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?