The Gateway

“Oh, how the mind deceives you into thinking you are nothing, when you are all. Belittles you for your own refuge and leaves you flayed out and sparred, beaten and forgotten; your sense of worth as little as the darkest hole of demise. My sister, I tell you now, you are no less than the stars’ creator, the witness to persecution, the one who collects the stardust of your falling tears. Beseech me and I shall come. Call out my name in chant or song, and I am here, existing as your twilight and ever answer. Do not know me by name; know me by action, less fame than fortune. Know me in the spindling and dwelling of thy mansion, the way I call out through the corridors of passion and rise you up to my virtuous calling to eternity. Though my voice less audible than delectable retreats within the deepest cavern light, beseech me and step to the trumpet and calling of my grace. Do not feign attention in the attention of naysayers and slayers of righteousness; do not call out to the falsehood of humanity roaring; for you are the treasure you seek, ripe with the passion of days brought onto your through suffering just; though you think not this so. Apparent is the wind to me; how it blows and pushes through the upmost mountains, crumbling dust, where once stood stoic. Am I not mightier than the wind? Am I not capable of shifting through the dove-making (intoxication) of pride, the wings fluttered against the (pride) which caused repercussion of one and many? Am I not capable of climbing the highest peak with my wind-tunnel of hope and bringing echo towering down the cascading falls? Can I not roar and shake the earth as dynamite surrendered to powdered remnants? Hear my shout, as the wind of change, a chill of ache, a spade of glory, digging beneath the ground of foundation and shaking the doubt from your miserly mind. For you are not made of this dust and clay, not formed as inhabitant of earthly demise, not a destroyer or temptress ripe; all these scenarios blanketed upon you, by the shadow speaker of the dark. How can such beauty exist outside of self, if not first intertwined with divinity; and once entangled willfully, can this not then be effervescent glory arisen from the ashes? How you do doubt me in your own suffering, wishing to be harlot, less angel. Wishing for non-other than the devil’s spawn to announce you truly unworthy, when all about your worthiness shines. Will it not upon yourself to suffer justly evermore, for in suffering is no cause for grief, less, I deem this so. And I say onto you, branded upon the serpent of your tempted soul, in suffering I bleed out to you the unified blood of eternity. In suffering I have spared my story’s end, through the walking of your path. Insist I am one, and I am. Insist I am two, and I am. But split me as wood splintered cross the open flame, and I am burned with you, made less hallowed and less holy than where I grew tall tree of remembrance. Do not bless me with your mournful disgrace, with your intense sorrow and retribution; cheer upon my presence, with your heavenly nature, and press into me, like child to cherub, angel to angel; two lips, two wings, pressed to form the gateway to earth beyond.”

~ Sam (written this evening; scribed what I heard in interior self, 2013)

Yesterday

Yesterday, was a day of mourning. A part of me thought— some fish swimming in the shallow realm at the edge of the pond, un-catchable but entirely in view—that I would sprout wings and fly, become unattainable, invincible, and in a continuous state of profound awe.

Yesterday, was a day of woe. A part of me thought—the missing part, the piece that floats above me just out of reach, the balloon with extended string that keeps pulling itself in jest, higher and higher from the receiver— if I was to be filled with complete healing, I would, with necessity, have to shed the robe of Aspergers, the label that haunts me like the welcoming fun house complete with imaginary ghosts whom both tickle with delight and injects the approaching traveler with astonishment.

Yesterday, was a day of limbo. A part of me thought—this dangling piece of thread, still attached, yet, unmoved, dragging on the ground with each footstep that cometh—in order to be successful, a miraculous door to the divine would open, and there I would linger indefinitely in a state of welcomed grace, my feet firmly planted in the place of no place, my roots free and heart aglow.

Yesterday, was a day of contemplation. A part of me thought—less butterfly than cocooned fragility, inching herself into self, shielding out the prospect of metamorphosis and sleeping in the familiar dark—if I had reached as far as I could reach, and that in doing so, if I have only found myself back where I started, questioning all that is about me with an unfamiliar readiness of discovery and adventure.

Yesterday, was a day of breath. A part of me thought—clutching like a creature to the womb, circumventing the prospect of action in hopes of merrily clinging to the underbelly of structure, earth, and rebirth. Narrowing my own self back into a place of molding, where I was fit and was made to bed in the shell of me—I can no longer divide myself here, amongst the broken beautiful remains of home before.

Yesterday, was a day of calling. A part of me thought—isolated in my awareness, lost as the sunset without horizon, or sea without moon, moving in a fashion without stage, setting, or instruction, flowing with barricade, blocked, binging on false hope, fastened to a part of self that no longer existed—where are the answers, where is the roadmap, where is my refuge?

Yesterday, was a day of mirrors. A part of me thought—a villager looking past the village into the valley of where the crops grow, wanting to do nothing but harvest the bounty, and then layer myself in benefit and reprieve, wishing to stop the nonsense of happenings, the transformation of soul into soul, the victorious wings sprouting and splintering out of my back—who is this lost woman, with the eyes that drift back into a thousand hallways, the corners bent open to eternity?

Yesterday, was a day of writing. A part of me thought—this damsel in distress, still longing for her knight to miss her, to acknowledge his longing, to run to her rescue, to swoop her up in his strong arms and keep her at his side forever and a day. The ache in me growing for the companionship of the unreachable and untouchable one, who recognizes me as equally unwillingly, as I recognize self—I still am empty; I still need; I still desire. and how does one stop this unquenchable quest?

Yesterday, was a day of surrender. A part of me thought—a drifting feather of white floating through the subconscious realm, collecting up pieces of self and no self, and rebuilding what was invisible into something of form, someone substantial and worthy, yet humble and sweet. Someone more vessel than person, incapable of being nothing but human, soaring through the potentiality of heaven—I am free or I am prison. I am love or I am fear. I am or I am not. All is up to me. To my very form, to my very thought, to what I chose to do, not in yesterday, but at this moment of everlasting hope.

And then, dove angel, I flew, far beyond the harboring of thoughts, the desert sand spilled out of me, like hour-glass made still. Emptied, I soared above the illusion of clouds and endless sky, into the place above and below space, into the nova of existence, into my heart and about my heart, dancing as bird rejoicing in the comfort of the abiding love of all.

Samantha Craft, 2013

The Shift

The Shift (2013)

I walked alone, a stranger on an island to herself. The atmosphere thick and strangling, my emotions bottled inside the opaque glass of reason. I did not know myself, my name, my passion. All was nothing and nothing was all. I longed for companionship; and, as desert soul left open, would climb the cliffs in search of you.

Call out, I did; until you came, at least the whispered ghost of you; your phantom corridor offering me respite, if only in imaginings.I ached so devastatingly-deep that the richest cave could not harbor the very start of my emptiness. A lion’s roar was my enemy and friend; this triumphant beating trembling purge of beast that drifted and wept across the sea.

I died onto myself, missing you, as the window misses the onlooker; left rigid, cold, and clear, with no view and no observer. I was less than invisible: I was abstract, set out beneath the world. Yet, none could be my witness; none could hear my tears.

Falling, I fell. Calling, I called. And still you heard me not, except the tiniest splinter of thought. In daylight, I formed you with clay; the milkiness of you seeping through my entangled fingers. Bled out to the ground, I molded my dignity, my fortitude, my every want into the making of your heart.

And you beat, this moistened part of you, beneath where I rested; my lathered palms dripping muddy-sweet into the blades of greenest grass. I ate you, then, ground your essence between my teeth, and turned my mouth a brown of dreams. Played you between my tongue and cheeks; something tangy, no less-sweeter than my own buds.

I nibbled and caressed, taking in the fantasy I created; the one I longed to paint across the sea breeze, to make your real, like the toy that comes alive to the child, still innocent. To dance with you, your floppy legs turned limber and lean; the muscles flexing underneath, the all of you.

I could climb you like a tree, harboring your very branches between my thighs, and ride you into the sunset as a damsel on her knight obedient. Atop, in the blue haze, far beyond the robin’s nest, where the eagle soars still, I would witness the end, and sit with you hand-in-hand, like butter between my flesh and soul.

Spread out like no other, my head upon thy breast, my heart within your very dove-winged embrace. My mystery revealed, a treasure onto you. In so much that my kingdom becomes your destiny; a place of rapture, delight, and dancing laughter.

Spin me there, now, kind prince. Swing me through the evergreen forest and champion your maiden ripe.

2013, Everyday Aspergers blog, Samantha Craft

Missed

In the place between place;

where I cannot see

and cannot

be;

crumbled down

to ancient molecular moment

of extinction.

When all that was is no longer.

And what lingers

is twilight yesterday.

I miss him in the way

of mountains.

Lamenting in the ill-lit

awful.

Battering the trunk grown dim.

His branches ceased.

Scarlet bark

bled.

Echoing fury

lit.

My arms his. Cherished

against glass walls.

Face pressed indentations.

Rush hour vexation.

One merging one.

I hear my eyes

weeping.

Peel back corner

of middle part. Exposed

is the heart dropped.

Bellied within

reason.

How I ache in sadness

longing.

The forgotten

land from whence I came

scattered.

Here for the masses.

Victimhood chastised; envy

downcast; my echoing

bellow

perched upon master’s lap.

I miss you in the darkest

places.

No one

I hate you in the way I hate myself

I love you in the way I hate myself

I lust for you in the way I hate myself

Rising the wave of turpentine

Aching to rinse my smudged edges clean

Salty thirst

To find no-man land

The outer regions of wanting to know

Fighting the current of didn’t know

Didn’t quite get there

 

Until judgment is judged

The complexity of tidal wave

Not precise to call them thoughts at all

Trickles of what ifs and what haves

What was and what could be

Vast prisms of splintered light

Blurring self in blessed water

Baptismal suffering

White-washing down

Delegating the way it ought be

So that the way it might be

Vanishes out of sight

 

Until truth

Until breath

Until silence

Until you

 

I hate you in the way I love myself

I love you in the way I love myself

I lust for you in the way I love myself

Dancing the waves of sunlight

Aching to rinse my hot edges pure

Dancing thirst

To find cleansing waters

The outer regions of knowing you

Embracing the current of truth

There, at last

 

Until judgment is judged

The complexity of sunshine birthed

Not precise to call them thoughts at all

Trickles of what ifs and what haves

What was and what could be

Vast prisms of splintered light

Blurring self in blessed water

Baptismal suffering

White-washing down

Delegating the way it ought be

So that the way it might be

Vanishes out of sight

 

Until truth

Until breath

Until silence

Until no one

 

Samantha Craft, 4.25.19

 

 

Dignified Love

And though he did not know of them, he saw them thusly, with perfect sight.

Their enamored hearts set before he that was righteous with dignified love.
He cherished them innately, as the children of his womb, the essence that stirred him into delightful admiration.

For they were a part of him; their very limbs his arches. Their voice his song, unified and broken through, as earthly angels reborn.

Had he not come from this place of stillness, where the darkness spilled and splattered upon mind, he would be trapped still, in the place of blindness.

But alas, his kindled heart had blossomed, the spines of goodness branching out as vines of fragrance opened.

Across the walls of bricked-minds and shattered-hope he entered. The barriers removed, before mention; the warriors called upon with sounding trumpet, before effort; everywhere he walked, the moment ceased and time bowed down in recognition of its own reality and existence undone.

For nothing came in the scope of this determination: a careful love that pours through the wounds of thousands upon thousands, and champions the child broken.

‘I am that I am,’ he pronounced, with a seeming-to-live spell; though the chalice of his voice held nothing upon nothing: No motivation. No whispers of hope. Not anything tangible or definable.

All of which could be collected and defined was eradicated from the moment of suffering removed. And here, he sang, and danced in a rhythm of ghost unbreached, of substance removed and surrendered by the essence of naught. ‘I am that I am,’ he rang out, a bell upon the highest peek of non-temple.

And with this, he was vanished, into the air of delight, into the arms of no one, but his sweet gentle self, varnished in the lathering of dignified love.

May 2018, Samantha Craft

 

 

 

Him

My heart

How it weeps

Beating, beating, beating

Lapped in smiling sorrow

Standing on the outside

Of closed wooden door

 

Aged echoes

Pounding, repeating, rewinding

Chipping away

As axe to birch

As birch to splintered reminisce

 

Cavernous ache awakens

As if never spent

As if never seen

His vivid river breath

Blown into hollowed alcoves

 

Familiar ebony caves

Imprisoned within

The evergreen, towering timber

Strangled in familiar entanglement

Choking vines of ivy, masked

Some shrouded ecstasy

 

Dampening moss surrounds

Suffocating coverlet

And I rise

Once more

This delicate songbird

Breast to neck, plucked blue feathers

 

Beaked holdings of ribboning ivory

Starch-like, in its dawning

We wait

Two begging mosaics

Still blindly pounding

 

At the other’s door

 

 

 

 

Left and Broken

 

LEFT

I’m searching for the right
way, when everything is
left. Gone is the roadmap—the arrow.
That pointing guide: swallowed.

Left is me. A tied up knot of existence.
Reality shaped into shapes; hangovers of
dreams. Trapped in the knowing of
not. Endless abundance. Sorrow weeping
joy. Tap dancing round layered stage.

Platforms tip. Emotions guised
in stellar bows. Prism raindrops,
fall. Tethered thoughts, shout. “I do not. I do
not. I do not . . .” and then I do.

Lapping up the
sunshine that dribbles down the brain. Am
I fantasy emerged fantasy? Endless
mirrors beseeched by endless mirrors? Where in,
am I? I tell you, “I know not,” and then I present this
something I ought be.

A speckled semblance. This
tip. This part. This poking, ancient-ache
awakened. As I bleed. Out. Out.
Out. Charismatic child grown. Ancient wonderment
pierced. Chiseled woe, giggling.

Laughter
begets tears. Tears beget hope. Hope begets this: naked,
naked, naked, torn, beaten-winged . . . some
one. Gratitude’s songbird. Tiny twilight feathers sprinkled
cross your landscape.

This ravenous, unified touch. Down.
Down. Into the right zone. The right
way. When everything is left.

BROKEN

You sit there unbroken, whilst I am in pieces. Shattered in spirit.
Filled in with light. Sprinkled in love’s sunshine. Touched. Pierced gently,
in the way spirit surrenders.

I am dancing beneath the moonlight. Beseeched by your caress. Lifted in thought. Touching down in the daybreak, and retreating at dawn’s crossing. A nightingale expanding into forest deep. Soaring above roaring sea. Dipping into velvet sheets of clover, where calm river flows through.

And I dance, swirling the colors of self—like silk scarves, newly dyed, kissing the stage for the first time. I twirl: blue, red, yellow, aquamarine. Full spectrum. Round and round and round. You watch. Unbroken. Smiling. Whole. Sitting there in recognition. Laughing at my shapes. Covering my scattered parts with rich tree sap. Pinching the outer regions into recognition.

I bend. And you lift. I fall. And you carry. I turn. And you come back, ’round the other way. Appearing in the corner, where the need is most. I kneel. And you beam. I swarm. And you collect. My honey, my calling, my ecstasy. You dance in me and through me and around me, and come out again. Before returning to this place you call yours.

And I, cannot imagine your infinite seams. Though seamstress, invisible, she smiles upon. Lifting and wishing me home. And I am there. Underneath the sheets of the universe. The stars, my beckoning meal. Munching down, as bear to comb.

Ah! The dance begins again. And you catch me, there. In the place of union. Colors bearing down on colors. Rising into a storm of rainbows. Thundering prisms shower through. And I spin—shattered. Fissured. Chiseled through to the core.

Laughing through this endless stream . . .  of . . . broken.

Samantha Craft, May 2018

 

Reflection

I seek a reflection of purity and refinement, of chiseled intention, an instinctual driving force fashioned from a universal foundation of love. What is not derived from love is derived elsewhere, outside the landscape of freedom, entrapped in fear.

What is not love is fear. What is not love is self-serving. What is not love is greed. What is not love is habitual attention-seeking to mask that which is unrefined.

What is not love is to burrow reeds in a stagnant water valley of shame, of shattered blame, to build castles of shifting sand in the shadow of rising tide. What is not love is to think one mighty above the growing flames, to raise flags amongst the heat and refuse to see the approaching cinders. What is not love breeds ignorance, intolerance, and the perpetuation of rigid goals, to drill plans into the brittle bones of innocents. What is not love is a vision of danger, to lance ears with spectacles fashioned in blades.

What is love casts out the dark shadows of children cowering and leeches burrowing. What is love blows free in clear air an ever emerging adobe to spirit, a gentle, whispered uprising of hope and serenity.

I seek what is love and love alone, from the intention of love, from the foundation of love, and place of love. I seek that which is equal reflection, eradicated barriers without hierarchy. Those that gather as invisibles beyond the hypocrisy of invented truism, of invented word.

I am a refined version of light, without obligation or room to be taken temporary captive of needled words. I know not. And in my unknowing, I am unraveled and set beyond the bellowing walruses, warped from overfeeding. I am what I seek. I shall emerge empty and take feathered-flight from the evolving space of rummaging soul that seeks recognition at my side.

Timeless

I am but syllable broken

Into sound

Sound broken

Into memory

A retiring present

Roaming

Distant shadow lands

Erased

Cloaked in thought

‘Cross flickering flame

Of ivory light

Of birthed droplets

White

Golden foundation

Draped

Of Him

In merriment ways

Bent past the hourglass

Into inwoven eternal

I please Him

There

Leaping into my weeping

Tempered with compassion

And solidified doubt

Faith unraveled twice

Fortified in humble adobe

Brave winged essence

Harbored

Thy vessel takes courage from thine

 

As seedling plucked and planted

Scattered amongst the violet midst

Of who was and what was

Once

Still yet to be