cranium

There’s a perfect storm sitting inside my skin-shell; my face is the vacuous eye of it, taut with eerie calm, empty with stoicism - a silent nod yes without any gleam or flicker in the corners of my mouth, dull with acquiescence to a world that forgets time, forgets its own bloodline, forgets the location of the soul (it’s everywhere).

The little girl in pigtails who used to haunt my mother is sitting still at the bottom of the stairwell - has been for two decades - waiting with all her stories, drumming her fingers at the base of my skull. She’s glaring up at me through her lashes. She’s angry and she’s scared. She’s confused and refuses to age. She’s riddled with the holes carved out by her aggressors: rotting wads of flesh sit heavily in the pit of her womb, her throat, the back-half of her heart, her ankles, the flattened soles of her feet. From her open hands streams brilliant light, but she can’t walk so it ends up blinding her, ricocheting off the walls and circling back sharply into her eyes, illuminating the way for the people scurrying past her. Their thousand footsteps bog the track so she steps into their prints and sinks, drowning with the weight of memories that may or may not belong to her.

I glare back at her, an aged mirror with various cracks - to let the light in, of course - the ruthless aggression of a grown-up who involuntarily skipped childhood, who refused apologies and help when they arrived too late, who leaks salt everywhere whenever someone inevitably asks, “Are you okay?”

I’m sure that I’m okay, I’m just flooding myself clean ... but I want to pose the question back: Dear world, are you okay? Are you all quite fine ? I can’t help but hear everyone’s aching and it’s splitting my body into fractured fragments, so colossally disparate there’s no hope of sewing them up with gold. Perhaps I should make a mosaic of myself, and bury it in the ground, and someone could dig up the pieces and wonder how they looked whole. The earth could make nutrients of me and I’d finally be home. I’d finally be able to nourish everyone from the inside out.

I’d return to the ultimate cycle, and never again begin or end. I’d be forever; a quiet legacy.

lavender and sage smoke

I feel my sexual energy come back to me -
winding her way through the grungy labyrinth alleyways
of some depths of my mind -
with a sharp, burnt orange melting
that gorgeous, wild woman
slides back into the bowl of my pelvis
with her silky skin and shining teeth,
stretching her beautiful ankles.

I'm in his neck,
my back body the crescent moon
against his swallowing sun. We're moving
deeper and deeper into the shadows.
There's gentle warmth,
a lot of it.

We're smiling.
Easily.

I'm back in the possibility of creation,
words flow again from my fingertips;
one and one make three.

I'm back with the artists and the makers,
the dreamers and the doers -
the ones who've learned to transmute
their love and share it with the world...

I've always sought out these spaces and knowing faces,
warmed my feet by the fires
of cosy beaches and backyards,
drank the sweet smokey scent out of my clothes the next day,
passed the Garden around from right to left.

He leaves and I return,
we all Come Home.
He moves to go home; I become it.
I beckon her back to me, that fiery Wildess,
a crooked little finger waggling underneath the dinner table.
We eat a feast, and she eats me.
She devours me from the red up -
and when she's finished, there's just light
shining top down, brilliant and blinding.
The particles of me scatter themselves wider
and traverse different realms, drinking from every ocean
until she's tasted them all.

salt and sun

I’m a tree with striking tan lines triangular in a vast barren landscape.
I’m weathered amongst the winds of change, reaching in multiple directions in order to remain stoic.
I’m earthed into dusty sand, treading holes into the untrodden sun-caked crust.
I’m the flow of black water opposite a blue sky soaked in sunshine.
I’m present. I’m the One. I’m all of us.
I’m looking down the barrel.
I’m taller than I’ve ever been.
I’m holding the weight of myself.
I am the mountain and the mountain is me.

don't forget
to dance
with your ancestors, daughter -- 

use that house within your bones
which we built you from,

use it !
to shake stories from your limbs
and speak aeons with those faces

fill your lungs
with thousand-year-old air

(we came out of the water)

and don't forget
the earth you walk on
-- let gravity hold you down.
she's heavy enough for the job. 

here I go,
biting off pieces
      of my own salty flesh
      one by one
I'm severing
      my atrophied limbs
I'm draining my own blood,
      wallowing in a bath of
      milk and tears.
I'm stoic
      but I'm fractured.
I'm a house without foundations.
I'm a mountain that can't be summited, for I have
      no base
      and no peake --
   I'm the rocky ground in between;
      a few stray trees
           leaning into the wind.

I'm a heart on ice,
      waiting to be transplanted
      and even when I arrive,

I still won't belong,
      mis-matched to some body
the doctors deemed me suitable for.

I'm a map
     with no directions
I'm a compass
     unable to point north --
     the arm comes close, but ticks over
I'm a head without a body
I'm a face without a name
I'm a fire without fuel
I'm a sleepwalker
      caught in the middle of the night,
      pants down,
      climbing over the fence,
           feet covered in mud and
daisies.

I'm a receptionist's desk
      without a bell for help
      and everyone who arrives at me
      must wait
      for service
      -- including myself,
          I am the end
                  of the queue.

I'm a vast garden
      without
      any flowers
      or vegetables
I'm a groom
      waiting at the altar
      for a bride who never said yes
I'm a planet spinning infinitely
      into a black hole
      -- or worse,
          the sun

I'm a single perfect note
      followed by
      a deafening silence

illuminated

here's walking on water:
          two rugged cliff faces,
          white crests in between

here's walking on water
                              on water
                                    on water

my head floods green
         with a generous gift
          from the man with / out his pounamu
          (his green talisman shifted itself
          while he shifted green energy with green plastic...)

... and I think about touching
           your quiet ribs,
           your hair gently at the edges
                   of my smiling face

and I feel green,
         not with envy, but grounded
         green in the earth

         my head is misty, like
         a morning in the tomo,
drinking elixirs and inhaling smoke
in the portal.

waikare

We slept on the beach, coddled by the heat of a fire built on ancient driftwood, nestled into the memory of tiny rocks worn tinier still by endless waves, surveilled by the thousand eyes of the night and strange lights moving overhead. We woke to the light of tiaho mai rā fiercely burning rainbows into the oceany horizon, a bed for the tiny crescent of silver rising up in the latest hours of the early morning. We woke to the world by being removed from the world - no reception, no other bodies, no sounds except for the busy humdrum of the earth's own aliveness, atoms colliding and sliding over and around each other. We came home by going away. Our conscious sleep, pitter-pattered with adding more logs and lifting our eyes, morphed into finding ourselves awake.