Archi - invisible

When will the land own itself?  When will the cosmic rush slam into us with water and glass and a million crystalline orbs?  We deserve it.  I've asked over and over what fate will bring.  I'm tired of wondering.  I guess it is up to me to make this something.  This something high overhead.  I'm not lucid dreaming, I'm the walking dead.  Too much zombie dirt on planet earth.  Typical terra firma response.  We green.  We grow.  Then we go down into the soil.  Busted up calcium.  Worm guts.  I'm fine with worms.  Just not dead birds.  I've buried two now.  Over and over, under maple leaves, under oak leaves and ash leaves.  Under willow's sways.  Under hawthorn.  Under shivering birch trees and aspen leaves.  Under the slender horns of the crescent moon.  Mother saw a life go by.  Black again.  Deep black soil.  Dreaming of fire hot lava.  Heated water and cool rocks.  This is my little oasis to write by.  It's like sitting by the stream as a child.  I was born there under a sprinkling of stars and wide spread branches.  I decided I wanted to stay.  I curled up in tangled, wild roots.  I laid by the water.  I clung to trees.  Each day a star burst forth from my heart and each day the forest whispered for me to stay.  I left.  I walked through the field and into the backyard of society.  I ended up in the box I didn't want to live in.  I wanted to live by that stream, in those trees, under those roots.  Woods and web.  It's easy to feel the disappointment now from a stuffy room.  Where did my wildchildhood go?  bring it back to me.  Easily.  Bring it back to me.  Says the witch.  Bring it back to me.  Daily.  Bring it back to me.  In the night.  Some would call that crazy.  Some say it's a flaw.  To think too much or too deeply and to remember too much.  I love you.  Stones, grass, trees.  I wake up in the night when it is dark.  I wander out in the sleeping town of concrete, brick, gravel and plastic.  Steel.  I wander out and wonder when it will be my time again to sleep by the sound of moving water, swaying limbs, moving air, and by the heat of a strong sun or silently watching moon.  Even her dark phase is not so dark, it is warm and deep.  A mystery.  As long as we keep it.

Andromache and Helenus

Speaking my Greek again on the warmer days of spring.  We've had some warmth, we've had some cold.  Now we are busting through to the actual spring weather.  I'm hoping it remains warm for many more months to come.  Sleep is like death.  It is a little death of sorts.  We awaken renewed.  There is no true death, only rebirth.  They can plant me like a tree in hopes that I'll grow but I'm a mortal thing.  I am doomed to die.  There is no true death.  And yet, it exists.  Greenwood cemetery is just a thought away.  My parallel universe still holds these spaces for death.  Giant gas balls in space hold all of the elements of my blood and bone, a universal plasma.  Blood from star to cell.  Dark blood.  Deep blood.  Red blood.  And the blackest blood of the cosmic womb.  This must be why light bursting forth from the deep dark blood of the universe stunned us into love and worship.  Love and honor.  Light bursting forth in the form of nebulae and embryo.  Beating hearts.  Life driven against the struggle of the dark.  Light shining through strife.  These things I see in the face of the Green Man.  Images show him with tendrils crawling out of nostrils or mouth.  Leaves grow around his eyes and ears.  Leaves twine with his hair.  It could be the Green Man or the Green Woman.  I see the birth of cosmic corners in the busting open of leaves in spring.  It will come.  On one particular day, for no seeming reason, it all breaks loose and green is upon us.  This is the dance we see.  Life and death.  Rebirth.  Going back to Buddhist lessons.  Seeing my face on a Greek stage.  Through fire and light, the dance of spring begins.  How do they all come together to dance so readily?  It's as though the fairies were waiting inside spring the entire time.  Every thought, every mythology, every parallel universe, every story has been wrapped up in the season of spring.  It is time, as a woman, to escape my tomb of cement slabs and rolling metal.  It is time to crawl out of the basement.  Spring is up here. 

Make a Moon a Witch

Rattling Death Breath.  Make a moon a witch.  Full, round lunar phase.  There is some haze around the rim.  Burn sage.  In preparation for the workings of a witch, you must prepare yourself.  It is something anyone can be but few choose.  Perhaps the reasons are that people are born to a different path, perhaps it is that people are afraid of the work, perhaps it is misinformation.  Either way, you have a witch within screaming to bust out.  If you let her, she will fly.  Most of the work of protection, cleansing, blessing becomes a daily ritual of sorts.  When we aren't managing the everyday, we are protecting ourselves and our loved ones.  We are pulling at roots of energy.  We are pulling them up.  We are allowing the flow to follow and fill us up.  Each night, the moon grows.  Each night, I pray for a lighted moon, a bright moon of night.  Fill up the sky with your phase.  Again, a witch is made on this night.  A witch in a year and a day.  Or tradition can fly out the window.  We get the scorn enough until something happens.  Other spiritual traditions try to maintain the anti-spiritual practice of not getting their hands dirty.  Even in the smallest circles, in the shortest rituals, we are blessed and we are drained and we need to remember to sustain ourselves.  Witches.  'Witch' is a loaded term but it is best understood as healer, friend (willing to go the extra mile to help others), warrior and nurturer.  There are those who can work with darker energy as well and perhaps that is the misunderstanding.  People are afraid of the dark.  Rightly so, I guess.  For certain spirits.  Challenges in a checker board.  Attracting the correct energy in ones life.  Asking always what is correct for me.  Is it to be lonely?  I'll have ghost walks and cemeteries.  I'll have writing workshops.  All to myself.  Is it to be lonely?  Is it to cast a circle, create a spell and offer up myself to servitude of the responsibilities of 'witch' even though I have responsibilities of marriage and work (and that's it).  Life might be better.  Burn sweet grass.  Bring in the sweet energy after clearing out all of the bad.  Burn the light in your mind.  Bless yourself with whatever you need to do work.  Sprinkle salt.  Close off your space to negative energy.  Create havens.  It's spiritual sanctuary.  It needs to be.  Walking in the sun.  Dying in the sun.  Sitting on the stump.  Sitting in a healing temple.  Kneeling in the woods.  Burning leaves of grass.  Night will come.  Make this moon my witch.  A most delicate friend with fur.  Frenzied spring break.  After smoke releases the season of cold and death.

trials of the heart: trial by fire

Don't say.  Don't listen.  Find 'em and forget 'em.  Just because you can.  So much beauty and yet, no soul.  Where did the soul go from the pocket watch men?  They used to be dapper.  These days, not so much.  You hang out there.  On the edge of my mind's periphery, a phantom stalking beyond my view.  You break my consciousness and I see you.  But tonight, I'll be with you, either way.  Words abound.  Don't get pulled into the depths of the mire.  Don't get pulled into the weight of the judgments around you.  The human condition.  Silence.  The human need.  Connection.  I have paintings to go into.  I go exploring.  I have grass to walk on.  I have dirt in my toes.  Connection.  For all the fancy things on earth, I'd just like to sit and be.  I can live on wilderness if I have you to take me there.  I need your words and your song.  Like melodies on blue skies.  And you've aged like a fine wine.  Something eternal, immortal about your expression.  Light fingers dance across the piano.  Delicate long things that create such conversation in their tone.  Each note a word.  You've spoken.  It makes me content that I could hear you.  I carry you on in wind and rain.  Each day, I carry you through sunlight and the sun dappled shadows.  I carry you.  My tinder bundle.  My little fire.  You keep me going in this existence of lead.  Molecules of you explode in my head.  Keep burning me warm.

ventricular fortitude

While goofing off and wearing my heart on my sleeve, I forgot where it was and let it get burned and buried.  Here we are in a black hallway.  Heading on down to my open heart casket.  I can't get over it.  I share it and it breaks.  Tell me about the heart of glass.  Why would some youngster point out all of my failings like I love them?  Does he think I don't know I'm a mess?  Does he think it will make me feel any better to hear it?  I know.  I know.  And diseased cities get eaten through.  No more sun.  We walk on in the wild rain.  Hearing the seasons change.  We walk on in the setting sun only to be one.  I visit his headstone often and wonder if he's like Schrodinger's cat.  Is he in there?  My mind can make him awaken and cry.  But, no.  He was dead when he was lowered into the ground, remember?  You can't walk miles in a drunken haze to raise the dead.  It doesn't work that way.  She used to play in the cemetery.  It was like her playground.  Bare foot and happy.  Until the storms came and chased her away.  When you don't want to meet beating hearts, this is where you play.

seed bomb

He comes on like rain.  He sends strings of tears down my face.  When he is near, his voice breaks my consciousness and sends me into the shock of being alive.  These are resurrected words on a Saturday morning.  No one took me to mass, I walked there alone.  The trees are silent emissaries.  Today they tell me the doors are open.  I don't have to stay away anymore.  I can walk into woodland worship and be at home.  I can sit and meditate on that.  No more sparks in the dark.  No dreams of Roman coliseums and romance.  We shift from dirty death to lacey frills in a heartbeat.  If only my rain-wet hero was a long haired rugged Roman.  We dream in hieroglyphs.  Why is Maximus there?  He's on his way to die in Rome and I'm still hanging out in the Temple of Bel.   I'm waiting for some vines to deliver up the Greek god.  It is all in a dream.  You can be the perspective.  No matter what perspective you dream up.  I went to get fed when Tori rocked the Tower.  When green was in and I was young.  I had friends.  Imagine that!  I just want to walk out into a large garden.  Tell the troubles to get out of the way.  I'd love to walk into rows of herbs and flowers.  Tangled morning glories.  I don't belong here, no way!  We've shaved off some moon glow to be a slim slice of life.  It dangles in the sky tonight.  Each night, more moonlight, gone.  Until we are dark again.  I'm not ready for a darkened moon.  I'm not ready for dark nights.  Bring on the rain and sun.  Bring on the pain.  Bring Spring so birds can come visit.  Perhaps I'll draw him a map.  Here is my heart.  Here it is.  I live on the brink of the forest in a small home.  I toil with mint and flowers.  I grow sage.  Here it is, my heart.  It beats one small beat at a time.  It hopes for small things to grow.

Spark in the Dark

Luxor, Memphis, Alexandria.  I'm on the road to your bric-a-brac antiquity.  Surely, some knick knacks and knock offs line this road.  Pharaoh tarot.  I'm a Greek dancing through a dusty deserted lane.  I'm twisted along the Nile from Upper to Lower Egypt.  Looking for a flood.  A flood of emotions has held me captive for weeks.  I wanted to let red run, rain down my arm from self induced harm.  You smiled the next day, you frowned the day after that.  Hieroglyphs of emotional range.  Like a Hieronymus Bosch painting.  You twisted me up in your movie frame.  A movie with really bad acting.  I've decided a way out of my pain was music.  Music is as it has always been.  Music is a way out, an exit sign to pain.  The voices of Opeth, Nile, Crematory, Moonspell tell me what to do and provide doors to leaving.  You can not harm me.  We almost burned together.  You and I.  There are no more sparks in the dark.  The electrical charge has been tamed.  It has been quieted and directed.  It wanted me dead.  Now it is wired up.  I'm in charge.  I'm driving away.  Poetry doesn't have to say anything.  It only has to provide doors.  We know.  I follow.  Sacred writing, ritual writing.  I'm wyrding out the ritual now.  No more pain, no more.  No more sorrow, no more.  No more defeat.  I'm done losing.  No more abuse, no more.  I'm not your stone to throw.  I can't ease your frustration.  I've got my temptation.  To be myself.  I have light, I have worlds.  I don't need closure.  I have wolves and night.  I have streams to follow.  There is this place inside of me that gives me all the comfort I need in the darkest of times.  I'm still here.