Category: Poetry

touching the profound

recently, many times, i have touched the profound.

it wasn’t just a good day, but a series of days – weeks – where i felt interconnected, and on purpose, and vibrant, and met, and loved and loving and adaptive. of the world, literally, made of the substance of all that exists. and even when struggle and crisis arise, i feel able to meet it with that profound energy, which translates into curiosity and awareness.

it is not lost on me that this sense of aliveness coincides with a break from social media. and comes in the wake of a season of despair, facing the things which make me shudder with doubt about human purpose.

i read some things that brought me deeply into this wonder, and i have and will share those.
but this recent contact with the profound feels most deeply rooted in practice. and it occurs to me that i want to write a poem about this kind of experience:

love is this humbled crawl
from dirtself to godself
stripped of masks and pontifications
i find no difference
ask anyone, love unveils it
we are divine cells of earth

endless and special

i writhe in the soil
until a rhythm comes
i dance through the swampheat
oil spills rainbow my grief
burrow to the molten core of me
pounding the heart of everything

flame in our kiss

i love myself in cycle!
every day reveals the ongoing ritual
by which i show myself devotion
candles lit, i raise a bowl to my lips
give thanks for the labor of sustenance
and the body which can swallow it

we bow, flesh to concrete

to trust love i must surrender
to the awe of being human
even falling far from heaven
i am sacred, worth forgiveness
worth prayer, lust and tenderness
i am never separate from god

and she wanders in us

to trust love i gaze in mirrors
soft eyes recognizing my distinct life
by its flaws
i swoon for each wound and scar
i remember: i’m made of the same dust
as mercury and mars

we are constellation

i remember: when my lover worships me
it is the love in me for myself
that can receive it, can believe it
i remember: my first breath was like this
loving myself enough
to demand to be held

we emerge helpless

i leave no dark unturned
no vast expanse unexplored
no mystery ignored
i have only one lifetime in which to love myself
so i will be naked
and i will be known

we each live
a whole world in one story
– let it be a love story
we have only one lifetime in which to love ourselves
so let us be naked
and let us be known

everywhere so full (for Jake Brewer, rip)

everywhere was so full of people
remembering what they’d been told to forget
dying with regrets
too soon or too late
but never on time

you were a man unafraid of the moon
leaning into the small and tender beautiful
of an incomprehensible world
if you were the president
i’d still think you were good

let’s banish the tar from our dreams
in your name
plant trees in shells of the old world of steel
swell against the places wounded with borders

there is this world and then
which one have you gone to
how is it there is no portal
you would have opened one easily
i want you to just explain it is all

in shock i put it aside
lived a day with the story peeking through every window
feeling the no in me forever as a bell
till i could look at your face
and know you
as your children will know you:
in memory

love in space (30/30)

prompt: write a poem backwards

a love which grows us up
a world which holds us tender
all of existence is in the sweet you cannot swallow

heart, get soft and open
bone, yearn to be rock and ash
stardust, remember the bright
a planet lives off of these longings

love is the orbital swoon
the outpouring of self story
the dark hours of sparse words
the shimmer of such kisses
the wonder at another’s existence
the flash in the eyes

whispered into the womb
whispered into the dirt
it is the magic salve
love is the source of all life
love is not held between two

it is all
there it is
love

come to obsidian {propaganda} (29/30)

prompt: write a review

propaganda distributed on earth during the sixth century of racialized global class warfare. dismissed by many as escapist fantasy…but not all.

forget that fertile place called home
it was precious
perhaps it was beautiful
but it was gone before we could love it
it would never be ours

come to obsidian

there is a blackness
which glitters with new life
where the days are long enough to learn each other
and the nights bright enough to dream wild

come to obsidian

there is abundance
when our bellies are full we lay around, laughing,
naming and unnaming our brown skins
forgetting ownership

come to obsidian

with no weapons
we break and mend each other’s hearts
we tear up the soil
we destroy barriers to life
never each other
we will love whoever you are

come to obsidian

there is freedom
we are learning to be human
it is not easy
it is exquisite
it is evolution

come to obsidian

relinquish your forever wars
release your always grief
your constant struggle
and ever righteous rage

come to obsidian

earth is an ancient broken promise
supremacy cannot see you
it will not love you until you have gone
we offer only one commitment
we will love whoever you are
today, here, you

come to obsidian

from earth to obsidian (28/30)

prompt: write a poem about bridges. A bridge is a powerful metaphor, and when you start looking for bridges in poems, you find them everywhere. Your poem could be about a real bridge or an imaginary or ideal bridge. It could be one you cross every day, or one that simply seems to stand for something larger – for the idea of connection or distance, for the idea of movement and travel and new horizons.

…

queens aya and e— tell why

we walked this sky
because we were not wanted
because we were always targets
of extermination

we left in twos
like all sacred beasts
spinning a path
towards another time

where we cannot be hunted
skinned, broken
lynched, choked of fair breath
expected to look away
from our genocide

where our love is no one’s
path to hell
(that look in the eye
confuses even righteous desire,
or the spark of forever)

we bet on the
miracle of our beautiful
black and queer
and liberated
bodies

we called our ship
Harriet’s Escape
her of rocket science and
witchcraft, dream fuel
and tomorrow
as our only direction

we came here for a future
in which our flesh is precious
in which our children are divine
in which our lives matter

we spun the bridge from
death to life
from supremacy to love
from earth
to obsidian

24-27/30, poems

catching up on poems.

home to e— 24/30

going off prompt to share queen aya’s first love poem of her second affair with e—

in the end
coming home was easier than departing
that was how i knew

she was hearth
i was unable to explain
or step away

i found the little bird
puffed out black chest
you have never seen such plumage
and fragility

i was holding her cupped in my palms
and then she had me
in careful talons
a million meters up
breathless, knowing only her name

she is a stranger still
made of years i have no reference for
in her eyes
in her hands
the exquisite now is enough

aya’s return 25/30

going off prompt to share e—‘s first love poem from her second affair with queen aya

the queen has returned to me
more accurately
none of her reasoning could keep her from me
none of her strategy

when i was delirious
she could be trusted with my blather
when i was coherent
she blushed at my sharp desire

people say she is a sort of goddess
but she is softer than that
no lightning, no arrows
she is more solid than that
she has the constant presence of a planet, or star
orbital, molten, bright

my armor piled in the corner
my footsteps brilliant with dust down her hall
i made it through her organized doubt
her thighs are open beneath the sheet

…

the vermillion moon sees 26/30

prompt: write a persona poem (a poem in the voice of someone else – mythical, historical, fictional, inanimate)

i know water and salt

wherever they move together
i come pulling

i tug obsidian round
and turn her away
our dance is forever

i am the first moon of blood

their taste was familiar to me
the first two barely spoke
for weeks they lay on the surface
a new home, but they only explored each other
conversations with closed mouths

in the silence of miracles
the other who came through them
belongs here
belongs to me

i lay her to sleep, rock her
bring her up to the surface just before dawn
so first light won’t startle her

i make her dream her hands are made
of shadows and sequin
the whole system whispers it
‘she is obsidian’s child’

the humans don’t know
obsidian heard them coming
and became a home for their love

i watched her choose her textures
adjust her orbit to match their rhythms
become irresistible

she fell in love with them
so alive
in the heavy quiet of space

the humans don’t know
their first child is not only of women
but half planet
veins full of stardust

aya and e— lay down and talk 27/30

write a hay(na)ku, a variation on a haiku. write a single three line stanza, or string them together.

a single piece of papyrus, passed back and forth in a planetary collective meeting between the reunited queens.

lover
the child
is she well?
beloved
she’s impossible
and so joyful

heart
tell me
do you remember?
slowly
tender moments
return to me

witchcraft
your touch
has not changed
perhaps
my heart
can not change

baya
her skin
is growing dark
daughter
our alien
she is home

lover
can we
twin the miracle
beloved
hold me
i have millions

two of keys (23/30)

prompt: take a chance, literally. Find a deck of cards (I used thecollective tarot), shuffle it, and take a card – any card! Make a poem from it.

…

from the manual on memory displacement, in the obsidian guide witchcraft and medicine files

there is no way to remove a memory
…yes sure from the mind
but so far, in our experiments, the heart cannot forget love or grief

these memories can only be displaced
locked deeper in the heart
than the present moment

it takes two keys to lock the memories away
one belongs to the memories’ owner
the other to the master witch

trust your witch
even a master can be a fool

addendum:
so long as the master witch lives
the memories can be recovered

but the process is violent
to the tender system
and can never be repeated

when the memories return
they take the center of the heart
for a year or more
before integration

when the memories return
all that wholeness can overwhelm
a halved heart

obsidian is the world (22/30)

Write a pastoral poem (a Shepherd or shepherdess on nature and love) (on earth day, a poem about loving a planet)

…

baya is floating
the vertical fields
she sings songs that make
the shmardue wander close
they prance in out round
her feet bare and bright
with golden sand

she doesn’t know earth
she doesn’t long for verdant lush leaf
she knows sunsets last for days

she loves sleeping in the sunlight
she never uses her grav belt
she isn’t scared of flight

i suspect she would be a fighter
if there was a war over these fields
or the black green iceland
whose melting in the sun
is all the river we know

i hope her whole life is this
wandering and learning her stars
rooting into the precious soil
forgetting in her bones the earth i loved
that bloody miracle
leave it to the men

baya is spinning again
upside down, walking the lavender moon
which aya wants to name vula

the earth children run towards and after her
different against gravity
already orienting towards her center

the only thing i want is her safety
for her to be free from our lineage
for us to be far enough away
that we can’t hear the
celebrations of war, the bloodfall
the only thing i want is her
dancing through the air

Redacted (21/30)

Our prompt for today (optional, as always) is an old favorite – the erasure! This involves taking a pre-existing text and blacking out or erasing words, while leaving the placement of the remaining words intact.

…

dear e—
after everything,
don’t take me back.
the memories I lost
say we shouldn’t

every day I am thinking of constant of my life
the miracle of baya. us.

my system lights up
kinder, my flesh more pleasurable

another chance.
you would give memories
give us a chance

told that we loved each other,
we’d only know joy
give baya
loyalty

Or maybe we forward
You with half
me with our future

take time
from the heart.
I beg you
consider me, anew, again

yours,
Aya

…

(from)

Dear E—
I understand if, after everything, you don’t want to take me back. Perhaps the memories I lost were the ones which say we shouldn’t be together. But I can’t pretend every day that I am not thinking of you the constant of my life. It isn’t only the miracle of baya between us. It is the way my system lights up in your presence. I feel kinder, smarter, better, my flesh more pleasurable. I want another chance.
I thought if you would give up your memories that might give us a real chance. If we both gave them up again, and we’re told only that we loved each other, I think we’d only know joy for the rest of our days. Perhaps give baya a sibling to devote their loyalty to…
Or maybe we move forward in this way? You with half our lives, me with only our future?
I write this so you can take your time to respond, respond from the heart. I beg you to consider me, anew, again.
Still yours,
Queen Aya

obsidian knows it (20/30)

prompt: write a poem that states the things you know.

…

a human footstep is light
except when they are crying

when they sleep
lovers are not separate

the child is mine
they’ll see the resemblance when she falls in love

i gather the shimmer
when i face the darkness

i hope they will stay here
it feels so good to give life

aya was right
though she walked the wrong way

i hold her memories
when she’s ready i’ll slip them back into her

e— is a long lost descendant
of our sun
she belongs here

it is their love that sparked my orbit
but of course the universe is a swoon