You can hold me tight
sleep next to me at night
but you can't protect me
from myself,

You can't put out the fire.

The following was brought to you by
self-imposed solitude during
my healing journey in Panama.
(This was while staying with the beloved
Mercedes, a purely Spanish-speaking "cuandera," or,
a healer who has been practicing natural medicine for
over 4 decades. I was mostly alone there, studying,
healing, learning, growing for almost two weeks.)



The rain came steady, finally,
(Lluvia despacia)
and
In the wet thicket
I can taste my natural soul
like warm herbs and fresh
papaya,
A burning woman-child
cries out in need
as
I paint myself,
The strokes of completion
Of happy alone, alive
Of healing, at last.
I understand everything so suddenly
as in the distance
The chorus of voices
echoes out
[The familiar peace of foreign chanting]
In unison
and the night, still young,
is coated with the
Twittering and chepping of
a harmony of
Creatures,
A cacophony of life.
In me, I have found the mother
My Earth
has turned her soil over
to expose the
Roots 
of a tree planted before
I was separated from the
umbilical cord
And deep inside,
the water flows raw and makes new again.

Is strength really the purity of love,
the courage of living
or
the love of letting go?

You have to fight your way to the earth, where your tears will feed life and the ground will eat your pain -- all real human beings must do this or be ill for not doing so.

And in the meantime, I'm throwing wild parties in a treehouse -- on a limb in your heart.


The more empty I am,
the more full I feel.
Do not stand at  my grave and cry,
I am not there,
I did not die. 

I have so many burning, aching
Words
in me
Begging
to be dug out
with the shovels of
Your mouth.

The need, it breaks across
My skin
like the fire
of
Mysterious mistakes
and
Autumn,
she is wreaking havoc
on my veins,
whispering
Slow burn
Scream loud
Fuck hard.
Come find me in the night
those pearlized white crescents
beaming into my smoldering complexion,
Our medicine soothing the unquenchable
hunger shrieking through our savage cells
until my moon-sticken complexion is only the
striking reflection of your own expression.
Separate we are soulless,
Together we soar.

Night Train

I remember waking to a comatose leg,
numbed by the sudden onslaught of
cold mountain draft,
Swiss alp snowy dawn,
my eyes nearly crusted shut by
the crackling stiff train air,
tight enough for breath to get
Caught in.
I was confused by the frigid ozone --
after all, when I had drifted to sleep
in the train car (rattling like old bones)
on our overnight journey from Czech land
through Switzerland to
Tuscany,
it had been stifling sticky unbearably hot,
air thick enough to slice with a
blunt butter knife in summer...
And now, shivering,
I have to stumble over my sleeping roommate
to rummage for my jacket in the
Dark.
Still numb, back in my seat nest,
I dare to slowly peel
the window shade up, inch by slight
Inch,
Unbearably curious as to what
lies beyond the icy window border
in that ghostly foreign Abyss.
Winding and rumbling through the rolling mounds of
Trees
and thin suspended bridges
Above sparkling ethereal towns
painted into the wooded peak crevices,
I remember thinking
This can't possibly be real
I've woken up in an ISpy book
And the night train just howled and
Clattered,
Like an old metal teapot
tossed upon a campsite fire to
Burn and steam and smoke until
sparking its own demise.


And every October
since that glittering train reckoning,
that late night early morning awakening,
Each October
This memory creeps up to me as
I lie sleeping in my sloppy unconscious
Golden tower of disarray --
Surveying the wreckage of summer
(messy nymphet of
scattered light and
fallen leaves)
This memory jabs itself into my
Broken skin,
Injecting me with wild pyre
Get up, it says
Wake up
and open those wide eyes
Remember how alive you were,
that night?

When everything appears unreal and the
movement of time is
too mercurial
even for a Gemini,
Breathe it all in
Doesn't matter if you keep up or
Slow down
Just clutch the beauty
to your heaving chest
And run with it as fast
as your heart can hold out,
Until your skin peels off,
leaving nothing but a rattling skeleton
Night train of bones,
rumbling into the darkness
climbing through the mountains
surrounding the miniature sparkling
ISpy towns
Covered in a glistening blanket of
surreal Swiss snow.

Life is too short, too fleeting
to miss one second
from behind sleeping eyes,
It's all a waking dream,
anyway
And these memories are what keep us
Breathing
(along the neck of October).