Category: earthling

Tickets, Please

The cost of admission.

You asked about colleges attended, your hulking mass above us, blocking the light. We knew the move for what it was, a banal violence. Hello, wolf, we thought, noting the borrowed sheepskins. How many others had used it to move us from the pits where we waited for the musicians, our kin, to begin? Tickets please. Tickets. The announcement punctuated by the swing of some blunt instrument pulled from a holster at the hip. And on the train where we rode to visit our mother who was dying for lack of credentials to prove she was worthy of the care needed to live. Tickets, please.

When you asked me about colleges attended, I was seated among others on the ground. We were sharing blankets. Many of us were children, some old enough to have acne; others to have the scars of acne and miscellaneous burns; still others had creaking bones and the tired eyes of the old. When you came to ask me for university credentials––tickets, please––you did not notice. How we had removed our shoes, each of us, recognizing holy ground. This was our school where we sat in the dirt on shared blankets at the feet of dead poets.

It is impossible to argue the exile from certain states of being, but we knew to listen for the music of a torquing tongue arched at just the right angle to halt the bone-crunching gears. It was only a moment, but it was long enough to notice the sound for what it was when it resumed. Your question, too. And we laughed with the ghosts when you left us, and went back to school, and you continued to mutter under your breath about the ignorance of some people, and we waved.

Flesh Chorus

From past, until––

Sing in us a song to unwrite what has been overwrought onto the bodies of earthly creatures, their backs and faces, beds and nests, limbs and soils, eyes and the marrow of mountains, each vessel to overflow with what floods between seen and unseen, light to lift the lies from torn pages of official record. Resound.

Corpus

And collective.

The words were what was happening to us, lapping and lolling their tides. The shock of being enmeshed in a work of art. If someone had asked what my life was then, one answer would be: anywhere but this body. Another: any felt where beyond its limits––both of which, I see now, would have betrayed certain narrow assumptions about the limits of a given form.

Histories in Gold

Records of conquest.

Once, amid covenant of salt and lamps to burn every evening through quiet, into dark, one had the idea to cut the groves. He suggested this to others. He knew what vanities to stoke, whose appetites were violent enough to take pleasure in the raid, as though doing so would bring a final calm, an end to the torment of those despairs and passions that would strike at midday and midnight. 

But what followed were empty pleasures, and now these hungers were of greater volume. From there, they built the walled cities and armies of men to protect them, and these grew notions of valor that were married to the work of weapons and attendant armors, of seizing and attendant claims, might and its supporting rights. With these, they enacted many plunders; called these Victory, claimed them Saving, recorded as the Project of Civilization. 

There was much claiming in those days, of the spoils of war. Over time it became unfashionable to call out the spoils; stating the obvious was something only a dullard would do. But the claim of the owners was birthed in violence when they ran off with the sheep, and when the salt loses its flavor over time, who remembers those first trees?

Creature

And creator.

It lives
by the distraction
it makes
before it dies
at the insides
only to emerge
as task: one sole
task given me
out of time.

Here I am again
afraid of running
to enact the small
body of infinite
infinitesimal
purpose given
to each, a creature
alive, scratching
for release
from suffocation
by a world yet
to know how
it breathes.

Song of Seed

Into birth.

We wanted only flesh of soil, of sky––to hold us. See us as children, planning our return. Now with our hands in the abundance called dirt, now with the earth on our faces, in our ears. Now with our dreams of flight, neverending. Until they did end, as we learned shame at the nakedness of our longings. To accept separation as a central term of continuance. To accept the terms they gave us for what this was. Such as civilization, such as fact, such as growth. But the souls––the soils that we had tasted when we held them in our hands had whispered differently: no treatise on growth or development, nothing to advance, but a call and response with the sky. Something like, here, and hear. How we had waited for our turns to call back, here! How we had sensed in our filthy guts, the wombs of all things sacred, that it was coming, and soon.