I Love Loving And Being Loved
I LOVE LOVING AND BEING LOVED
I don't align myself with any of this; I align myself with women poets, and that's about it. Again, I feel like I'm millions of kilometers away from home 'Coz I couldn't have the one in your arms. You're scorning me, Again, Denying beingness its beingness, Denying me a forest, magical. My voice no longer a cacophony but a shiver-sliver, Glass shard in the mouth of la yerma. In front of them, I'll act indifferent, but really, I hate it, I want to peg you. Me, a robust-shouldered Furko Maria, Blown out candle, Dragging the edges of my nightgown In the dark, in the dust. All of our loves are infertile, a vacant studio, A vacancy, And the studio is vacant because it's locked. "No space for an unfolding, I don't have the money" is a never-ending story. Nobody to notice the trapped animals in my eyes, Not Even You. How much misery fits in a single human woman? Hair platinum blonde, the kohl-rimmed gaze, Lightning-struck? Virginia! I talk to you now. Is this the water where you drowned In their abysmal refusal?
Your 100 years have passed, And still the same unresolved voices Are solving the same unresolved things. Tiresias, Daddy tyrant Of a poetess, What the fuck are you so afraid of? Oh, come, marguerite, A single marguerite. I have a little space in between my legs, inside of my lungs, Thanks to tender love Of my woman friends' loves. We are building Silent empires For ourselves to enjoy being in, Not for heavy artillery of the boots of the union of congratulatory proclaimed geniuses To desecrate sharply with a drowning-out voice, Scared of the unsaid spaces, Burdened by inadequacy of its pretend claim to universal knowledge That remains a broken fractal. But we do not fear its brokenness; They do— In imposing a submission on themselves Through having to pretend to be more than they are.
Ours are empires of the tall rustling grass, and we are theirs. Rustling-grass empires, Forest-sanctuary temples. Aborted-modernity prisons, keep them for yourself if you wanna. Only don't make claims to that which you stole. No more living off stolen land, A colonized womb. I am living, I am heaving, And accept no payments, Because they are all worthless, For they are all a conspiracy of falsity. I do not accept your payment for my keeping. I refuse! I refuse your payments, and money too is a lie, Sickening and see-through, Quick lie of one who is Afraid, So he makes his little deals Out of speculation And inability to trust His own heart. Keep your partition of heaven; I care nothing for it. But give me back that of my hair On the top of my head. Dare not touch me. I do not invite you, And if I did, I uninvite, Until you learn to touch without grasping, Greet without freezing, Talk without lying—deceiving. You with your rotten, black, emptiness-heart, Ancestral nothingness claim, Stirrups and arrogance. Go away and cure yourself of arrogance, Because until you do, you shall not be welcome here. No curse, only a final indifference To one who thought he knew so much, Yet understood so little. Enough!
Come, my sisters, Come, the amphibians. The night gives hand to day In the twilight and the sunrise, Horrible, heartbreakingly lovely. We dance around a fire No greedy hands can desecrate, Subsume, Or steal. No longer being dragged by the ashes into the filth-coils of man-made history, Yet breeze in the hair, Tossed by wind smelling of salt And freedom to be connected.
On the shore of no denial, Plays no harp, strums no guitar, orates no genius, No guitar of no genius, No foot ever to trample on no face, If not having been invited to caress it gently, Out of love. My daughter, your pain is an orchid, A crystal you sat on, incubated, To be used by you alone. Yours and yours. Toss the salt on your bread, Gorge on it, Sharing it with no one, Inviting yourself to the psychic Arthurian tables if others won't – a never more truthful inner life. A yearning unfulfilled, perhaps, but sanctioned By my own hand, and don't tear my child away. Its face and hair, I kiss it. Fair daughter of the land, the sea, and the skies. The age of forgetting is over. We shall not be killed By the cavalry, But liberate all the horses, Including the blue ones Painted by Franz Marc.
Is this pangs of hunger? Is this a pregnancy? I no longer know Whether I am devouring or giving. Perhaps both are unfolding at once, While you, a sick child, Baptized with misguidedness, Self-baptized into a pseudo-autonomous lie Of denial, Conscripted to rape, plunder, and steal, Only take, rape, plunder, and steal. Enough! I will crush you with our heel, Or else our army will storm your nothing-house. Then we will sing and cry and wash our hands and hair in the spring As we bury our dead, Our sisters so mightily fallen, In truer, deeper courage You know nothing of. The depth of the very life, Taking as it gives, Moving inside In apparent stillness that is never still, In the deflowering and rebirthing, then deflowering again, Amid the buzzing in the head Of the tender fragility and tiger-like resourcefulness Of all the Ophelia's flowers And the water lilies of this world And my friend's forget-me-nots.
Enough!
And when you think yourself good and dead, Even then you will hear our admonitions in your dreams As we tread barefoot On your human but then denied in its humanness face, Pressing on it to remind it of itself, Forcing the skin to affirm itself Against another skin Of the sole. Then you will be good and buried, You of injustice and you of Platonic, You Moloch, you Yahweh, You who all this time posed as a rightful god, But was anything but. We will topple you. Down to our sky will fall your stature, As the woman's hair falls down to her ankles. Down from your eyes, your useless pride. No word of untruthfulness allowed to pass your lips. Down your vicious pretense and denial. All your armies ground to dust or fed to the beasts, 'Til all the corsets of the world loosen, And all the shaved hair of the martyred whores grows anew From the rotting places Of your cataclysm.
It is a Penelope's ruse, and maybe You cannot see this, But by night we come together, Dance, Divide roles, Seed seeds, And once again build empires. The tall empires of the rustling grass. Tigers do not scare us; The tigers are our friends, Because on the eve of this young century, we have understood that tigers and beasts are our friends. Tigers and snakes have always been our friends, With their honest devouring, Compared with our human comrades Who thought nothing of selling us to slavery. Show your faces, cowards! Show your Soul, If you are so courageous. Show your fucking heart! Show those fucking hearts! Give life something to work with On you! You have split it from the earth's aorta In the exile, in the space. How do you expect to live? Well, I will not feed you. Me, To live in a false order that nullifies real things. I refuse! Soldier, show your face if you are so brave. For me, I am standing here as I always have been, Showing mine, Baring my breast. Now it's your own turn. What do you have to show? Strip your armor, show your face, If you are so brave.
Did your mother feed you milk, or did she feed you cowardice? But no, sisters, there is truly nothing there. Yet another worthless one, Sold to a phantom For a pittance. Where did our brothers go? Off to make a deal, A very old deal. Now they must be killed and wept over On the altar of their Crassus-like nature. 'Tis how low they sunk, 'Tis how easy they were to bribe. One almost cannot believe. And yet it is so. Bribed with very close to nothing, they gave away everything. A true nothingness, An army of disguised, Crying, crying! Terrified-beyond-life Little boys Playing war, Unmaking life. This is what has been done To our sons. Utter cowardice, Motionless, without a feeling, Only a blind, mechanical killing Out of a mechanical greed. It almost cannot be – – and yet it is. And yet it is, Yet that is what is. Out of it all, Only this. This, the machine that melted their faces, gave them masks and armor, With a man to wither in nothingness, Replaced with greed, the cancerous cell, To make rape and slavery, Afraid of life and love, How a kitten is of water. One would pity, If one could afford to. The girl pities still, Even as the girl kills, Forced into it By a circumstance, by a good life-affirming Primordial ruthlessness, For the falsities have to be killed If we are yet to be, If we are yet to be anyone.
Do you truly have nothing to show? Not a taunt, only an honest question. Just how I thought: There is nothing here. Only the very soft rustle... That is me and my sisters, Growing a tall grass field and growing with it, Down by the edge of this human crematorium-junkyard, Growing in spine, Growing in fire. Down by the end of the village, A worship place Where the death flows in a river, Made unstale, To arise again with a shriek For those who are not afraid. To give their body and soul and mind to give birth to A new, old world. Each falsity burned out and transubsumed, no place of hiding from irresolution Left behind.
How about you incubate me, you who have for centuries been denying my soft body's needs In your own heedless hungriness? You called me boundless till you arrived at my confine, In the most delicious broken place of becoming, In the light of the animal archangels. Refused to drown, Refused to become Only the same old chatter of cannons, Defending a supremacy’s made-up lie. I leave you your own blood, But take back that which is mine. Then let us see who bled more Under this azure sky. Me, I am to be bloodless no more. This me, which is she, which is I. Centuries' worth of incubation Of a cry, Of a horrible, worldless cry. You want a war? I give you a war. I leave you your war. You want a war? Then have at it. I leave you your war if you are so fond of it. But if so, give me back all my birthing, For this is mine.
Poet, you too burn, I say. What of talent, what of silver mouth in service of this lousy pretend empire? I don't care how well you think you write. I don't care how well you think you talk. If what you say is a justification of a lie, If it is an incomplete testimony, thus a lie, And a theft, A pretend truth at the expense Of choking vowels Of the another. Burn, I say, If you have so thoughtlessly and cowardly made your alliances With the hangmen and the bureaucrats Against life. Though we may share a discipline, We have nothing in common. Come, the ballad-tellers, The insane choir, Slick and wreathing In luminosity! Clothed in fire woven from a subsuming pain. No more binding of the feet and waists of the concubines, Or the solitary crying of hetairas, But a human voice belonging to a human face, to a human body, to a human intellect. She is its bearer. Was it not you who projected it on her, Sophia, Out of the fear of your own self? But she is not your depository, But a little bird up in the oak tree, or washing her feet in the river, though sometimes looking up-up. A slow, timid rising of a normal human chest. How could you ever have thought there was more than this, O scornful one, Scornful of the gifts In a delusion of supremacy? I pity you, and I pity your riches, and I pity your intelligence, and I pity your strength. I have always pitied you. Even as I prostrated ancestrally, I have pitied you even then, You who know so very little, Yet believe yourself to know So very much. A ripple of unknowing, A child that destroys the universe Out of its own childish incomprehension of this. A grave of humility In place of a cradle Of a humble, small process Of the possible becoming, Spat on By a toddler's mouthful lie of omnipotence. How long are we to stand it? How long are we to yield? Taking strength from the earth where you tossed us, "Enough is enough!" we decree, Unisono. Take this shame, And make it yours. Then turn around, And start a life That is not a negation of itself, Or else perish In your own trap, A cat at a wall, Believing himself so clever, Yet in total and utter terror, He sweats miserably at night. I have been there. I have seen it. I know Every single Of your tricks. This is what you are so afraid of, isn't it? It is, yet it almost cannot be.
– April 2024