Blood Memory

Rushing into the red current of oblivion, seeking a vein which won’t collapse, making a fist at God, ready to strike, tying my rage tight as a tourniquet.

She says it’s okay to let go,
its okay to relax,
let the warmth within me flow,
but there’s a knot
in the 70th strand,
where my ancestors
were forced to disband.

The day was crimson
over copper
into black
I waited by the fire
until they returned
the flames burned,
but they never
came back.

Now this syringe is sacred,
I have unchristened it,
like the way you came here
to unsettle the settled land,
please understand,
I am coded to remember.

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.

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

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.

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.”

The Sorrow

Your hands, your fingers, the bones in your forearm, the anatomy of which I’ll soon come to know precisely, the scars, the glassy glare of strangers cutting them fresh, peeling them back like mica memories preserved in an age so distant, the one who lives there seems a foreigner to me, unable to adapt, she mapped out her emotions with a razor, giving you directions to her heart, there in the dark, where you scorned her sadness, the deeper your scorn, the deeper her cut, until there was no more depth, only hollow, fine slivers of silver memory, a corded line, the horror in her grandmother’s eyes when she saw the long- distance bill. The pills scattered along the floor, while her blood ran thin and lost sugar. She ate chocolate, candy, the sweetest things she could gather, even in your bitterness you were insulin rushing into all four chambers, you knew every room in that organ of fire, a fine stricken sulphur you were. The moan of you, the sorrow, your hands your fingers, parting Babylon, your kisses, deep as Euphrates.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The man holding a swan

He arrives at dawn when the others are gone, soaked in their debauchery, seen as a stain on the city, red speckled sea on the horizon , something we avoid on the morning walk to where we have to be, not where we want to be.

If I had my way I’d marry music, swan songs and oblong stories of our less than genteel history. Here in the North we are sorry, that’s our story, forced manners , like blisters on the fingers of the erhu player, but his country has communism, a cracked schism in the pavement, where I step to behold his wordless poems.

You cry out in the morning, no memory of the night before, no purpose, when your legs are sore from running against the current, can’t keep your head above the water long enough to see the shore.

Each morning you stumble down Portage on your way to nowhere, because that’s all we’ve got sister, that and the man with the blister, whose music makes us forget the pain, makes the suffering more tolerable, but what have we to compete with that?

A man holding a swan, caressing it’s long neck of eternity, you and I are lucky if we last ’til tomorrow but that beautiful sorrow can be heard like an ancient cry to the soul, and his case is full of potential coins for the demon that eats loons and moons from our past dreams. They float up merrily and coo at his fingers, see how he wraps them there, wings soft as straw, another corner conquered by something other than a drunken squaw.

What started as awe quickly turns to indifference and downright bitterness for birds. You start cawing and spitting venomous vitriol at anything that jingles. Where did they put my moon eh? Where’s that crescent thing they promised my people, no one remembers the buffalo, they killed him with the red skins, somewhere near wounded knee, but we got this Eastern melody flooding our streets with beauty.

I’m too ugly and my spirit is a deaf traveler. I’ll strangle that white-necked whore! Be nice to the hand that feeds you, it’s the hand that holds you down. They talk like indigenous means religious, it’s not a political stance, it’s birds in the hands of a dying democracy.

I’m the white and you’re the black on the chess board. They are counting on you poor pawn, they are singing for you sweet swan, together we can make a symphony that rises up towards the parliament in full plumed brilliance and lands on Harper’s lawn. Tell him to quit selling what doesn’t belong to him. Take off that Isis mask borrowed from the president and fuck terrorism when we’ve got heroism in our own hands..

dawn over oil spilled feathers, washing these sorrows pure again.

I tried to drown my sorrows but..

My sorrows won Olympic medals in the 50 meter dive, see how they come alive, with fleshed out indifference, gilded like aqueous queens, oblivious to the sun.

What if

Power lines and the thought that I could climb.

Your hands gesticulating, motioning me back into a feathery bed of passivity.

The pillars of the bridge engulfed by the engorged red, unattainable love I felt, swirling in violent cyclones of possibility. If I stand and watch the swirl of water, like a small child who perceived herself a screaming fish, spiraling down a drain, lifeless. If your mouth could kiss away the death that overshadowed my withering frame in the halls of a consensual prison, we called work, then nocturnal birds would have never watched my mother from the post facing east, and signalled the ominous, the premonitive , what if…

What if she slept and I was the night guard keeping watch over spirits? What if I stood on the boxes in the back room of the building and tempted my fate with a rope and a crate, tied around a beam, leading somewhere I had once been before this life? What if that exacto knife hadn’t opened my arm and caused such alarm among us? What if when she slept I found bottles of Captain Morgan’s and took the keys to one of the vans in the driveway, took a hose from the industrial vacuum and shoved it methodically, one end in the tailpipe, the other in my mouth, with the doors locked and the radio playing what were meant to be the last songs I heard as I stared up at the starlit sky drinking 21 shots for every year I was alive.

What if all of this and still you took me home and held me by your side until that storm subsided? You laughed and chided my attempts at life and death until I had given all I could of blood and sex to you, and it left me in stitches.

Then a girl turned into a woman and kept walking, unconvinced by your feigned displays of love & mercy. A girl who was nothing more than a serotonin depraved burden to your artificial, feel good, polyana ways.

Climbing power lines, shirking the electricity, jumping twenty feet into nothing for you. It never ceased to  amuse, you wanted something more substantial, like semen and the demon of a vacuous tube, sucking unborn dreams away.

But what if your fingers were razorblades and your lips were a red abyss and every kiss you gave cut into me with the thirst for something deeper?

Things at which you smirked and slithered away, cowering. With the “oh Gods and what nows” when I played Anathema or Theatre of Tragedy, and you walked out of my apartment unable to bear it.

You were the amusement whose pleasure wore out on me. When you could not abide my pain or sustain my darkness.

I surged on alone deeper and deeper, further and further away from you, towards a city where a tenebrous girl flicked her blond hair and noted the sadness behind my smile, able to see more deep, able to keep shadows.

Remember when I told you I was lost? You said you would send a taxi to find me, but you fell over and nearly dropped the phone when I told you I was across the country, where I’d gone on a whim to reclaim something that never belonged to me. So she didn’t and you don’t and what does, belong to me? The names of constellations, the origin of beauty?

Or just this…what if?

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.

Fish out of Water

What cycle of the moon would bring us our doom; two fish washed ashore in a forest.

The tide pool offers us a view of birds, previously hidden, but for those moments we would jump above the surface of the water.

They build nests and create something numinous beyond all seeing.

If only we could grow wings.
If only we could find our way
free from this puddle before the sun rises and dries up our dreams.

“But where then shall we go and what will we behold?” Asked the one fish of the other.

When our sadness flows in streams we will drown in the river of our selves, sink deep into the roots of the trees and then branch out to the sky and swim among the stars.

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.