I am the well, beyond
Baseline, sparkling chasms
Encapsulated in teardrops
Fragmented rainbows that speak
On reflections of you
Heart split, chambers imprisoned
Beat, as one, no more
Hopes, cast away
In cherry-blossom-dancing sky
A brilliant blue, against
The blue of us
Pronounced missing
Such all-encompassing rigid agony
That centers bow at soul’s home
And with penetration, reminds: life
The living, the journey, the road
Leading back, onto what finds
Me, this charismatic pang
Dressed in cashmere softness
Pink again, as if promising
For resting place, of comfort gone
With echoes of when
Sings thee, a voice like rose-tinted silence
The knowing that existence is
Yet, still sleeps in growing light
Stretching vines, and forgetting beams
Not beneath, nor beyond
But in this one, who stands ravished
In deafening woe, highlighting self
With a fragrance, unknown
Some shimmering tastiness
Without taste, a tongue reaching to glimpse
If had eyes, to bleed out
This endless game named ache
In the substance of lost, I am
This that is forced surrender
Be that it may, carved
Inch, by breaking inch
Very made in light
Called upon, shattered
The dove wings circle
Enveloping rest, they whisper
Feel the wholeness of sacrifice
The glorious, intensified rupture
Birthing, new skin
Scales of stories in ebony caves
Crimson strokes rewind
The past, tale spinning tale
A comment set upon itself
The well below, existence
A deep reservoir for thy drinking
When I get triggered, since very small, I fold into a world, like a butterfly covering herself, into the depth of my mind and imagination. It is dark and uncomfortable. As if returning to the now-broken chrysalis from whence I was created. From there, the angst, and agony, and pain of this world, and the confusion of human nature, particularly selfishness and cruelty, pulses through my veins. I bend, I twist, I ache. I stay there hours, days, sometimes weeks, until I recenter and find balance in my authentic self and remember my inner truth. Then the world starts to come back. Then the words start to come back. Fast and clear. The collective unconscious, if you will. And I am then propelled forward to write, seemingly without choice. I bleed out the poison. Only when the words touch air, they transform into the wind that pushes me out and back into the world I love, the one of light, truth, and service.
Sometimes life hurts so much, it can only be described in dancing words . . .
Dancing Words
I weep for naught
No thou within this weeping be
No element of fair
To pair such wicked torment
True
No beloved to catch
Tumbling pieces
This broken, scattered
Grave of thee
Hooded trumpeter lands, anew
His white-dust reservoir beckons
Piercing claws retracted
Shining sword to once-closed eyes
Sleep! Awaken! Light! Emerge!
Birthed in disproportion
As angel’s prayer weeps through
Tender flesh announces arrival
Opens and reopens, a homecoming of ripening
Vast canyons exposed in midnight air
Wounds licked, longings long
Stretched out, seams splitting seams
No needle doth repair
Haunting questions spar with answers
In equal magnitude, memories heckle ado
Sweet tormenting rhythm, squashing tune
Eradication announced
Torrential winds bowing down
Begging the winter wave rising
Stop! Alas, to begin without end
Logic beds feathers, alone in their room
Erotic plumage dancing round
Master tailor’s needle, sprung
Crisped from daylight’s fire
Set up high to open sky
Drenched, widow raven sits in once-virgin white
Wings plucked, taken, merged in spinning black
Till morning comes to mourn the bluebird broken
Her gentle song carved out of throat
Carrion painting crimson branches
This phantom life of who
I know someone who is suffering
I know someone who is in chronic pain
I know someone who has chronic fatigue
I know someone who is searching for answers
I know someone who has gone through divorce
I know someone who is in an unhappy marriage
I know someone who longs to find a soul mate
I know someone who is alone
I know someone who has no one nearby
I know someone who searches for another
I know someone who cannot afford the mortgage
I know someone who cannot afford the rent
I know someone who is homeless
I know someone who longs to reconnect with family
I know someone who longs to be accepted by loved ones
I know someone who has been hurt by those most trusted
I know someone who has lost all siblings
I know someone who has lost a child
I know someone who has lost a partner
I know someone who is in search of work
I know someone who is burdened by a job
I know someone who isn’t recognized for abilities
I know someone who can’t control anger
I know someone who can’t control the body
I know someone who can’t control actions
I know someone who feels trapped in the wrong body
I know someone who feels trapped in the wrong gender
I know someone who feels trapped by society
I know someone who has been displaced
I know someone who has been ostracized
I know someone who is searching for community
I know someone who is losing the ability to remember
I know someone who is in the last stages of cancer
I know someone who is preparing to end this life
I know someone who feels unseen
I know someone who longs to be heard
I know someone who is tired of cruelty
I know someone who gets trapped in the mind
I know someone who gets fooled by thoughts
I know someone who battles voices that seem real
I know someone who lost a beloved pet
I know someone who lost a beloved possession
I know someone who lost a part of who they are
I know someone who battles addiction
I know someone who pangs to live in the moment
I know someone who doesn’t understand why life is unfair
I know someone who is suffering
Samantha Craft
December 2016
Where The Crow Feeds
There is a bitterness instilled and growing. A habitat of woes poured through the grout-laden tiles. Sacrificed as brine burdened tears and inched toward desert ground below. And here is where the crow feeds. Nestled against the marrow remains. Latched onto feathered-whispers meandering stretched out corridors. He caws. Cries out and pecks the places he exists. Broken, hallowed and shamed into boney crumbs. Comes again, the agony dance. A thousand droplets drenched cascade through victim chambers, round the bowels and out into the essence of darkness. Evaporated with each pressing. A salt-lathered stain against tainted black. Beak to bone. Talon to ash. Weathered door creaks opens to an endless echo of isolation. I am this shattered bird. I am this proclaimed prey. Slathered in likeliness, prancing round the corners, where burden lives. Shifted into form anew, turned into unfamiliar, still carrying the weariness of loss. I hear him clawing at the pieces below. Beneath the marble crushings—how he weeps. How he mars the destitute of his own hallowed out regions, emptied beyond starvation. The pool of self, shaken, moved and unmoved by worlds forgotten. Edged back, he endures, counting the ways in which his agony survives victor, in which his piercing eyes pierce that which is about, lavishing the view with what seems as bleakness awoken. Terrible he is, in his misery. But terrible worse is the way in which ‘what was’ has returned once more. Again, he calls out from beneath the remnants of fragmented substance. Devastated in a state of weary forlorn. Forgotten by self, and still there, in his sheltered state. “I am here,” he sings, from beyond the trees winter foliage, drenched in muted grey. “I am here,” the song carries, far above the collapsed sky. “I am here.” And his tears swallow themselves—one upon the next—tumbling gems catching the wind. If only he could see enough to lift his tethered eyes. If only he could hear his own song, seize the dying shell, and rise once more through scattered bones.
Samantha Craft
Bending. Bending towards humanity.
Upside down and twisted. Sideways. Backwards.
Hello. Hello, out there. I wave.
Casual-like, faking the discrepancies lining the walls of my interior.
Wallpaper: aged, peeling, unwanted.
Caution to the wind, I sail outward, into the blue societal corridors.
Painted bleak by ill doers masked in golden-tainted grimaces.
Castaways, alike, we gather into cylinders of being, turning inside the encapsulated thoughts.
Syringed through penetrating drops of nothing.
I am not what they preach, nor say, nor whisper in the cornered room gone viral.
Tentacles forward, burrowing through the broken skin, tantalizing the soul with promises.
Undone, again, in the region born from goodness, now made bitter-sweet in its giving.
How I long to climb the mountain high and scream out the bounty brought onto us—the widow’s heart eternally mourning for the lost child named innocence.
How, if given opportunity, I’d purge the demons from them all, and dance upon the grave called fear.
How I’d rip then, apart the hearts donned black.
Forging, grasping, into the misery found there.
Stand then, we would, upon the cornerstone of our calling, without the stage bearing down beneath us.
And speak no more of these times.
When darkness held the strings to emptied puppets turned asleep.
Sometimes you are the moon above my mountain. Glowing and set on the stage of my skyline.
Sometimes I think I created you for my own suffering—to set myself apart and be made into loneliness.
For without loneliness how could union become?
Sometimes I think I made you into this untouchable longing—to keep myself reaching and yearning.
For without desire how could satisfaction live?
Sometimes I know I found you as the answer to my ache—to press your image upon my love-sick heart and wish for you in completion.
For without living as half, how could I be made as whole?
Sometimes I know I have made this world with you in it, so in my striving I will not forget my failings—to wish again and again for your unavailable attention.
For without missing your return, how could I recognize adoration?
Sometimes the way in which you move me is uninterrupted in that everything I do and say involves the foundation of finding you—filling myself with your beauty.
For without breathing your essence, how could I exist?
Sometimes the way in which you enter my mind is like a wild cat chasing her tail—scratching and biting at something that is there in the background.
For without the looking back, how could I look forward?
I am this woman with you, and without you.
I am this woman dialing your name to the stars and coming up short.
With no place to enter except back into the hollowed out parts—the caves of missing you.
Until the sun comes, and he is not you. He is but the part of you removed. He is the continuing onward without my hand in yours. He is the essence of strength. The one built from the tower I allowed to crumble in your memory.
Sometimes I think you were made for my growing—set out and standing in my exact line of vision—the puzzle piece I required.
For without you, I was forced to find myself.
Sometimes you are the moon above my mountain. Lighting the way home.
I am a mountain dreamer. Born of the stars and birthed by the light. I am the dweller, endearing inhabitant of your heart, whispering the glorious hope of morning to come. Do not feed me your worries or frets. Yet, come to me filled with your misery and isolation, and I shall come onto you in wholeness pure, and cleanse the foul nutrients of your soul with the tear drops of my agony. I have seen you from the distance. Watched with bitter hope turned saved as you dance in the twilight of your awakening.
Why do you fear, when all about you the music dances, the melody herself broken open into spears of radiant dreams? Why do you fear when the enemy is demolished and all that remains is your beauty exposed? Weep not gentle child of the universe, appearing still so broken and alone. My arms are wrapped around you fully, guiding you to higher ground and blanketing thy footsteps in my own gentle grace. Where you walk, I shall follow. Where you weep, I shall sweep. The last of your teardrops saved for the jewels of my crown, to show the world of your essence, of your battle, of your trials. To etch in my wearing the exactness of your path.
I am you and you are me. Both journeying on the path of unknown and scorned in our outlook untouched by luck and gratitude. I am the same; the wondering hopeless beast screeching for his maiden in the last of his dying days. The one that beseeches the garden to grow, and births the magnificent golden woven petals of alive. I am the solitude at sunset and the dawn reflected in the lover’s eyes.
You are I. I am you. And one we blend into the magnificent cause of all. Can you not see me here crying in the darkening day, waiting for you to find my hand and lead me to your bedside? To cradle me like the lost fawn set free and feel the tender gaze of all upon your haven space.
I am this mighty one that waits in the corridors for your submission, neither broken or gone by the dankness of days. My journey is your journey; yet, my soldier is strong: the one that stands within and with all, readying the reinforcements for battle’s call.
I am neither here nor there. But everywhere. And you may sip me in your weary blindness and stumble into me in your drifting shadow. Catch me and I shall bleed as one into you. My spawn your spawn. My truth your truth. Come to me and I shall carry you through the threshold of beginnings again and again, until you see the time has lapsed and all that is brings forth the dandelion kisses of our valley made and waiting.
I long to skip through the hills with you, where the wheat grass tickles and nibbles at our cherished laughter, joined in union, both body and soul. I long to tumble as the weed broke free, and dance in the edgings, as I spring forth reborn in your presence. Find me here, in the center of your heart, and bring me out. Call me by name and inch your way through my imprisonment.
How I long to be free and set out of this pain you call game. How I long to break through the chains of illusions you create for us alone. I am your one, still here, ticking as the clock reminds the passing, and silent as the time has ceased to be.
How I long for you my lovely one, in all of your ways, in all of your movements, the swaying of your lips in the talking of our wishes, the parchment you entangle with scribbles of hope, the layers of laughter you pile upon me in your sweetest moments of gratitude, when the veil is lifted and you spy me, if only by chance.
When you kiss me, if only in dream, when you move with me, your guardian, like the sun-tipped babe in the forest leaping through the clover green. Your golden lockets touching the paleness of pure ivory skin. Your eyes glowing with the coming of me.
I see you there in secret hour. I hear you call out to me. Say I, beg for me. And I cry again, the tears counted no more in the circling of eternity. I cry for I am here, and you still call. I cry because I have never left, and you still fear. I cry because our merging has just begun and each inch is my deepest agony.
For I long to grind into you fully and form as one. For the union to be complete. For the unloved to feel entirely open in free-flowing ecstasy. For the enchanted one of my destiny to linger not in the chamber of daylight gone but in the bride-groom’s nest of freedom realized. To dress you in my own clothing and call you again the one I love. To dress you in my own skin and then taste what I have made.
If only your eyes would open, and the treasure could burst forth. If only your dream were not my dream, and together, the drummer’s beat was not buried beneath the trappings of our own pitter-pattering trail to nowhere.
Belly of a Star 