commingled

your voice holds
in my bones. my frame held
up with echoes. my heart's weight
under your overcoat. your fisted hands hang
from my slight limbs and when i reach - touch
your face, you're heightened; made aware of
your own shape.

your eyes are green.
now, to look at heaven, it fills for me
with emeralds. it fills
with bright meadows in long abandon
from their rightful horizon.

lucid dreams
configure the stars and they dangle
constellations bespeaking our mythology.
a hunt in scratch-depiction on a cave wall;
a resolute face made supernatural by firelight,
telling our story, milleniums before we
came true and i came to be the place
for you to anchor.

my water; deep as space. be weightless.
use my surface to lift up your own reflection.
scoop me up with your body, cupped, you row across
and toward yourself.

my lighthouse, you are. balanced at that fine point
of ebb and flow's transition. annointed by
my high tide. i bring you gifts that belong already
to you. still you accept with graciousness.
i am indebted.

what are we? there is a fire at our feet. if i've turned
from you, my heart was never cold. it was smoldering.
wet green. i turn from you saying, 'this will destroy
us. yes. eventually.' the sound of your voice in
response; like tongs regrouping the dying coals in me.
the breath, let by your sigh - and all again, ignites.

Carina Round 'Come To You' Video

he'd tell you
he doesn't always get what he wants
least of all from me but
if the water's from another planet
were to come to ours and fill out
the complicated tributaries and
bony bowls which shape our oceans, our
lakes and waterways,
whose sea is explored?

he's in my blood
and so,
i am captive.

there's one thing we captives do;
a characteristic we hold
in common that holds us
in check:
we wait.
beneath or over-riding bars of steel
or concrete walls, our prison is
forged of time.

moths

usually i do not choose memory -
what or when to ...
recall sputters on or strobes away or
hobbles my heart - just now i remember
how sundays weighed heavy through my chest turning everything brown - something sad and far from rest - the too-thick kitchen smells; burned flour; dread-enhanced hour: four o'clock slightly soured and uncomfortable in its sadness. perhaps a room, a bit too warm with light too low and the suggested odor of roasts or stews - comfort foods - my throat thickened with words from a language i only speak somewhere between breath and dream. comfort. far into my preferences; my focus, my favorite trees, my inspiration - dead moths fill the fogged glass, bell shaped around the silent kitchen bulb. moths -through choice or inevitability or
inevitable choice - drawn to the light - again again again to beat their bodies burned and broken - burned and broken without comfort - but too, without regret

fearful and war-like in our obdurate obligation toward 'making
sense' - bottomless logic sealed off in unapologetic deafness - airless and seamless - jar without holes poked in the lid - wings fall silent in comfortable smother.

in gaps, in margins, in common corners and doorways where the faceless
sleep distracted by the senseless, the beautiful, the terrifying - i
keep a sundial in my basement, collect clocks with broken
hands and faces that can only tell me "now."
and i visit them often; offer candle stubs and photos
of stranger's whose faces have grown over my own.
i wait on either side of the aperature;
glistening and ecstatic within stoic rhythms
and i strobe-flicker for the hungry moth-spirits and,
i remember.

danza contemporanea - ex novo danza - bestia senza suono

aspects

as a woman - or perhaps in a broader sense, simply as a human being, i've felt myself divided, then divided again. different aspects and perspectives, internally in conflict. sometimes it's frightening; overwhelming, temporarily paralyzing. i watched the dance piece posted here, in awe. and realized i was watching it AS that inner drama - each feminine form representing a part of my 'self.' to see it played out with such stark grace and raw physicality did much toward articulating these times where i felt that lack of integration and was shy of 'peace.' more than i've been able to apprehend with language. in this, i felt the peace and acceptance and hope that such psychic dissonance may indeed be a dance towards wholeness ... if it's watched without judgement and with kindness towards oneself. the dancers do much to illustrate moments where my internal world is not kind and the different inner 'roles' in turn are hurt, stubborn, repressed, dying, dictatorial, scared ... these times pass. they are storms. they are dances lasting the span of a strain of music and they remind me that i am a woman. i am human. i am alive and my existence is rich if not always clean; easy. and the dis-integration CAN return itself to integrated peace. no one gets left behind.

Hauntings

An opening octave of light where he emerges.
All other shapes fall silent, shift to sand,
swarm down while he swims through my vision in
harmonic toning. What music is this?
Condensed to gather across his features like frost
on a long window guarding the cold at its night-side;
cracked by the bloom of heat from mine.
From mine, where memory curls its flat shadows off smoke;
falling from the plump plumes; all quiet disaster,
satisfied to shimmy up careless recollections ...
slow to dissipate.

Ever-unfolding memory of a plucked bow,
a shutted heat vent, a big spoon still tasting like
the last lips held then pulled across it.
Deep inside the beside of you, I whither in the old words from
a last time. The clamour of you; bell resplendant,
unhindred hammer-swish drone, drowning out
the hiss of air expelled from our slow dying tide.
Mine, still reaching and bringing,
bringing in shells full of what I would put there:
A wooden flower, burning.
An artist's mannequin changing poses
on its own in a dark studio - the artist has little to draw from.

Draw towards me, close in closer to me, open-handed,
my brushes fall to the floor.
My blushing pencil splinters lead and
fragments from something in myself,
they stain the incompleteness - a page complicated by
its own blankness, and all that implies.

Somewhere in the wise unforgotten,
where the moon's borrowed light meekly bellows its own
interpretation of the illuminated;
there, a memory hesitates, collects itself, resumes.
That light takes to my skin.
Skin melting into that light.

The deeper spaces of
my own purple-pelted-darkness melting,
until my darkness flames and readjusts to
my new, organless form.

The deeper spaces where
the void is cluttered and hunger is vanquished
by its own presence.

A weighted curtain covers a window,
now bricked over. Dark haunt of moon
reflecting its reflection from a pool.
I cast a stone at its belly,
perhaps to break the cycle, perhaps
to open my own cloaked heart and
lend that garment to you, as you're closing a
weighted curtain on a window now bricked over.

Our memories sticking across the glass
my eyes pass
over your eyes
recalling ... ah, but its no longer there.
I still see; seek to see through it.
I watch you flicker; can smell green burning.
Destroy the fire to salvage its wounded,
half-eaten fuel? Why?
When all has gone to ash, I'll dip my pen there,
or pull a coal forth, and use it
to write these words.