you from the beginning to any new girl that listened. “She’s an inspiration. Read her. See her magnificence!” “But are you sure she’s only a friend?” They asked as they stood in the shadows on the precipice of what could have been but never was. And I laughed. “She’s a province away and miles out of my league,” and they stared at me perplexed as they crossed their legs and ran a brush through their long hair, combing out the dreams that never materialized, like tangled knots of unfulfilled promise. Until one day you vanished like a star, and I stopped speaking. Until the last girl told me she adopted a dog from your hometown and picked a book off a shelf that you recommended to me. Then I was struck dumb and I walked away and left her with no explanation. “She’s a friend from long ago and far away, ” I said, but my reaction was disproportionate with my words, so that all she heard was that I was a girl, lost in the memory of another.

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.

If you were coming in the fall

If you were coming in the fall, I’d brush the summer by With half a smile and half a spurn, As housewives do a fly. If I could see you in a year, I’d wind the months in balls, And put them each in separate drawers, Until their time befalls. If only centuries delayed, I’d count them on my hand, Subtracting till my fingers dropped Into Van Diemen’s land. If certain, when this life was out, That yours and mine should be, I’d toss it yonder like a rind, And taste eternity. But now, all ignorant of the length Of time’s uncertain wing, It goads me, like the goblin bee, That will not state its sting. — Emily Dickinson

I love Emily. I admire her fierce undying devotion. She would go on loving and write countless letters & poems to people she loved but never was able to hold. Her first true love married her brother. I can identify with that undying love and devotion, and the crushed sense of spirit she must have surely felt, but never let destroy her.

Multilingual

The languages I speak are English, French, Greek and love. In the latter I am a beginner. At neither am I fluent. Truant to love’s feast, I hunger for something I cannot articulate.

δεκαοχτώ

An inferno dying out in your mouth of clouds, the sharp hungry bird crying out at dawn, 18 reasons to stay, 18 to leave, dekaocto.

A girl I watch from your balcony;
years of stifled song, and the wrongs spill out in silence as she bends down, her tight shorts cutting into my agony.

Through the doorway where you call to me after such a long drought, you force my hand down and tell me to touch you now, but it feels like mercy, like persuasion not to fly, like I want to die.

I want to die separate from all the things you know of me,  but I cannot because I am a muted bird, and you are blind to this feathery thing in me, which wakes in the night hungry & scorned.

The Eurasian collared dove (Streptopelia decaocto), most often simply called the collared dove-

The song is a coo-COO-coo, repeated many times. It is phonetically similar to the Greek decaocto (“eighteen”), to which the bird owes its zoological name. It also makes a harsh loud screeching call lasting about two seconds, particularly in flight just before landing. A rough way to describe the screeching sound is a hah-hah.

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.

Barrier

Red tape, white tape, things to break and be bound by. Seal my heart away in a box, in storage where it stays, incapable of remaining any other place, but categorized under things to take out when unpacking, things to decorate this empty space.

There was a turning door that alternated between dark & light, among all the places she led me. I could not follow her in, could not let myself process the shadowy barrier I would never have the chance to cross.

Her mouth was gentle and breakable by invisible kisses, kisses stained black, white, dark, light & beautiful in their pain.

We cannot get beyond the dusty smell of death in all the old places we stay.

I see a flutter of butterflies carrying stars to the river, to drop them deep in the murky silence & the gush of waves.

Some day I will drown in stars.

Some day I’ll rise silver & moonstruck, to hold her in my arms and stay in a place where my heart is still and my body never defies 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.

Crystalline Confession

Today I wrote your name in the snow, like a small child professing her love in frozen molecules. The problem is that the snowflakes melt as soon as they touch the earth, isn’t that how love goes?

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.

σκέψη

The slow amber drip of time, the silver of the spoon, the dreams of last night lay like coffee grounds in the bottom of my cup. Bubbles float up to the surface like thoughts of you, desires which dissolve on the tip of my tongue. From the balcony I see trees in the distance, olives dangle from the branches like tiny hearts throbbing in the sun.

 

to love but not to touch

I am no more yours than the moon,
something which you gaze upon at a distance,
through the darkness,
and expect to always shine for you.

Sometimes it’s all too much, to love but not to touch,
sometimes the equator forces the tectonic shift of a continent,
8 feet in the direction of another continent,
many lives are lost, but the earth moves with a magnetic pull, attempting to bring us closer.

In a hundred thousand years
our worlds will collide
and all the love we hold inside
will create a supernova,
which will burn through the sky
and light up the universe.