Rhyme Of The Free Bird

I’m really not that wounded
That is to say, I’m not broken
Parts of me were left unspoken,
A book that was never opened,
An egg that cracked prematurely before its own time,
A bird that learned to rhyme to its own chime.

The feeling of alone was etched into my bones since before birth 
it has taken a lifetime to find my own worth.
I only ever tried to translate my soul to those who spoke foreign,
but the language of love is how I was born.

I was a baby in a crib and that crib was like a prison or a cage, 
so as I grew I carried this deep rage under my newly forming wings,
but I always knew I was meant for greater things,
because even the caged bird yearns to sing.

You left me there to wallow in my hunger for a mother, 
you left me with my brother, but I didn’t really need him, 
because every bird eventually finds its own way to freedom.

So here I am in my sky world, being my own girl,
learning to accept all my parts as equal and as one. 
A gift full of surprises that is opened as eagerly as the sun rises, or as the moon, 
or as one who descends from the womb of the stars of Iktomi the weaver, 
untangled from the web of those who never took the chance to know her or believe her.

She will live in her truth and her bravery 
because she has broken free from her own self-slavery, 
that is to say, she broke free from trying to save them, 
that is to say, she had to outbrave them.

Then, when the waves crashed in she had to break open wide 
and let herself be carried by the tide, 
she had to allow her emotions from inside to flow outside and breathe, 
she had to allow herself to grieve, she had to leave.

It was always written in her blood to travel and stray 
because every free bird must eventually fly away, 
she must follow that red thread back into her own veins.

She must build a nest in her own chest and fly home to herself, 
understand that she must land in her own hand, so that she may hold herself strong, 
because every bird needs to sing her own song, 
just as she needs to create her own world where she can finally belong.

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.

Ruby Through The Looking Glass

A Crystal for a Ruby
a Ruby for a Crystal.
A mosaic of many moods
bristling in an overcast sky.

We speak of a darkness by which we lose our shine,
a stasis by which the light
gets contaminated,
disintegrated in clouds of silence.

The glass allows us to see
as a spectator outside a window, viewing the world within,
but as one looks within another
stares outwards and this glass
is a fragile veneer of crystal,
a glitter of seas,
where we could almost drown,
a red stained mural
on the verge of shattering.

You said the anger
would come back
just as the love did.
cutting me up again
and again and again.

My smile is a blood clot,
coagulated,
self-created
to prevent
a hemorrhage
of hurt
from within.

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
shadows trembling between one’s eyes and the truth.
There must be truth;
there must be a wall.

The child’s cry
melts in the wall
at the border of the glass
leading into the hall
where the others pass,

the voice of the transient and the perishing, coming and going like human breath,

And I..
I am the arrow,
penetrating
at one with the drive into the red.

Through the looking-glass
Ruby sees things in you,
things in me
She won’t want to be
just a little light
turning the key
at the root,

feel a little hand
turning
turning
Ruby,”
what I missed, she will carry.

In you Ruby, the pain you wake to
is not yours alone.

Crystal Kinistino
Sylvia Plath (Ariel) /Nick & The Candlestick
Anne Sexton (Again and Again and Again)
Virginia Woolf) The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection)
Tori Amos (Ruby Through The Looking Glass)