A View From The Leaf

I saw you last night, or maybe it was my imagination, I can’t be certain it was you. In the lit foyer with his arm around you as you entered the restaurant and I stood outside in the dark; was that not your smile then, which opened the heavens and caused the God’s to fall? I can’t know for certain. I was merely a mortal passing by in the dark. You were a trespasser. Your blood was taken from the old country and transposed on the arctic skyline where we slaughter bison for the profit of the corporation, and trading our furs, always trading away what never belonged to us, trading in the wilderness for a cage. They keep the tropical trees and the waterfalls behind the glass, even when there’s an icy blast of air outdoors. A butterfly escapes the garden, and tears out into the night, her wings freeze in mid flight and she just lingers there beneathe the stars. You don’t even know how lucky you are to be holding her now, I think as I turn away, watching you embrace that hungry stranger as you go enjoy your dinner, without ever knowing what went into the sacrifice, the amount of blood loss it took to afford you a good seat with a view to the open thighs of mother nature. We take it all for granted, we always have. In the salon she went on about the myth of Medusa, while my snake hair fell all around. It wasn’t that her beauty turned men to stone. It’s that she was a petrifying gorgon who knew how to subvert the male gaze until it became fatal. In this way she could live on and all men would be but a memorial to her.

Nirodha

When I pass the house;
the home we once inhabited,
there is no house, there is no us,
for you do not inhabit any space
that my body can touch

I tell myself,
the body is betrayed by touch,
I say the spirit is more lasting,
and yet we are taught
nirodha-samapatti is attainable

I sit here in a lifeless trance,
which to the living breathing
world appears as death,
as I suspend my breath,
and cease all molestation

the small child in me hungers
with the ache of alienation,
athough a foreigner to my own life,
something sacred remains
In the wilderness of my veins.