You came to me in distant dream, trumped out in your making, meandering through the causeway of ever more. I saw you there, and starlight shifted, beckoning me forward in the routine fashion made of man; and yet, as dove undone, you vanished in the skylight regions of my mind, as I sat vanquished by your doings, with eyes that danced as merry men alive, bending to the stardust ripened, harvesting the dew, listening to the avenger’s touch caressing vapor skin.
I seasoned, say ripened, in this hallowed out space deemed mine, situated between the burly blade and the spearing spine, tingled and tantalized by the mistress named me. I came to her desperate, in search, in want, determined to sever out her remains, to section what she’d become into distinguishable identifiable sectors.
And there I stood, as daffodil unopened, marrow-filled rapture segregating self in want of rescue. I listened to the voices of unknown trekking past my soul, forgetting my presence, erasing my cause. I became abandoned again and again, wrapped round the corners of my own doing, laughing at the shadowed self as another set near, raven to the blind man, pecking at the wounds I’d left behind.
How I’d wished to be seen. To be scooped up and caressed. To be harness against the strength of a million upon a million, and set free from the prison of endless self. How I wished over and over for the rupture of tangled substance, to disassemble and be brought back as something recognizable and just.
There I bathed, in the dismal garden dying, created of my own suffering woes. Dripping of blood-let talismans—signs, symbols, flashing tales of what was naught. I gave up then, beneath the gravestone I’d erected. Eradicated the beginnings with the end, and brought to life the newness reborn.
The failing called out. The failing caved in. I curled in submission, the babe to the tender yoke of my very own soul. Evicted, I was, in the terrible eternal voice of self, seizing the days and bringing back to the torturous home deemed hell. There I was, forlorn, forgotten, dedicated to the bleak and black, bathed in the destitute, naked in the face of what could only be the devil’s own foe turned sour.
Mocking, haunting, grinding, leaving, coming and abandoning once, twice, and ten times more, I was there. Yes, I was there. And in the ways the memory grows old, my soul grew sightless. What appeared once before as hope, now faded in the background, as clovers do in an expansive field blurring into green; a tender turtle belly up to the singe of a penetrating light field, named death.
And I remained, there, in the twilight of my spirit, inching through—worm through core and back to the depths of suffocating dirt. Shifted and sifted, brought forth as a burden undone, fertilized through the tunneling of causation. Circumvented once more and made flesh. I came out scathed, peeled and pinched into a version unrecognizable. And rested there along the curbside in an unfamiliar way, until you came once more, grazing towards my cause. The champion of the sun bride nestling between your legs, the virgin dough I be.
Heated, I bled out the blue I knew, and emerged risen thrice in fashion, braided bread for the masses. And it came then, in gentle knowing, this voice of unreasonable kindness venturing into the platitudes once known as this vessel me. And I cried, aching for the place she’d once been, the face she’d once had, and anchored in the vestige brought to center stage.
I called for her, pleaded for her, to return, though her battered bones now rest beside the cave dweller’s refuge. And thusly I sat, huddled in between the shadow I’d been and the canvas I’d become—chiseled remains here and scattered light there. And nestled I wept, pinpointed in the extended space, in the lap of plenitude, graced in the end gone and the beginning once more returned, tracing the furrowed path of fear, with fingers made chariot wheels, merging into the human reformed. And I danced there, within my vast becoming, twirling into the daylight, set loose into the wild woman’s psalm.
Belly of a Star 