Impermanence

Before the glass shattered, it was already broken they say, true to the Zen principle of impermanence. I think of the day I first emerged from the taxi, taking your glass hand in mine, feeling the fragility of every molecule of crystal flowing in the summer light between our glass bodies as we held eachother. I recall the glass city, yet to be explored, shimmering with the beauty of ancient temples, mineral by mineral. I pay glass money to the mosaic man, whose eyes reflect in green visions from a childhood, still seen, on the surface of sand, surrounding the Pacific Ocean, where I shattered into sunlight, collecting broken bottles, which the water shaped to resemble lost gems of treasure. Where has that child gone, her body a mere memory held in cracked neurons, sustained there between the darkness and the stars? I am that bottle, I am that eye, fixated in green brilliance, over the radiance of these shattered encounters, from zygote grin to wrinkled skin. That day on the street, when the glass savior with blot on spoon, dissolving into liquid, injecting through syringe into glass vein through semen, into ovum, the opium of my fluid existence. I hear chimes ring as the wind smashes them against the window, echoing across this wild , wintry country, the songs he sang before my time of fiery emergence. I am that bottle, always accompanying me, in the broken luminescence between light and shadow. I tread carefully amid two contradicting forces, the one with glass breasts and the one with glass phallus, anima and animus, one jagged splinter, ever forging toward the mercurial, toward the mesenchyme of osteoblast and hyaline, ever regenerating new bones, new placenta, new spearhead toward multicellular matrix fold of glass rose, glass wine, glass romance, capable of falling from the balcony where my glassy infatuation lies, already a hazard to the lovers who pass by barefoot and careless tongued. Your countenance glistens, not with the warmth of orbital, but that of ice, incapable of deliquescing. Shatter me a million times, I am already broken, broken like a blister on the lips, where we kiss away the cancerous rays of ultraviolence. Don’t tell me the circle of vibrational circumference is always gravitating further away, because if you say this, we might need to stay, held down by the force of the world, which is forever fated to break.

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.

Before the Abyss

Somewhere on a mountain in India, you were learning about the particles of sand in the rocks that expanded from the boulder of your aspirations. Speak nothing of the weight of it, small unrelated sibling of brown skin. Don’t carry the weight of the world, crossing continents, shifting from what we spoke of as a caste system which broke open and slowly became something of a mineralized memory, chiseled sharp as a surgeon’s instrument.

When I was ten years old I felt God enter my bed and lift me toward the sky. I may have at one time cried over the death of birds. Never once would I imagine an unborn soul’s karma would meet with mine to rise up into the white of discarded feathers, else pull those makeshift wings over her own small body and fly.

Truth drizzles from the tongue in crowded corridors, where from behind the girl without a circle flocks towards my side in tacit approval, smiling back lost decades, where among you all I would have been unrecognizable. Her and I are the nuclei of free radicals, I laugh at the open door for rebels to pass through, gaining entrance freely. I hear your own laughter echo back to me.

We all started with a dream. Today that dream dies. Today the scope of practice is spoken of, and the post trauma of seeing small children, like smashed eggs on the sidewalk, where the yolk of what we become gets burned beneath the sun. My heart, my heart lies lateral to my body. My soul, my soul, lies proximal to the sky. Skip a beat…

listen for the atrial flutter of a butterfly, inflating beyond measure, auscultating systolic pressure.

120 over 80 mercury, retro to distal, the parietal of my hand reaches through the ventral of the darkness, separating the opposing sides of a funnel cloud in utero, tapping on a stethoscope.

The eyes open as light floods the pupils, dilating variance, ascertaining vision, a flash of recognition, the first stranger we meet,

our first lover, the keeper of our primary impressions. When acceptance or rejection tattoos the future on our small dangling feet.

The first spanking or christening, followed by the first kiss,

Before the abyss, and after the abyss.

Lost

I awake to my breath in a ghostly cloud above my head.
This white clarity blinds the city.
Unable to rest, unable to dream.
He said our people, the Anishinaabe were possibly the lost citizens of Atlantis, true Atlanteans crossing the Atlantic. Thousands of years ago the Mediterranean was more like a lake and less like an ocean. The land mass of Atlantis formed a bridge from North America to Athens Greece. My kin, the Algonquins migrated to the ancient city and throughout parts of Europe, including Britain and the East. Is it possible the whites were decendants of us? Is it possible an old seed buried deep split open and released a very ancient desire to reclaim itself? He speaks of Sakimay as a place where our people originated. This was the land of my ancestors. He speaks of the seven fires prophecy and the crystal energy our people harnessed, which led to their own downfall, the sinking of our island, the melting of the glaciers, the light that flooded in like razors on our skin and stained us with the red ink of Indians. The turtle island that sank and swam down again, lost in the reaches of time. Oh Turtle, teach us of the truth sewn in hand with the ilk of our ancient medicine, until then we are lost like a city under the sea.

Time

Is a river that rushes onward
Is a vein that ruptures inward
Is an emotion that stagnates
on the cuff of bloodied sleeve.
Is all those who leave me
Or allow me to leave.

Sunset

See the future, through a suture of time, stitching minutes through wounds.
We bleed out hours cochlea swell,
barely audible in the mute hope of this stethoscope, where no drum sounds,
no savagery of heart amplifying fire.
no pulse of temple, no Goddess in hips.
no pitch to this rhythmless routine.
take me underground,
bury my body, mourn what I was,
leave flowers in place of,
vacate where I am now,
yearning to flourish,
into the crepuscular,
muscular flex of
this sensual sunset.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.