Shapeshifting
My body,
this temple of clay,
is my one and only home.
Silent quiet so so quiet
quite the void that I’ve built inside it,
you see, each morning upon waking I choose to not be afraid of the dark, rebirthing this
ssssnakesssskin ssssself that I’ve been sssshedding all SPRING.
You see,
spring never fully “ends” it just slips into itself again and all the while this bodied beauty folds its bones into the crooks of the books that I will forget to reopen until the next time the river comes out to play.
Bodies see more in the daytime but only know themselves
in the DARK.
The godly giants remind us that this world was once entirely cloaked in DARK:
the belly, the home, my mother’s gentle womb. She swallowed up the moon and grew a
self she always knew, cracked it onto the altar of this experience that we call a
baby “girl”.
But,
you see,
I was not born from my mother. “Through her” yes but “of her” no. This skin was fully grown inside the body of another, the one we call “grandmother”, yes! her hands built the boat upon which I sailed into this shelter and before her were the mothers and the fathers and the ancients and the forests and the canyons and the mountains and the makeshift spaces of sacred embraces between sea creatures land seekers sky reachers space eaters
FOR THE STARDUST SHIMMERED DOWN UPON THE CHILDREN OF THE ETHER!
For we are forever holy
money making hip shaking
wading through the trash heaps
swaying drunkards on city streets
stitching love into bedsheets
broken-boned deadbeats
We moan tirelessly through exhaustion
through ecstasy
through pain
and yet the rain always washes our supple bodies pure again always pure always light ALWAYS READY FOR THE FIGHT!
WE ARE ANIMALS WE ARE EONS WE ARE DREAMERS OF THE NIGHT
this body is not mine
this body never was
for it belongs to something much bigger than only “I” can ever be
For a long time I grieved.
For a long time I couldn’t see. THE DARK was all encompassing the void had been decreed so I kneaded ribs across the crushing lungs that never breathed and I puzzle pieced my way back up the mountainside each day and I said a prayer of gratitude before going on my way you see the way back down Olympus is both treacherous and clean after dusk sets and the winds slip footpaths beneath your feet.
Counterintuitive,
is it not,
to believe that knowing happens in the dark?
When did you first begin to doubt your own church of bone and clay?