Every part of our selves are open except our minds, and yet that is where so many people live…
In the smallest room in the house, in the basement of our being, but it is love that calls us out,
with a beauty that begs to be felt… and so begins the only game we will ever know,
the temptation of the soul from its shelter.
— David Enke
I am tired of the surface and the shit, I am tired of facades and phoniness
I am leaving for the day, into myself. If you wanna know where, listen to this and follow the clues
see it standing there
feet in lavender and
head touching the washed
blue sky breathing in
the scents of grapes
and souls
a winery, a church
one and the same
the place of crushing
and filtration,
fermentation
maturation
the small and winding road
leads to the cavernous
inside, beams like
the bones inside Jonah’s Whale
and all swallowed within
who wish to become whole
but only in the crush
the broken shattering
can true wholeness emerge
in scents of lavender
and notes of bloody grapes
I did mean to say “breathe”
and not “breath”
clothe me in clouds
wreathe me in smoke
let the fresh breath(e)
of the deep Universe
touch my dry skin
and let me drink deep
the water of Life
from the Wellspring
of Love
i find myself constantly
bending over backwards
to become the table
the banquet feasting table
that my enemies
come and sit down to
a meal that I serve up
before they rise and run
at me with their sharp spears
i stand watching
that train rushing
flying by fast
and furious
ethereal
everyone on it is thin,
transparent and afraid
to just step off and grow
thick and green and
gravitational
spinning across
the blooming sky
and singing in
the solid dirt
there are the ones who claw
fierce at the universe
the way an anteater
claws at a log trying
to scratch out beauty in
small ant-squiggle pieces
about Twenty-Four hours
long, each one that long
then there are those who breathe,
who open their eyes and
breathe and blink in wonder
and awe because of what
they see made beautiful
in the seeing, in breathing
in of every breath breathed.
those who seek to consume
beauty and thus embody it
are doomed to dissolution
for flowers fade and wither
and end up burned and gone
but those who simply look
and look again in wonder
will find the Beauty flowing
within their eversouls
made beautiful
made beautiful
Medicine Woman Trust
yourself with tenderness
softer than snowfall
and give yourself
the gift of grace
like tender moonglow
peeking thru
the darkest clouds
Medicine Woman Heal
in the shining
pregnant present
by walking thru
your shadow
hollow past
unafraid to
look into the heart
of this becoming
Medicine Woman Imagine
your glittering goals, resources
diamonds, move toward them
in waves, sails raised
in those winds
creativity your calling
and your deepest well
Medicine Woman Celebrate
your Holy Years believing
your inner self, remember
your outer self as well
is beautiful like trees
that dance in glory time
with hands raised to the sky
in greens touching the Blue
Medicine Woman Love
yourself like mountains
love the clouds, the sun
and value vital friendships
of other truest women
all of your Bright Days
Haunted By A Lovely God
Okay.
I get it. I do…in spite of what you might think,
maybe several of you, maybe dozens of you,
maybe hundreds, or thousands or millions of you
have endured deserts and mirage oasises
vanished in life when it comes to the subject of God.
I hear your stories, the bitter rants of some, the tired futility
of many others, I have taken venom, been covered in acid,
as I lead face first and I listen to tales of
one thing held in desolate common.
“God’s not here”.
“God wasn’t there”.
“God isn’t real”.
“God doesn’t care”.
I bleed when you cry in anguish, and weep as I
hear your recitals, and then in dark rage, and then
finally in grief, that pools on the dark other side of the desert,
in that null empty kingdom of Ozymandias the great ruler of Vanity.
You might think I weep sanctimonious, sorrowful supplicant
of righteous standing, who’s crying for those destitute
and benighted, the distant, the stranger and other,
from my tower of ignorant pie in the sky…
You’d be wrong.
I weep in guilt.
Yeah…guilt.
For my tale of dark woe is so anti–tragic,
a Mysterium Tremendum, of a wretch so shattered
and shipwrecked in this desert island
…my body…
My story is different, and I feel so guilty,
confused as to why even in existential
despair I am still on the outside of the common
narrative swirling around me?
Contrary to you, in your longing and noble long
struggle to live, and to surmount desertion and
lost lonely silence by God in Their Heaven above…
I have always been
Haunted by a Lovely God.
When I was little and in my first dawning awareness,
and ageless, I recall that I always heard This Voice,
and at first I thought it outside me, I thought the wind had a voice,
or perhaps it was Trees, but it never was dirt under my feet, no,
dirt is a tongue-tied dull mute.
As I grew I realized that the voice was inside me…
in my heart, and I came to treasure its company
and the glad beauty of thoughts, and of musings.
Then I told my parents what it had told me, and,
flabbergasted, they asked where did I hear that?
And I told them “God. God told me”
(for that is Who the voice told me They were and …
Jesus like a Shepherd led me).
They laughed! LAUGHED! And while they were not mocking,
they merely thought me mistaken, had fantasized wonders.
So I cried then, and thought that maybe my parents were right.
And then came the break, the thirsty sword stroke
that cut me to ribbons, my soft girly heart left in shreds…
then the slavery started with harsh words resounding,
those prison door words…and God was still there,
holding me in my tears, wrapped around my hurt heart…
and I longed for death, wanted to jump in the river
from that tall steel bridge I crossed over each day
but God asked me “please“, and…
well…
who can say no to God when They ask “Please?”
Then They would give me a joy for that day…
and They gave me a dog! Oh! How she and I bonded!
But you have already heard some of the tales of Millie… “Good Old Dog!”
No…this is the story of me being Haunted…
Haunted By a Lovely God.
One time, I was alone outside our house
(the one in the Pear Orchards down near the cold creek
where Millie and me chased those skimmer bugs
and slippery pollywogs all live-long day…)
and it was warm in the soft early evening
and dusky and glowing ethereal gloaming,
the good dusk…and wind softly rustling thru fruit trees
so heavy with life and the sounds of the living earth
echoed around me…
…and then all was silent…
Suddenly, and it caught all my attention immediately!
Slowly I walked to the pear trees and stood, just to listen…
and I heard it…something!
The call of a Mourning Dove
(or is it Morning Dove?
I can’t distinguish
the One from the other,
it seems to shift
back and forth
always and ever).
It cooed and it called, and it seemed to me
as if it spoke to me, saying…”Come out to Me, Baby…
Come out to Me. Come home to Me.”
(Lady Grace, She calls me Baby now, here today)
I was so skert! I thought it was a ghost!
And this ghost it was longing for my tender spirit
and if I went out there, it would get inside me
and I would belong to it, always and be its flesh,
its living body for it to inhabit, its dwelling place
then and forever.
I wasn’t far from the truth… I look back, I think
it was Her, Lady Grace, Dove come down,
Her Voice was calling me, claiming me even then
as Her own…I wonder what would have happened,
my life had I heeded Her, gone to Her, run to Her
heedlessly on that first day?
It’s not coincidence that our trees now, all around our house
are filled with Morning Doves (Mourning Doves too), calling, cooing…
and pestering people in our neighborhood, but so comforting to me
as totems and emblems, reminders of Mama’s first call to my hurt lonely soul
and my soft tender heart.
Then: it was Veteran’s Day, fall, 1969.
We went to town several miles from home
for the parade…I insisted that Millie come with us,
and after the music and marching had ended,
we went to the movies: “The Love Bug”.
But Millie was left in our Volkswagen van
(the one that was faded red
with canvas roll back top
and that relentless bamboo pole that
Dad used to poke us and hit us with
when we were clear in the back
and too rowdy and rude)
and when we came back to the van…
she was gone.
I cannot tell you what that was like. I nearly fainted.
I ran in the street screaming her name, as cars screeched,
stopped and Dad chased me and hollered “Get Back Here!”
We drove the streets hours and hours, me,
head out the window, her name become my tongue
protruding and flapping and desperate in the cold wind.
I screamed that name loud, again and again until I was hoarse,
and I kept screaming, my grief-expiation for killing my dog
with my stubborn insistence that she come along.
I tried to bargain with Them…
in the sibilant cold and the darkness,
I lifted my face:
“I will scream her name until I pass out
and can never talk ever again, and then
You will receive my burnt offerings of me
and give me what I earned with my desperate grief,
what I bought with my service…my heart, Millie
come back safe home.”
They remained silent, aloof
(and I wonder if this is where They were in your tale of sorrow…)
Finally Dad said “she’s gone“…so we had to go home,
in that cold rainy dark night of loss on that day we remember
and honor the valor of those who faced
their fears and endured for me.
I threw up. I do that when I get distraught…I always have done…
I cried, and cried and I cried, and when I had no tears
I groaned and keened, inconsolably moaning…
crying til dust poured from my eyes in place of the tears long drained
empty by grief so stark it was a terror strong,
threatening to crush me forever.
My folks were hurting for me, so they used
what they always had carved me with, thought was
the best for me, raw in my towering emotions
and gaugeless deep passions…words, stern and cruel,
words so full of dark violence, and those words’ incarnated beast,
gawd…the spanking…well…yeah, the Red Raving and Hungry Beast.
I was forced to eat my dinner, and I threw it up…
on the table, on all the food, laid there for others to eat.
I then got spanked and sent straight up to bed…
where God was silent and nowhere to be found…
but hey, Ima talker, right? So I cried out to Them
into the darkness thick…
(now get this, and understand that I’d
been thru the wringer of Sunday School,
Hellfire Sermons, Damnation Devotions,
and I knew enough to be good or the devil
would get me. I once was told:
“I will not spank you…I’m just gonna
let satan get you”…and I roamed behind my mom
hours, and wailed agonizing in fear
and stark terror, and begged her to spank me,
deliver me from evil on the cross of my butt,
and her hard paddle the hungry propitiation
for my sins and my wrongs…and I knew that
so many times I had done things, hell-things like say “shit”
or steal cookies, or sneak out the window
to sleep with my Millie and her wriggly puppies
though I was forbidden to, or watch cartoons
on a Saturday morning so early and low before
anyone woke up and caught me at it…
and I’d never been sent to hell…God had not bothered
to notice or even to thunder at me, or make trouble over me,
and I knew lots of people thought God was a fairy tale,
which, frankly, mystified me cus They talked to me
so much when I was so little.)
That nite…I cried in a jagged blood whisper,
my voice bleeding raw, and the words,
still they linger there, seared deep in me
to this very day, now, here with you.
(and now, in this moment… I feel so damn guilty!
Why me??? Why did They talk to me of all people?)
I cried out “God…if You’re really there, real…bring my doggie home…
PLEASE!” Then…somewhere, somehow, I moved past bargains,
and buy-offs and bribes…I had cried my way thru the stark castle
of filthy rags and entered into the place of no exit,
the inner sanctorums of grace, where there’s nothing
to buy there with money, and there is no bargaining,
no supplicating, no pleas, there is just the beginnings
of Mercy Free…
and crying out the word please in that dark night,
eyes gummed shut with sorrow and tacky tears
I at last faded off into sleep, dreamless as I grieved
and wished I was dead, like I did every night,
and at last I knew nothing, released and insensate
and absent within the lost shoals of sleep’s gift
of respite from my agony, sorrow and grief.
Until I woke, instant and on point, into an electrical dark of night
black glowing bright-black that cast light and filled the still air
with a presence, thick, substantive knowing, and threatening
to rend plain reality like the quick ripping of shrouds
in the hands of the dread faced and tall grim deliverers….
…and I heard scritching, and
(oh oh oh)
her whine (that lil ki-yi-yi she always used to call me heart to heart)
and I jumped from the top bunk with a thunderous thud loud enough
to wake even the dead and I got up and ran thru
our house in that miracle moment:
“GOD BROUGHT BACK MY DOG!”
“GOD BROUGHT BACK MY DOG!!”
Babbling over and over again like a babe, Bartimaeus had nothing on me!
Shattering slumbering sundering darkness and giving voice
to that One Thing that I am:
Haunted by a Lovely God
Fumbling feverishly I rolled the gravestone away in my heart
and threw open the back door where she called me eagerly whining
in joyous returning at sunrise…
she’d jumped a 6 foot fence out of obedience so she could come in
thru the Eye of the Needle: the back yard garage door.
She limped and jumped on me and I went down to the ground,
I was crying and kissing her and she was kissing me
too and I ran my hands over her, scarcely believing that she was real,
she was returned, she was home and alive, and my heart was restored unto me.
Then she rolled over, so I could scritch her tummy like she loved
and when I ran my hands over her precious side, my fingers slipped inside
her skin and I drew them back from her side which was pierced and torn open…
(I swear! I know, the metaphor seems so damn cheesy, right?
It really happened this way! That’s the kind of thing I feel so guilty for…
it’s like They shouted it from the Bright Heavens that
I was not ever escaping Their Undying Love never ceasing and
new every morning. I’m telling you that I have always been
Haunted by a Lovely God).
She had torn open her side, and I’d thrust my hand in
just like Thomas and drawn it back,
bloody and warm and changed and I collapsed,
(cus I can’t handle blood, even though it has
handled me, covered me, branded me,
marked and commanded me
forever Under the Mercy)
I murmured brokenly
“God hear my prayers,
God heard my prayers,
God hear my prayers,
God heard my prayers”.
Later, my parents made sure I knew that this was highly unusual,
God has more pressing concerns than my dear dog,
or listening to me scream and demand…
yeah, there are all kinds of other prayers over the years,
that went up and bounced off…
you know the kind…yeah, those
…and life went on…went on…until
Puberty hit and then hell came home hard to stay…in hair and voice
and a horror-beard (and oh god oh god, oh god down there, oh god please no).
And life required again its cruel ransom, and I wanted,
longed to lay me on the gears and cogs that turned in schools
and the church groups that seemed to me incomprehensible strangers,
in their innate knowing of how to move and how to
laugh and to be… again I longed, desired to do away with me…
this gender–joke…absurd and ugly mistake,
just an ironic blight on “There” and “Here” because
I was neither…here or there, just a null thing
…and then…
…I had another time, deep in the darkness of night and numb tears
and dumb talking to Them…
…Them…
1973…14 and awkward and lonely and numb from the bashing I gave me
to un-know who I was and was not supposed to be, allowed to be, allowed…
On that nite, cold and alone in the darkness I told Them that
I was not going to follow Them. I was resigning from being a christian
and that I was leaving Them once and for all.
“No offense”, I said. “It’s not you, it’s me”
(I’d yet to discover how this trope is used when we
want to abandon an unwanted suitor or
how its thrown out…to hurt and to wound a familiar dull
lover become coarse and rank and too shrill)
“You have done nothing wrong, You have not failed me, no it’s I who’ve failed You,
and what’s worse, I cannot BUT fail You…always, because
“I’m a horrible boy, I’m an absent mute girl,
I am nothing, and I count for nothing and
I live on nothing and I mean more nothing,
just more black horrible, lost empty nothing.
“I am not going to church anymore,”
(for in those days I, like others around me, assumed that
if you went outside and climbed into the chicken coop
then such a fat happy bird you’d become.)
“…when school starts up again, I’m going to say yes
instead of no thanks when they offer me pot, and offer me drinking,
and offer me bodies and no clothes and company there in the darkness
and then I’ll be numb and feel wanted at least…
“I cannot do it, walk blameless and upright, for
I am a constant habitual wallower in my sin
all the time in my heart, in my mind as I fail ceaseless,
besides, I don’t even desire to be in on this world full of Leavenworth walls…
“I will not fake it! I refuse to be like them, sitting in their pews…
“with hallelujah on their lips
and wanna screw ya in their hearts!
“I’ll stay alive, take my medicine straight and deserved and so bitter…and
maybe if I try, I’ll even manage to conjure up a hearty yummy while
I drain the draughts of despair bone-dry…
“I know You’ll send me to hell…I deserve that, and even more so…I don’t
hold that against You, for You are and You always have been so Beautiful…
no, it is me, blight and curse, it’s just me, a disease in this world and pure poison.”
Fountains of sorrow again welled up, even as I wondered why they could
never be fountains of joy? And I cried and cried…softly so no one could hear me…
my brother sleeping…as always in these cut-off times…and
Millie was newly dead, gone to run free in the fields
of her dreams, yet another cruel tribute collected
by Usurper death…that left me so empty,
so cold, so cut-off and bereft.
Until I heard it…the Voice!
Calling me gently (as always), so I held my breath, listened
to be sure it was Them, then I heard a soft quiet
question asked so plaintively…
“What would it take?” (Ummm…whaaa? I didn’t get it)
“What would it take, Precious One? Child, what would it take
for you to not check out, not go away, but to come here
and spend time with Us everyday? Talk to Us, listen
and just be for Us… just be Ours always, just as your dog,
Good Old Millie was your friend, and she belonged
only to you?”
This was a careful and startling question and it was quick,
coming at me curving sideways! So I had to really think!
Something absurd, something so damned unusual, that there was no way it
ever could happen, I mean, don’t get me wrong…I still wanted to be with Them,
wanted to share in Their sweet soft communion, cus I LOVED my Jesus,
my Shepherd who I always dreamed someday would leave the 99 and come
to rescue me, I dreamed that He was my Jester to make me laugh
joyously, dreamed that He was my best Friend
…I just wasn’t…His best friend…and I couldn’t fake it. Nope.
So it was crucial I create conditions that even the Almighty God couldn’t meet
…you know…
God cannot make a rock so big that They cannot lift it, but They can do anything
so They can make this rock so big that even They cannot lift it…wait…
I was searching for that Rock that God couldn’t lift… right? So
I said to Them “If, when I wake this morning, and my dad says
‘Kids we are moving‘…if there’s a strange town so distant where
nobody knows me, and no one has seen me, and I can start over,
start fresh and anew, then I’ll choose you forever and
give my heart freely…lock, stock, and barrel, completely to You… I’ll be Your Millie,
all of my days till I die and my sentence is over.”
Silence gave answer…then after a bit…I drifted away breathing
deeply again as my tears crooned soft lullabies
to my hot cheeks, they ran down in such ancient deep
canyons of sorrow…down my face, down my heart,
down my soul to end up glistening in sorrowful streamers.
When I got up the next morning, things didn’t sparkle or gleam, and I didn’t
remember the Voice, the Epiphany…I was just staring at breakfast my mom used to
“cook” me in those days…Shredded Wheat with skim milk…and feeling
…that gulf, that dark feeling. That feeling. Yeah… The relentless sharp
razor slash cutting inside my soul, forever aching and Constant.
I wasn’t list’ning, as Dad droned on talking of somethingorruther… until I heard
him say the word…“moving”…something about that word…
why did it stick out?
Then in a quicksilver windstorm of memory-shredded, each piece was
hitting me, sticking, un-ripping its way to become one
coherent experience, and I recalled my reply to Their inquiry…
so I turned quickly and asked my dear father what did he just say…and he
said it again! He confirmed it! Just as I’d laid forth, to a T!
Haunted by a Lovely God.
(I feel so guilty… why am I treated thus?
Why me? Why not the prayers of parents
whose children suffer and die in horrible pain for
nothing that they ever did?
Why not the prayers of wives for soldiers
Cain has already marked for death’s dark
gaping foul maw, prayers supplicating
deliverance, protection, but
they go unheeded and
Death eats again?)
And of course, we moved, and I did…commit myself to Them…
once all for always…yep, I was in…
And I’ve hated it sometimes, and loved it at others.
I’ve grown and I’ve changed, seen Them change before my eyes as they were
opened and I could see other than my own idolatrous self and that
small god I fashioned, so stunted, blind, deaf and so mute in the
vanity of my self worship when my box, my image of Them I had
made was so gloriously broken!
I’ve sorrowed and railed… I’ve been outcast by mean so called
spiritual family, been stunned by the towering cruelty of those who should
know better, done blindly in the Most Wonderful Name of Them…
Lovely God to me, and so ugly and coarse, buffoonish in their mocking mouths.
I met my darling, and we had our babies…
she/they are amazing miracles…I watch the
lives of my college acquaintances shipwreck, their
marriages foundering on the black jagged rocks of their alluring
careers and blood money…and I watch the children of
hard working salts, such dear people around me, more worthy than I, better
people than I, quaff drugs like their hearts are on fire, and join themselves
numbly to anyone there in those earthquakes of loneliness,
wreckages strewn in their wake and their orphans tossed
careless like litter abandoned.
And I have prayed with these people, so passionate, supplications far more
suitable than my own bumbling tongue-tied petitions and tall ebenezers…
and seen them bounce off, with dust poofing, dry-cloudy in
dull drifting mockery…
…and I feel so guilty.
Such. Guilt.
Because They have haunted me… They’ve apprehended me… taken me…
They have not let me go, not let me drift… and I,
transgender woman held in such derision by
most of the offspring of the Blood of the Lamb…
The Holy Spirit has even shown me Her Name and Herself, Lady Grace,
and She’s drawn so near to me, to be ma Mère…my Mama, and teach me
my secret heart and my self, so young and emerging.
And yet still I ask myself why am I haunted?
I could go on, forever recounting the
stories of Their faithful presence and meddling hands…of
Yosemite Sacred, cathedrals where mountains became the
Triune God, and I fell asunder to claw at the dirt in despairing blood-guiltness and
crying for mercy… and wonder of wonders!
El Capitan: Papa…Half Dome, cut asunder became My Friend Jesus…
Yosemite Falls: my Lady Grace, flowing and washing forever until I am pure…
Bridal Veil Falls was me, shifting emotions and prevarications blown
lacey and wand‘ring across rocky faces but always to Them…
rising up from the ground, clean and unsullied as
Waterdeep sang for me They have been nothing but
Good in my life!
Each time I hear someone’s tale of woe filled with despair
or with cynical bitterness flowing, or just fatigue and futility…
I am worse than any teller, and merit less than the askers, more
toxic than anyone else who’s had issue with God, or
issue with Their Present Absence, or make issue with Them because
“there is this construct God which has come
out of nowhere, seemingly and thus doesn’t exist
(unlike anything else which its knowing of testifies to its being)…”
I have not told you this tale to shame you… I who am shame incarnate for so long.
Nor to claim privilege or power, position… I do not have an iota of that.
…I have not told you to lobby, convince you… or
proselytize, or evangelize you. God No!
I have made my expiation to you, my confessors…
The sin I am guilty of? Of this I Charissa Grace stand blood guilty:
Being
Haunted by a Lovely God.
Nomad…such
a lonesome word
a wanderer, thru cold
crowded tangy deserts
drifting, homeless thru
fudgy thick neighborhoods
traveler in time and yet never
home in any singular moment.
Feeling like
the darkened sky
could swallow me up
in seconds, under silent stars,
I feel the same way “Nomad” sounds
I am a wanderer,
a refugee in this
gulag archipelago
of google connection,
a stranger in a homeland,
a foreign and yet familiar land.
I have a suspicion
we are living but
as aliens estranged, from
our thin past, from
our strained culture, from
our oh so tragic country, from
our neighbors (as ourselves), from
our friends and family, from
our deepest self
and from God.
Nomad…
walking in the silence
of an anguished lonely prayer,
lost in the distraction that
constricts and consumes years,
hopes and dreams annulled
by all that alienation welling up
within us…and yet…
*there is always an “and yet”*
and yet we wait
estranged and encouraged
in hope that all is not yet
as it will be, we wait in hope
Hoping in that blue Promise
that promises are real and full
and yet we wait
and know that Nomad
can only mean there is a home
we wander from and
wonder back home to.
open up your gates, gates of old, gates so strong
filigree and delicate gold, interlaced with song
let the daylight in, let it shine, let it in
thru those sacred living gates so old and strong.
I am waiting outside, by the barn, barn so red
under skies of tepid grey deep scriven with true blue
you can come to me, thru the gates, out to me
or I can enter in and come to you
“Just because that’s the way you remember it doesn’t mean that’s the way it happened.”
| — | (via deeplifequotes) |
elaborate
intricate
wrought
invested
imposing
it’s still just
a brutal lock
and my subjugation
your only key
your finger comes at me
like you think
you are God
well, it would
if you actually thought.
but you don’t
think
you just assume
and instead of sparks
you give ice chips of death
yes, that’s it, you throw off
sparks of death and call it life
in your masquerade
i long for it
the feel of that
soft silk, hot
from the press
smelling of spice
and hints of
far away orange
scrawling over scarlet
the summer breeze
which sings of forever
but implies coming sorrow
and hear it
there in around
the dry and straining
vines digging in
stealthy red earth
jory loam and chocolate
windblown loess laurelwood
and long
i sit long
for it,
that wind
from the back
of forever
and here and gone.
we soared high on currents,
uplifts unseen by human eyes
but oh so visible to us,
we dancers in the skies…
ever young and long did we thus fly
until we tired and we had need of
landing, resting, manna sweet to feed our
honking hearts, our silky souls to
take wing once again, in skies…
we thought forever we would fly
until that day the clarion calls they sounded
and the promises of haven-rest resounded
to our ears, our listening ears though with our eyes
we saw nothing but blind…blinds…we just saw blind
and swooping sounds from where?
and so we flew, we glided lower, lower
and so the guns did bloom and boom
and shot us from the keening clenching air
in lead-packed punches to the breast…
that took away our very breath
until we died, and dogs ran at us hard
to carry us triumphantly back into Massa’s yard
we, feathers fouled in blood, in gore, in mud
our necks floppy and broken in that flood…
of death that finally claimed us as its prey.
A slow gentle snow
falls on cherry blossoms, falls
to the constant dirt
“play it close to the vest”
came the granite words beating
against my face cascading
on craggy cliffsides or was it
like cannons booming and crashing,
coinvesting indifference and distant
assumption, consumption and
constant presumption?
I couldn’t tell which was true
which one was stronger,
the smug or the deaf or
the dumb, cus they had
no ears, not that they
wanted to hear my voice
or my heart or my soul
desperate, traumatized, hurt…
But they certainly had words, oh yes,
and their unctuous tones quickly
said everything I was supposed to know
and nothing else…nothing else.
Close…play… “it”…vests…
what are vests?
And what does it mean
to play close…to a vest?
The vestiary vague and looming
is that closet where play can
be kept oh so close to the vest
(or costumes donned for cover)
The vestibule tells a different story
than the vestiges of vestiaires
that peek out from under those
fanciful covers…it looks so calm.
Which place is the womb
of a travesty played out, and
which one can make someone
divest a warm heart for stone?
Vests…what are they…hmmm…
There is gravest…that might be worth
playing close to, since crisis might
confront the bravest…in gravest?
But just the naivest? Well,
easy to push, just invest all
your privilege/position in triplicate!
And no one will ever be wiser!
I think vestal virgin
might be the best vest
as they cultivate flames
and harvest the fire
To keep the community
safe and secure well,
that vest I definitely
can play oh so very close…
play…is that a joke?
it…the most common term for me.
close…near, or shut off?
to the vest…I ask again which one?
Vests and me do not really
know about one another
Not the stars,
in all their splendour
but THAT the stars
are perceived AS splendour
THAT the stars release in us
ineffable numinosity
why?
ahhh…the wonder, the Wonder
the Door to the Outside
thru which we enter
Inside at last
you do your best
to deny me but when
you can’t, you would rather
use me than see me
you don’t even know
you are not aware
of how much is denied me
already forever
the body, the flesh
the flesh become word
the love of my own kind
her intimate touch, and
what I’ll have never,
well is it offset
by what I do have…
and just what is that?
rejection by children?
gaslighting my past?
shunning me, shutting me
outside my group?
you pigs called “big men”
I am not like you
though cursed with your flesh
my heart never yours
and you princesses, women
my soul…same as yours
but my body a charnel house,
nothing in common
locked out of inside
locked in from outside
why do I linger?
why…I’m a why
onions
brazil nuts
cranberry juice
water
grapefruit
carrots/carrot juice
ginger
herbal tea
“I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears.”
| — | Jean-Paul Sartre |
Image converted using ImgCvt
“In folkloric terms, animal horns on a female figure indicate healing and shamanic powers, as well as the ability to cross boundaries – between the human world to the Wilderness World (as the Yaqui call the spirit realm), between male and female, between animal and human. If a painter or writer is to be guided by her Muse, then she must be able to negotiate boundary crossings.
“The figure is wounded, as many of my figures are, to acknowledge the difficult passages of life rather than to fear, repress or ignore them; to celebrate the strength and wisdom that comes from hard experience. Clothes half-on, half-off her body indicate a state of transformation – she is either shedding her human consciousness or returning to it from a primal animal state.”
painting by Terri Windling
i wonder what my heart looks like
after the washing away of all
the filings, the shavings
replete with scents of
graphite and wood
and scryed metal
filigreed and
final?
i wonder
if it’s beautiful,
if it’s a testimony
to something? To someone?
In the midst of loss and abandonment
of everything by everyone I love and held
close and dear, I wonder if God abandons me, here?
The loneliness of exile echoes
the darkness of captivity
and always the marking,
the marking of the prisoner
and the marking by a prisoner
and the markings
Of a God who cannot forget
and cannot be forgotten.
God carves with the sword of sorrows
baptised in great inkwells of Shalom
and my heart Their Ready Slate
God mixes beauty and ashes and oil
and Shalom is Their medium and message
(my heart torn and bloody)
and gift of peace, God’s offering
of well-being, God’s great good news
and saving salutation…
and I never need to hold it
because God writes it into me
to make it me, and make me it,
to hold it, smell it and to taste it,
to be gathered in forever
and delivered from all grieving…
I wonder what it looks like
my heart within my soul?
here in the neck,
in the in-between
the glass on top
and the globe
on the bottom
amidst the slide
of sand but where
it bottlenecks up
in the illusion
of steady and still
blissfully pretending
that it is not
trickling
grain
by
grain
I try to figure out
what’s going on
out there beyond,
on the other side
of the impassable wall.
Here among the ruins
of ancient times and places
I pick the flowers that grow
merry and brief and oblivious
to the faded splendour hinted
in the wreckage of time’s passing
grain
by
grain
are the flowers
the same as the sands
(I wonder this),
do they know they will also
become ruins?
Or do they know some
secret, have they some
nepenthe,
some salve,
some balmy medicine
for sorrow to aid in forgetting
pain and suffering?
i pick flowers
among the ruins
and long grief
is an altar hungry
for expiations that
are never enough
and yet still offered
grain
by
grain
“I still care about you a lot and I’d be a liar
if I said that I don’t miss you, but I just don’t
know if you’re what I want anymore. Maybe
you still are, but maybe I’m just a sucker that
can’t figure out how to let things go.”
…Welcome! 🙂
“Constance” refers to “Constant Reader.”
Do not take a post or two as emblematic of the entire blog…I post what is in my heart and on my mind, so to get a good understanding you will need to browse around…utilize the calendar feature at the bottom of the page and you can jump back and bounce around.
BLESSINGS!!!
it is high above the smoke, the noxious fumes,
stench belched from bulls and bullies, flesh and steel
above the ego faces that still shield
the hearts and empty hovels lurking there
you know, that land of dreams that nightmare breeds
to stalk the streets where zombies walk in peace
that feeding ground of brains not being used
that parched and soulless place of no relief
lead me higher, sit me in the dirt
at least I feel vibrations of real life
in every grain of sand and pebble hard
and hold me, till I know that I’m alright
Siggghhhhh….
I really love this poet. She makes longer poems that give my spirit room to roam, to ramble, to buck and thrash and pronk like a beastie antelope under endless starry skies…
Here is a small excerpt that rings in my soul!
“…It is easy to see,
here in the dark, how explorers of old could
convince themselves of destiny, cousin to destination,
of a magnet star calling to the magnet in the breast.
Quest is kin to conquest. Scaling these leaves, helmed
ghosts cry out in seven romance languages, Devil
take the hindmost! and flail their way into the surf
of sinuous vines. Like them, I navigate by clutching.”
By Susan SpilekiEnjoy, friends…enjoy
Don’t take it personally, Gentle Readers. A good friend of mine refers to both her two large cats and her college students as the “little beasts.” It’s a term of endearment. Enjoy the poem.
Nightview from the Beanstalk, with Moon
I.
Up here, night clouds move like an ocean breaking
against the beanstalk, rolling into charcoal
horizonless shore as if racing to discover new worlds,
ferocious and green. But there are no new worlds
left to discover. There is no green; only heavy midnight
blue indistinguishable from eternity. Without moonlight,
this foliage is primal, reaching out. Jack says,
Navigate by touch as salmon do, heaving themselves straight
upriver, up waterfalls, up to invisible sky. It is easy to see,
here in the dark, how explorers of old could
convince themselves of destiny, cousin to destination,
of a magnet star calling to the magnet in the breast.
Quest is kin to…
View original post 819 more words
three women
are left widows
Ruth
Naomi
Orpah
(hers a different story)
one left (missing tooth in the wind’s mouth)
one bereft (missing river in the bank) and
one rooted in the cleft (present)
Naomi without water
on fire with despair
Ruth without a plan
on fire in the air
choosing simply never leaving
just simply remaining…
there
no matter what the cost
allegiance to the weakest
boasting in the vulnerable
feeding the dessicated
and comforting the desperate
and calming those who rave
when women stand together
for the sake of one
no matter what the cost
they stand, they hold…they save
it reminds me of the marvel
the wonder and the mystery
of Jesus in humanity
at home in shared adversity…
we all of us “Naomis”
As Jesus walked among us
“the very least of these”
and chose to share our horror
and chose to face our death
and bears now on His body
the marks of His great love
He shows God’s solidarity
He is our loving Ruth
the difference between living and dying
can be found in the difference between
the Grand Canyon and the Milky Way
Another way to say it is
mutual dependence
Living Mutual Dependence Dying
We need the solidarity of the reaching skies
in swathes of silk and shades of grey
to close that gap completely
all the way
Solidarity…
Mutual Dependence…
trump cards over torture and unbridled ego…
habits that engulf so many with such ease and lack of effort
Adversity sometimes coaxes out
the best and the most beautiful
in human beings but only if
the sky can partner them
thru the gap
between
that unrelieved thirst
that threatens to engulf
and the utter madness
of misdirected sanity.
Ah…and the skies like banners unfurl
The Difference Between
The route left the Côte d’Azur
at the golden height of Autumn
in the silver splendor sun
on the silky stretch of sand
Parallel lines
stretching out
Jews Christians
wealthy workers
old young
Oppression Resistance
never meeting until
the chain connects
in commitment,
in the blood of
one another
The tracks are different than normal tracks
Those will never meet, but these meet
in the meat and the smoke and the ash heaps
Of Auschwitz
In Dachau
Thru Treblinka
To Birkenau
A Train that left in Autumn arrived in Hell
A Train in Winter fueled with horror.
A Train Running Silent, Death Shark
along those metal tracks, sparks flying
whistle silent
and my trauma rides there too
cold in the shiver-cold cars packed
with the bodies and the empty eyes
and the ever playing rape and violation
as I follow my own tracks to my own connections
to face down dead flat eyes and masquerade eye lashes
that blink furiously to bat the truth away
I am posting this because words are important and mean things…and this article provides that meaning.
****************************************************************************
New paradigms often require a bit of new language. This is certainly the case with the neurodiversity paradigm – even the word neurodiversity itself is still relatively new, dating back only to the late 1990s. I see many people – scholars, journalists,
The tiny echoes of your
small silence are dwarfed
by the elephant in the room
hiding under the lampshade
of your indifference.
I said it, yes
I said it.
You don’t say anything
even though I wait
every night and endure
every desert day hiding
under the hot sun
of my charade.
It’s time for bed
and I lay down
and still you don’t break
but instead you take
your silence-cuffs
and chain me
the nightlight goes out
so you turn on the light
overhead and it bears down
bright
relentless
and sterile
just
like
your
silence.
It is not so much our slogans and statements, our creeds and commitments as it is the way we walk them out with our flesh and blood. Documents are empty hulls of potential…and every single day that we truly live those commitments we give them flesh from our flesh and blood from our blood.
The challenge posed by staunch commitment to broken people is that you then will have dealings with broken people.
This can be troublesome if you unconsciously expect that broken people will live and act unbroken. If you dribbled a crystal globe, and it shattered, and then when you touched a piece and it cut you or poked you, the challenge you would be facing would be full blown in how you reacted to being cut.
That is where the reality of creeds, statements and slogans truly emerges…the ones who react in shock or outrage or horror are the ones who thought that globe was a basketball. The ones who recoil in horror or anger or disgust are the ones who believed it was a soccer ball.
That is the distilled essence of walking out the Gospel: realizing that it is a message that attracts the hungry, the lost, the broken and it is not the creed which transforms but the living Presence of Christ IN that creed that does the work of healing and restoration.
Which means to live the Gospel is to be inconvenienced, to be confronted with wounds that stink and are infected, to change the emotionally and spiritually incontinent…and to do it in patient joyful tenderness.
Someone can make their point with stern words and terse actions…it is not hard whatsoever to understand a point that has been made…and someone else can walk their love with gentle hands and consistent presence, and then ask for whatever they want as the broken heal, and slings are discarded and casts are cut off and the lame begin to walk.
And then…deeper…closer…at the pulsing core…the revelation that is couched in those words from the cross “Forgive them Father…they do not know what they are doing.”
Those words have such compassion and understanding in them…they assume that most people would do good things if they REALLY KNEW the impact their troubling actions are having.
It’s such a good thing that we are coming to the place where we can even see that our statements and commitments and creeds have a unique calling to be expressed in our current climate…
it’s an even better thing when we count the cost…
it’s the best thing of all when we keep going and the word(s) become flesh.
there is a tide, red and rough, a red tide
there is a sea current deep and dark blue
they twist together on Time’s spinning loom
or are they the needles that Fate clacks together
to spin out, to weave our quick times?
deep in my blood flows a tide and a current
twining in red and in blue and the echos
and rumours of beauty are driftwood in me
remnants from dream islands not yet discovered
but whispering of That Place where All Is Well
and the ancient and old, the fearful and bold
walk the earth in my blood or sail in the blue currents
to woodlands and hills and to mystery legends
returned in the Hope and the Promise of paradise
tidal and twining insistent in me
the glacier moving blue
and stolid crushing step
inevitableness
occasionally makes noise
as it crushes rock
and crumbles it to dust
it listens to the waterfall
cascading off of granite cliffs
and hurling thru exultant air
and roaring in its falling flight
and does not understand
the tumult ringing loud
and shout of exultation
its liquid sister sings
and so in all its stolidness
the icy glacier murmurs
that waterfall should fly
but quiet in the night
and careful in the day
and keep her singing heart
concealed within her breast
and hidden in the light
and tumbling down…
sssssllllloooooowwwww…
as if a waterfall
could not sing, ever sing
in joyous flying freedom
and just gallumph along
like glaciers, crawling over
whatever may be there
glaciers grind all things to dust
but waterfalls can fly
and waterfalls can shine
and waterfalls can sing
and wash the stones so clean
and leave them shining there…
glaciers…wearing vests
waterfalls…loud, blessed
and dancing double time
I am astounded at the absurdity and the letdown of the last 7 days.
I have learned that I am cursed with the notion that words mean things…specific and precise things, and some words can morph, can shape-shift depending on the wind or the light…or the scents in the air…
and so I have collected them…words. I use them like a carpenter uses finish tools, like a furniture maker wields her instruments of creation.
But I have also learned that others do not…
…others do not know that words mean things (they ass-u-me)
…others do not CARE that words mean things
…others use words carelessly
…others use words lazily
…others use words clumsily
So the next thing I learned is that other people freak out when I ask what they mean…they get upset, or angry, or worst of all puzzled, as if I speak in a foreign language, as if I am an animal that suddenly went Narnia and began to utter intelligible sounds…but since I am just an animal they need not be considered seriously, it is just a lucky co-incidence.
This freaks me out greatly when this happens…being a sufferer of brain trauma, this ambiguity and denial of meaning is like throwing gasoline on a fire and expecting it to go out like water has been applied to those unwanted and despised flames.
So I devised a coping strategy…I decided to ask for clarification.
“I don’t understand, would you please clarify?
“I am uncertain as to what you mean, would you please explain?”
“I am anxious and scared because the ramifications of what you said shout and gibber at me and I have no hiding place…will you please give me definition and reassurance, or if not then out with the guillotine and lop off my head?”
Sometimes, when I ask this, people deny there is anything to define…the inference is that I am crazy, reading too much into the words, finding things that are not there, and that I just need to mellow out.
“Take things for face value” they say.
I tried that. It led to betrayal and violation and deeper/horrific trauma and a conflagration that nearly was my end…thank God for God and for Phoenixes.
So that didn’t work so well…or rather, it utterly broke and stained for good that place inside which could (a little) stay still and let go and take something on its face…this is utterly absurd anyway, given the combination of words that are so carelessly used and the mutual exclusivity of those combinations…to take most statements at face value is to accept meaningless absurdity and to bathe in the vile flow emanating forever from the ruins of the tower of Babel.
This led to a different strategy…that of survival.
Maslow wrote about the hierarchy of needs, ranging from survival to self-actualization, and emphasized that when survival was in question self-actualization was a pipe dream if it was even present in the threatened consciousness.
I learned that words cannot be trusted when they are loose and running wild in packs like rabid dogs. I learned that other people do not want or will not choose to place them on leashes and seek to master them and use them for life rather than death.
(“The power of life and death is in the tongue” says the sage)
As I survive, I discover people and places where there are indications and implications that I might find sanctuary. I begin to trust, begin to hope…and then comes the dilemma…undefined words, confusing communication contradictory and capricious…
What do I do? Whenever I ask for clarity, that ask is offensive, shocking, puzzling, incomprehensible? But if I don’t ask, then I am doomed by this:
In the lack of clarity, I am compelled (powerless in this, actually) to find the worst possibility and the shade of meaning that places me in the worst place…and that becomes my truth.
Which of course leads others to heap on even more incredulity, and they say to me THEIR truth of me…
…as if I am an idiot for thinking what I think in the face of ambiguity…
which actually drives me deeper into the fires.
In these last 7 days this has happened to me…and I have happened to it as well, for I sought clarification…in open words, in more words than others consider decorous (because I want to be as sure as I can that I am clear in what I am saying)…in plain pleading plaintive words…begging words with empty cup extended in front of my dirty street urchin face…
and the bottom of lower than the worst has been the result…
The very worst thing, the ultimate blow that anyone can give to me in this place…
…………… is silence……………
no response
no reply
no nuffin
That silence has a voice. Did you know that? Silence speaks?
In knives
In slashes
In crushing fog weighty and inexorable
Silence gibbers sinister
Silence threatens with burbly graveyard chuckles
Silence goose-steps over my grave in shivery stampings
Silence screams that I am nothing
Silence screams that I am soon going to be eaten
(but only after I have been torn apart)
Torn apart by words…for it is on the other side of silence that others finally speak words…imprecise, wielded clumsy and ham handed, lacking nuance and deftness…and me, Andromeda without a Perseus caught there by my wrist, chained while the imprecision feeds on my liver in gnawing knife pecking beaks and ripping tearing talon claws…
It is in these moments that I wish it would just stop.
Just.
Stop.
I have recognized this is also mostly the result of trauma in my life, and of that I have recently written…no, you cannot just “mellow out”, just “relax”, just “let it go and choose different”…thank you very much for your insensitive and ignorant admonitions…give me some credit, and imagine that a being as complex as myself might have tried that a time or trillion…no.
Trauma is with you like your skin, but it is a skin inside your skull and made solely of cockleburrs and foxtails.
And that is where this poem comes in…”Nothing Rhymes Orange”
It is short, considerably shorter than the ravings of this post (now you see why I love to speak in poem and nuance and layers)
Words
Uncertainty
Anxiety
Fear
Ask for clarity
Silence
That is the road for Charissa that leads to hell.
5 days of hell, and me still here and no one understanding the fortitude or fierce fight that I have been in simply to be here prattling on and on and on and on…
Silence says to me “Just shut up and go away”
Silence is the siren call crooning and never have those sharp rocks looked so inviting, so final, so untroubling in their destructive shadow.
But I? Well, I guess that I am even worse than bad…because in the face of repudiation and rejection shouted so eloquently in that Silence slouching towards this Bethlehem, I don’t even have the good sense to go…the courage to go? The integrity to go? Is that it? Prolly that is it since my integrity is called into question in the imprecision and indefinite miasma that masquerades as communication…
Is it that I am stubborn? Is it that I am curious and want to see how it ends without me breaking character and stepping off the stage in Act 3 of 5?
I dunno…I will just go with the end of “Papillon” (those curious can search my blog for that, those not curious, well why are you even still reading…did I not lose you in the Labyrinth of my words?? ‘Ware the Minotaur, sojourner!!).
I WILL NOT BE SILENT, even though so many will…
but I won’t lie either. These last 5 days have been a living hell inside my skull, and it hurts so bad.
Everybody
wants to be king
of a hill
and that hill
just a pile
of dust
hot and red
and dry
or a dungheap
so silent
and stinking
with malice.
And yet
with more kings
than hills
and more dirt
than heart
and more dung
than wisdom
we just
collect hurt
and more hurt
from wounds
and from cuts
and from boots
on small faces
from despairing cries
and from silence
and malice
we just build more hills.
I wonder in stars
inverse black against
skies of light why
I wasn’t worth
the fight.
empty my skull
with a spoon thru my eyes
scrape the bone clean
and give me the peace
of an empty mind
worthless
no value
no beauty
just me
in my
traumatized
brain
screaming always
and keening
I am at an end of some kind
an end of expecting pink
when the sun arrives and departs
an end of hoping someone
somewhere would get it.
I am at an end of expecting anyone to
actually understand shooting stars
streaking thru the night and
my words piercing pulsing
pricks of light thru dull
dark and choking
indifference…
or any yearning
to pay attention
to urgent and plaintive
cries.
I who am
healed in words
am at last wounded
by words and endless
accusations and slander
and the opaque screens of untruth
I have been broken
I have been violated
I shall never
be clean again
I don’t think I will
ever be whole again
or fit for any service
the light thru the window merely
heightens that separation and
the scraggly fingers waiting
to claw my heart to ribbons
and lick the talons clean
in the moments between
sunrise and sunset
in the cruelty
of the ordinary
I am double
I am here and somewhere else
I am in caves of coming futures
staring out at fires casting shadows
of the past that flicker, flounder
and then disappear.
I am winter and I’m summer
I am autumn with some spring
thrown into my yellow gold veins
surging and pulsing with everlife
straining to throw off apples and pears
and some of that fruit
without a proper name.
I am true blue trueheart covered in shit-words
I am singing never silent song chained by silence.
you can call me whatever you want to call me
it doesn’t change who I am.
I am double.
I am here and somewhere else.
I am a broken girl and I am
not so easy to love like
carefree normal confident girls
next door in cotton and flannel and lace.
I live inside a fortress and I hide
inside shields and my soul
lives centuries in seconds
I am a survivor of wars
that break the strongest
men so flimsy.
Can you love me so strong that mountains
collapse into the dust of quiet surrender?
Can you melt my doubts and burn my soul
hotter than cold death and abandonment?
Can you endure my very worst days and stand
me not knowing that I am beautiful,
can you erase the thousand tormenting words
the sibilant whispers from hell’s pits of isolation and horror? 
Can you stand that I am thinking even now “Why would you?”
Why would anyone?
I run from you,
but do you see that I run
far slower than I could?
Do you even know
what that means?
Why won’t you chase me?
Could you provide me anything
that I can rely on, any routine
that will be as sunrise and sunset
again and again?
Could you give me a pet name?
Could you kiss me, touch me?
Then do it again, and again.
I am a broken girl and I am
thirst itself so strong that Sahara is oasis.
I am a broken promise but I love
with loyalty that is the stars’
commitment to shine in the night.
I am a broken girl and I am
Charissa's Grace Notes 
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