I find now, that I have removed myself. No longer a part of a life that can be considered “western”… The life that I was brought into by default and cultivated from. It is easy to forget sometimes until caught off guard, at which point you can see it at my core, coming through the lack of repress. And then, it is like I truly am the land that grew me.
There was never a way to win against all the odds in the west. It is a commonplace cycle of death, birth and survival. Since the beginning, people have been coming here mistaking the impression of endlessness for opportunity. No one ever came to the west who wasn’t running from something. And those of us raised here by those people, were suckled with that desperacy. It has worked its way like a disease from one generation to the next.
The sun is fixed on life here, sucking the water from everything. There are wildfires in the summer, and blizzards in the winter. Dust and cold alike, covering sagebrush and skin and life itself, turning everything into the same numbness of grief so that there are times between one year and the next, when a person has no way to tell the difference. The valleys and plains, though dry, give more of a lonely impression of open ocean than of land, or of anything you could ride a horse across.
The men here (that I grew up with), are made as callous as the hands they work with. Stripped of unnecessary flesh… By weather. Rained, and sunned and blown and beaten into a state of crudeness where all elements of mercy are lost. And the women are disintegrated. Trying to muscle up an impression of invincibility and of grace, in a place where it was better to not be born a girl in the first place.
Out here, femininity is the easiest meat to feed on. It is devoured into rarity before most of us reach the age of five. So what is left is women clinging to religion as a means to cope with the insensible cruelty. Trying to extract meaning and purpose and control out of the constant tragedy, so as to not lose themselves.
To live without God here is to live alone, as prey. Children are bred heartless and made more heartless by the poverty of their compassion, as the law of the land has always been eat or be eaten. It is true in the emotional sense of the word as well, maybe even more so.
The main streets of the old western towns I grew up in are littered now with impermanent chain stores. Absent of a building code, it looks as if the businesses who came here, all snagged themselves on the destitution. Unprepared for the kind of customers who leave their Christmas lights on all year long (they are simply that degraded).
Walmart, Kmart, Taco bell, gun shops and E-Z Pay day loans are the only stores which have made it out here. Like scavengers they are the businesses which survive off of the unfortunate, and left behind as if they were a food source. People who would be driving cattle, growing gardens, canning their own food… Are now swallowed by the wave of modern society and left behind by it.
And now the cowboy, who once conquered the Native American, is conquered, their life made obsolete, making way for the new wave of people trying to take over out here. Now a days they live in trailer parks, or houses falling apart on the outskirts of what can hardly be called a city, living on cigarettes and chew and easy access television. Working in metal shops or corporate dairy farms, or meat packing plants, selling their souls to Walmart and Kmart and E-Z pay day loans, because it is all they can afford to do.
And so, still an infant by settlement standards (as it was conquered barely over one hundred years ago), it is already full of a hard won, gun shot, broken history. And the kind of wounds that never heal. Guarding freedom like prison was on the other side of every door.
But beyond the hot crackle of the grasshoppers and dry, winter frostbite, there is a slow, heartbreaking beauty, a vastness that can never be possessed. Un peopled wilderness where the night sky is so dark, the stars are a bright, white dust instead of interspersed lights of only those which can out shine the nebulous glow that humans create.
There are sunsets and wildflowers. Animals outside cages, people outside metal and glass. The collection of them, made intimate by having to live a life, simplified by realizing the temporariness of everything. Taking nothing for granted.
And though the struggle is a violent dance that no one would participate in if given the choice, it has a way of connecting you to the earth. In a way where life itself is distilled to it’s raw, original self.
A plead as simple as bleeding,
To be free of the warm veins,
forged for survival.
Where?
Directions are lost,
Obscured by wind and stinging soot
Pulled relentlessly from the earth,
No longer stable and turning black.
Where?
Is it the prison of it ,
That shapes you the most?
Or the shapelessness of your keepers?
Reality is scarcely a fossil here
Where?
The chemical blood, smeared on forearm and thigh…
It brings out the best in us.
Bravery’s way of finding us, where mercy would not
And honor’s taste, heavy on a bitten lip that will never speak of this again.
Where?
I am the only soul here,
The only thing living, besides molten,
That flows in slow, spitting rivers, breathed in by nostril and pore.
A living cadaver, in skin like wax that never melts.
As cold as the idea of this being not where I belong
or what I deserve,
has become.
Where?
The path of devastation, leads you in circles they say.
Back to the same Iron,
The same brand.
The same vision every way you see it.
You are a slave.
But the tears don’t come beyond the thousand degree heat,
and the way it’s scarcely felt now, when it burns me.
Where?
Against what bones still un fragmented, and what flesh still un torn,
Fear is a rising tide.
The only thing I fear is fear itself.
It is the only thing telling me, life is not like this for any soul but mine.
But any love they drip to me will fall like blood in the end…
No way to take it in,
Once it’s outside you…
Awaken love.
May the blue, ethereal, newness of your eyes look upon this world.
May your tiny, uncoordinated hands explore it.
The sun lays itself across your window this morning.
May you greet it with a smile which will never vanish from your lips.
You are home, with me.
May you always keep this kiss I lay across your cheek.
Awaken love, and know you make a heaven of my everyday.
These early summer days feed off of time,
Stripping light and darkness alike from the sky in cycles which feel mere minutes apart.
The sun rises and the sun sets with blue and rosy lips kissing the tips of each rolling hill,
As if the colors were trying to suck life from them, the grassy breasts of the west.
Weeds and flowers appear to be the same creature,
Their complexions, the colors of love's own breath.
Pink fields, the blushing cheeks of the seasons.
Each rainy day stands as beauty's beast,
And for a time these storm clouds serve as gravestone to the stars.
The mortal moon is devoured by shadow then is reborn,
Crowning itself king of the midnight heaven.
This dark sky procession is of endless age.
My voice, barren of pride, for next to this I appear poor but free.
Swollen, dark, bulblets at the axils of each of your whirled leaves,
Pointing upwards, as if a sign of your fertility,
Painting you the most sexual of all beasts.
You are almost waiting here tonight,
Like a siren, intent on seducing the entire month of July.
Petals melting back,
Daring the touch of a humming bird's tongue,
Then declaring the act Erotic.
Sometimes I think you wish you didn't wear the clothing of a vixen,
The only lily that doesn't hold the copy write to a lonely face, so people could
Find your fragility before they plucked you to watch you wilt in a prison of glass,
With no sky to look upon, and to love you.
East Asian native, garden escapee,
Your spots instead of dew drops look like blood stains on orange satin,
Bleeding through, until they end up drying on your blossom,
Maybe because you are the one who hides your battle scar
Beneath a forest of stamen, reaching outward,
Cupid infected and pollen tipped.
These grass blades stare at you as if wishing they were worth notice,
Yet you are the one never satisfied with having represented enough color for the world to recognize.
Don't you know,
You are the one with whom the departing side of the day chose to leave its claim!
Don't you know,
You are part of the sunset's array, of mango colored children!
I rode, under a cloud multiplying sky, which matured yet garnered no age.
The temperature had yet to dissolve into summer.
Miles and miles of touch- less acres daring to be run through.
Land under hooves, newly condensed with the tears of spring.
Heaven and hell could have mixed and spun, as our pace made time and space seem void.
Pressed up against his withers, his breath boiled upwards, through my hips and chest and heart.
We've made imprints upon a field, which when blown, moves like the sea.
So there I wept in some place inside, for the feeling of this I so much missed,
His coat grabbing at the fragile shade cast off under my legs as if it were tightly knit webbing between us.
All the matter in the living air took breaths as one,
And I listened to him so as to climb up the sound of his inhalation.
We have birthed a resurrection, you and I…
Of power in the sweat it took to achieve the second that we were no longer separate, but one.
One creature forged of the two broken halves of each other.
Together, we concealed our secret intentions to escape by any means possible and by any means now.
In that jointed stage of self-synthesis.
It was then that I told him “Fear not this second my horse like lover,
Fear only the fact that like everything else that feels perfect, to this moment too,
Will be fastened an iron bridle, which will restrict the longevity of it’s movement.
And this moment will slow, and dive into a thing called yesterday....
The waters in which triumph tends to drown, but how it sparkles as it sinks.
Because beauty is still possible in yesterday, its water isn't dead.
And it is there that we will be preserved…
Our identities melded, sinking this ship wreck of a plan to keep us locked up in a round pen.
No matter how many faces a round pen may assume,
We tore the vein giving life to any and all of them today.
And now,
I'm half man and half horse”.
I remember you and I used to play in the dirt which makes this world whole.
You and I used to know how to pretend,
or maybe we used to not pretend at all and that's what made us so perfect.
I recognize you amongst the many.
Growing lonely in your world of play things and penny candy.
Your softness, like birds caged for their antics; the prison now a home.
I see you in the reckless direction of everything I’ve ever fought for or believed in.
I see you still in the field beside the house, an exalted fabric of green on blue, and God there too…
All the answers we wanted in simple things, like the zealous union of weed and flower.
I want to tell you that there are people who find beauty only in broken things…
Before it’s too late, and pull you then from the diluted pain of our losses.
And tell you, the voiceless, to borrow mine.
It is that of a woman, relieved of the heavy husk of childhood, intending to heal for the both of us.
You are not to be ashamed… For healing is the seed of hope.
And a seed may be small, but as it is planted in the earth,
It is not said that it is rootless and stem less.
It is not condemned as immature and underdeveloped.
It is instead stared at in wonder.
Because for the length of time it takes to get from seed to bloom, to death of the flower…
It contains it’s whole and complete potential…
As do me and you.
Promise me now,
Promise me always
Even as they strike you down with a myriad of hatred and violence,
Even as they dismember and destroy you that no man can ever be your enemy.
The only thing worth anything is love;
Unconditional, invincible, limitless love.
One day when you face this world
Unburdened by the tyranny of fear and hate and greed
Your fellow men will behold you.
Across a thousand cycles of living and dying in full bloom
Your joy will become eternal.
No sun or moon that ever rises, will ever see it fade.
Promise me now,
Promise me always
Even as they strike you down with a myriad of hatred and violence,
Even as they dismember and destroy you that no man can ever be your enemy.
The only thing worth anything is love;
Unconditional, invincible, limitless love.
One day when you face this world
Unburdened by the tyranny of fear and hate and greed
Your fellow men will behold you.
Across a thousand cycles of living and dying in full bloom
Your joy will become eternal.
No sun or moon that ever rises,
will ever see it fade.
We are not born.
We do not die.
The moon, which carves its million mile course through the sky
Has seen us all coming and going.
One by one,
Into and out of form and function.
Each life,
An advancement to no discernible end.
Perhaps an infinite pattern of coming and going
Where only the space between,
Tells of the primal color of what we really are.
Walking in the withered fields,
Newly taken by November frost,
It is easy to feel that time passes for all of us,
The same as it does for the frost when the sun rises to kiss it with it’s burning lips.
We pass, as all things do, like frost on the grass.
Ashes to ashes,
Dust to dust.
And yet we can never truly die.
We can only come and go,
From the timeless space between the lifetimes that we live.
Which is what we really are.
Nigredo
We are turned to ash.
We are rich with the putrefaction of what we once were.
And the shadow rains down upon us
We suffer all but death
In the perpetual fire of our own illusions
We suffer all but death
In the hell of our own fears
Until…
Albedo
The ash is washed away
To reveal our original purity
To every black, there must be a white.
A heaven to every hell.
And so
Behind the mask of our temporary identities, there is an eternal soul.
When we remove the mask…
Citrinitas
We find it
We turn
From what we thought we were
Into what we really are
We can see now
That the moon’s light
Is not sun light,
It is just a reflection.
We are just a reflection of what we really are.
When we decide to turn from moonlight to sunlight
We are transmuted
We awaken
And when we do…
Rubedo
We become the embodiment of our very soul
The sunlight is all that we are
A perfect fusion of spirit and matter
We are now the phoenix
Looking down at the ashes that once consumed us
With gratitude
For we are now…
Enlightened.
Over the choir of the hour,
I hear the minute whisper,
that life is a series of seconds,
strung together one by one.
A happy life is nothing more than a succession of happy seconds.
But I watch this woman before me,
as I hold her in my arms,
twisting with fear and writhing in the agonized resistance to death
as she advances towards it with every breath she takes.
And I see that her existence, like so many was a desperate quest for a happy life.
Like so many, she spent her days so intent on reaching that happy life,
that she missed the happy moments as they slid beneath her feet…unnoticed.
Death, like birth shall have no dominion over the ever lasting soul.
When blood and bone and sinew are gone,
we shall all have stars at hand and foot,
though we resist it all the same.
The coming and going from this life, is not often a thing of ease.
And the bitter landscape of grief tells us that those who die,
are lost to us.
The living flesh is not immortal.
But death is not the monstrous tyrant that reminds us so.
Rather, it is the inevitable lesson which teaches us to look beyond the flesh for what it is that lives and dies.
Today, from the granting platform of my arms, she leaves this life.
When the line on the ECG runs flat,
her daughter, like a woman giving birth, is taken up by interwoven tears and laughter
in the throes of the release.
It is a palpable transition that liberates every one of us within the room.
It is a ceremony of souls.
I sit atop the white linens, both they and I, stained deeply by her blood.
What is left of her is celebrated in a residual silence as people file in to say goodbye.
I remain for a time, in the cold of her mortal garden.
Her skin as cold and pale as clay.
Holding her body, now renounced,
with immortality at my side.
Death does not stop time, even when it feels like it should.
The seconds are still strung together one by one.
The question is…Are you watching?
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