A MEMORY

We write our signatures on air

On air money

I remember when the sound of

Change

Jingling in a pocket

Meant a Grade A or a Red Hot

Do you remember?

Did you ever walk into a candy store?

Where a big glass cabinet

Housed a reflexive kiss for

Everything within

An involuntary tightening

Of orbicularis oris,

A pucker.

(Candy was the closest thing to love I knew.)

Years have passed, many counting themselves,

As I never kept track except the big ones,

Except in the most general ways

Others can tell you times to the tenth

But I barely know how I got here

Nor will I ever need to

This is all that matters: thisrightnow, thismeoment,

Thisthisthisthisthis… 

VISITS ASEA

Never have I lost your sounding waters

Stream of consciousness

I have missed the tiny whirlpools

But never the great Tides

Which swing my world so in & out of balance

I have learned only that balance is flexible

That it’s changeable, malleable,

Balance lifts us up into manageable.

Yet I claim it not, not fully, not without first

Looking around for railing, or a handhold

Balance was a for-granted

But it has gone the way of faith

The chair will be behind me when I sit…

A variable where only an inalterable ever existed.

But that doesn’t stop me.

I watched a baby walking, thumping along

After being put gently on the floor

Leaning into his future

Walking, forehead jutting ahead of his feet.

I walk like that sometimes now.

I don’t lean back, if I claimed my past it would

Claim me. I choose not to dwell there.

So much so I rush from it.

Somehow I have seen it all before

I am bored by the repeats

Bummed by the reruns

Interested in the growth & the new

In the place where I can claim some experience

The holy bath of experience

From which no one returns the same

The reruns are off, the endings

Jacked up. How could I have counted them ever?

But the not understanding is okay with me now

The wondering & the laying on of syllables

Like strips of bacon making grease in a heated brainpan

The smell will intoxicate me; I wonder if I’ll also have eggs..

I mean ideas, I mean ways to get out from myself & away from

Me awhile. There’s that place where it’s okay to sway.

I am there now.

REPTILES IN THE OFFICE

In my supposed comeuppance, your one-line flick of a forked tongue

At me, I watch you, woman.

I am a threat. You are right to watch me back,

to rattle a warning accusation of

A crime I know nothing about; One thing: I will not dance it again.

But you know all, having discovered we’re out of

Paper…the accusation precedes the announcement:

This from the woman who says have no fear,

Unity does not do fear!

But running out of paper is a hostage situation a 911 bristle, a threat

To the future of major proportions.

Staples being two miles away, n’all.

But there is a humidity of accusation cloying a measure of self-protection & I

Understand, as I was there, too, in the beginning.

Every Unity I know breaks apart, succumbs to Great Change

We are thinking it will be one thing

When it might be entirely another.

Now I have a measure of self-protection in place

This is just how it is; it’s nothing personal

It is how each explains herself to life

With a bang on the counter, a jarring of the bell

Heard in far reaches of outer space…

These women purport to ministry but live a self-crafted life

Involving much validation in finger-pointing

An air of mayhem-in-waiting

Of corrupted effort & diminishing returns

Saying one thing to another

Neither quite true or trusted.

Only demanded.

I can feel my armor dented in places

The shin-guards worn away

the covers over the ears newly heated

by accusation by disbelief by not “get it right, but you’re so

stupid you got it wrong.”

I think it’s because I feel it hit my Translator

& bounce awry instead of smoothly smoothing out.

I have no respect for the one & am rapidly losing

What I have for the two…histrionics accomplish zilch.

Something broke today when you harried me in front of John

Who was just waiting to speak to you

But seemed unmoved by what I perceived as a full-on Tantrum.

Like the ones 3-year olds throw on the toy aisle.

For many of the same reasons, a parent would say.

I’ll say, too, I can’t get there from here. I do not know how.

It is not my understanding of what you asked for two weeks ago

This is some wish you cobbled together in the fiery pit

Of I know  I asked her this!!

Nonesuch.

DEPARTURE, TAKEN PERSONAL

If this is how you feel, just go.

If it is coming to the point that you decide four weeks in front of leaving that we need to know every single solitary thing you know,

Only the God of Heaven can help us!

But we are not the women who ask for help

Before designing our own program

Buying our own uniforms

Building our own pillboxes

Designed beyond your getting in

Which is funny, because you built it

By how you treat me.

The irony of it all being you likely

Do. Not. Even. Know.

IN GENERAL

The tension in the room & the torsion in the air

Accelerate an already fast-moving iteration

Of Situation

Into international waters, traditions count out here

And One People do not mix With Another.

And don’t try to tell me these aren’t all over the planet

These whorls where someone made bad juju & no one ever

Redeemed it with a blessing.

Cuz I recognize them.

From before, some my own

You enter here at your peril

With the potential of  your sorrow

For I am only a battery

Only a mirror

I will up the energy of the situation

Since what I think if it is on my honest face.

Someday that face will look into your own

I amplify & reflect back.

I clap endlessly one-handed

I walk the forest listening for downing trees

I cannot play that game of throwns any more

I want to belong to a vibrant community of like minds

Who do not throw away their own decisions, but do not force them either. What would it take to not be the problem but the problem-solver?

ALL EARS’

Could I be a Listener?

A listening device of analog proportions?

What would it take to be fluid of body once again,

To have a man, once, lift me to himself & cradle me

Set a seal upon that Seer Eye: awaken it with unexpected vision

There is a reason they slay the spirit there

But I seek not even the smallest of deaths

To bring it to the surface, to lead the light

To have a unicorn kind of magic: emergent,

Masculine, parting the very air

For in between the particles

I would go

To achieve the feminine.

It sees me to be: finally whole,

Not foresworn in the belly.

My spirit parts are strong, but invisible here

Jovial, they push other stuff out of the way to have theirs.