gender identity is not really important

I realize that I'm sort of feminine and sort of masculine and that I am a female bodied person in a romantic/practical partnership with another female bodied person but I feel incredibly uncomfortable with every single label that exists to compartmentalize this reality. I don't want special attention because it's not really anything special it's just the way my being crystallized just like we all have beings that crystallize into personalities and expression and habits of mind. Sometimes I am more feminine or masculine than others my body has a natural eb and flow with this energy I don't fight it and am learning just to flow with it. And PLEASE just because I am with a woman does not mean I dislike men. I LOVE men and have had relationships with them and I would again but when I asked Spirit for a spiritual partner who could walk with me through the fires of healing and awakening at this time on earth I got Jesse. I did not specify if I needed my partner to have a dingdong or a hooha so I got the right soul for me. Thank goodness I was not hung up on a ding dong or hooha preference because I might have ended up with the wrong partner and wouldn't that be just another bum deal for me.
I do want to feel comfortable just being myself and I've taken that liberty from a young age on. From gay to bi to transgendered to 2 spirited all of it just bounces right back off of my auric field like it isn't mine. The word 'butch' actually ricochets and is liable to put your eye out. I've never felt comfortable around people who strongly identify with these labels. Most of my friends and family are strait normal people because I need deeper qualities than gender preferences or expressions to keep someone near and dear. Yes, I am just a little bit different in this way and at the same time yes, I realize that these things are incredibly superficial in comparison to the depths a soul can hold. Souls do not have a gender as far as I can tell so all the stuff around that is just human. I don't want special attention for this I want special attention for what kind of person I am being or not being. Gender identities are inconsequential details to me. You are a woman, you are a man, yes okay woop woop let's find out how you love or what you hold dear in your heart. Let's hear what life experiences you have gotten your self through and what you have learned and what you are dedicated to, that's what is important to me.
I know some folks really need to know how to think of me and sometimes I do too, but only when I empathically feel the confusion or whatever is going on for others when they encounter my little universe. It's not a struggle that I own for myself I have just always been me this way. But it's now a 'thing' on the planet and people are all in a tizzy about labeling gender according to the inside perspectives and rights and all that. Well here is what I feel about it. My name is Moon. I have a female body. You can refer to me as female because according to physics that is what is going on here and it's just easier for everyone this way and we can use our energy for other things, like what is really important. Like not do I want to be called 'him' or 'her' but do I prefer crunchy or smooth peanut butter? Because if you can get that right I will begin a friendship with you. And if you get it wrong I will probably still eat the peanut butter anyway and be your friend.
Anyway... I am with another female, but that is not what I see when I look at her, or what I see when I look at myself. I just see Jesse. I just see Moon. I just see you. See me too and please keep me out of the filing cabinet if you can but if you can't file me under 'human' next to all of the other fine folks you may know or meet. I feel like there are bigger fish to fry for our species than this. I'd rather talk about the spiritual pitfalls of awakening during the age of the Internet, or  that is what I've been thinking about. Thank you.

God drew a circle on a map

This morning during my little online yoga class Elena Bower said a new age platitude in a new way and it struck me and I also thought it was corny simultaneously, which caused me to be interested in it and meditate on the meaning of it. "God has drawn a circle on a map and you are inside of it right now." I shared it with my coworkers and we appreciated it and made fun of it, so now it's real to me. Comments such as 'what did you just do inside your circle' and 'I see what you are doing in your circle there' as well as 'You have provoked me to anger inside my circle and so now we share a larger circle together and inside of this circle we are learning a lesson together but you still need to stay out of my circle' etc. so on and so forth. I know it's another way of saying 'you are exactly where you belong' which is kind of an obnoxious thing to carry around as a truth to me. Try saying that to a child that has been kidnapped and sold into prostitution, or someone who suffers from an advanced state of awakening and endures the throwing of rotten tomatos by the very ones they love but are not where they are yet... and may never be. But still, there is a kind of truth in it that is meant to be transcendent beyond the suffering and the duality of this realm. I am exactly where I belong. My soul chose to come here to do this thing. I forgot all those promises when I was born. God drew this circle on a map just for me to be inside of it and remember who I am and what I came here to experience. What am I doing with my circle? Whom do I allow and how are they permissed to enter this circle and why? How big is my circle? Is it just me inside it on my yoga mat trying to get over myself or are my family, my friends and my coworkers involved in a kind of holy sanctioned vinn diagram with me? Circles. I used to tell my clients and myself that time is like soap bubbles. Every instant in time is still existing inside a little bubble and shamanic journeying, which I rarely speak of anymore due to the world's incessant cheapening of the experienc, well shamanic journeying is just a way in and out of the edges of these bubbles to bring our chipped off pieces back home. These circles God drew for us to learn inside of. These infinites bubbles that spill out onto the cosmic kitchen floor because somebody silly put dishwashing liquid in the dishwashing machine and everything has been soiled and needs to purify. All the souls making messes and cleaning up. This circle of mine I wake up inside of and have filled with laughter and tears and farts and beautiful nothingness. All the vinn diagrams that have come together to serve larger circles and broken apart, each individual circle changed for better or worse off to make new vinn diagrams. God drew us these circles on a map to be inside of, to flex our spirits and work to look up and crane our necks hard enough to catch a fleeting glimpse of the hand and the pen writing the script, penning the edges of the space that make the shape of us. God drew a circle on a map just for me to be inside and I just want to burst it and I just want to have a bigger circle and I just want the map to be my circle God drew a circle on a map for me to wake up inside of and my eyes are opened and I see no maps, no circles, no lines, no Gods, no sleep to wake up from God drew a circle on a map and that circle is our beautiful crutch to lean on in our beautiful amnesia of flesh and bone, like and dislike God drew a circle on a map and the collective is a great vinn diagram and as one pulsing beaming circle we all exist inside of, watching the movies of our life we project onto it's edge. God is looking at us in our circles, each circle no more or less precious, God's love. It's been too long since I saw that.

the visitor- a travel story about Crestone, CO

The Visitor

(everything that is written here actually happened exactly the way it was written)

She was the most angelic child girl I had ever seen. Six years old, almost white hair and her old pale blue eyes had an ancient combination of feline and snake crispness... seeing eyes they were... seeing everything true about the nature of her small earth life. The entire visage was topped off in a white summery dress, leg braces and clip-on crutches. Her family loved her, you can always tell when a child is loved. They walk around wide open and each new thing is another cause for expansion, rather than the constricting response of the wounded.

The neighbors had said they were the Visitors, the Visitor family. Something ominous came over me and my imagination took off like it does, pondering just how far they were visiting from. Crestone, CO is weird man you want to watch your back you never really know who anyone is until they are long gone from your life. I cast my eyes suspiciously in all corners for I am of the Wounded Tribe.

The day before, 2 inches of hail had slaughtered the hard worker's farms and gardens in the small town. It was June and it still lay in trenches of slowly melting slush along the shaded side of the house. Hail in June. This was not a place for the weak-willed.

"She'll not make it past 12." A neighbor spoke and the shadows took a subtle bend. I heard somebody whisper “Cerebral Palsy.” My heart broke apart, I knew I was meeting a living angel.

The little girl suddenly yelped "Snow!" and lunged in her beautiful elastic way to touch it.

I remember standing on a deck moments before, watching the family walk out of a shadowy Aspen grove full of the tallest Aspen I've ever seen in this time so far. Here, I've been Here all along. These amazonian Aspen knew more than I could, supped the air of more seasons change than I ever will. Reach further, dig deeper, stand stiller then small me mighty tree, teach all us humans your strong lesson. Show us the beauty of your eternal patience while we burn and yearn and churn to learn from new mistakes that are the same.

Two older siblings, also white-haired and blue-eyed, wore somber faces in the presence of we strangers. They were maybe 8 and 9, and skipped the earth innocently, yet with a quality of maturity rarely witnessed in even the full-grown. Grave youngsters they were, haunted by the beauty and short life-span of their sweet little golden sister.

The Mother was very petite, topped with mouse-brown gray hair in plaits on each side of her small and peering skull. She knelt down and faced her daughter as she reached for the snow, guiding the girl's sensory experience with it, helping her to explore the textures and sensations of the pure white snow, white as her soul.

The Mother could see I was sick. I had erupted in the most immediate, violent and miserable hay fever, pouring liquid out of my eyes and nose like a triad waterfall in the wilds of my face. Initially greeting her with a hands-free tissue stuffed up my nose, she could not help but address the matter at hand, like a Mother. She peered into my half-lidded swollen eyes.

"Allergies?"

"Yeah"

"We got those too upon arriving."

“Durn Pinyons... they really know how to stick it to ya, show ya where ya dun’t know the truth yit.” I said, helping myself feel comfortable in my country accent.

Maybe she thought I was crazy for talking that way, maybe she already knew allergies to be so much more than just a simple ‘reaction’ to a natural thing but an issue in my soul... to be allergic to my own planet. HA! Maybe I was crazy. I was ok with all of the above. And used to all of the above too.

My small entourage and I had been driving around looking for the Great Stupa. I had a long withheld yearning to be in it's presence. I never was a Buddhist, but honor the teachings I did. Never was very disciplined, but when my chaos erupted in those seasonal mega-volcanos, I grabbed onto those teachings for dear life, like a man on fire will take ahold of the hand that pulls him out, like a beaten child accepts an embrace with tears, like a drowning fool who forgets to thank his life saver ring.

I recall the surrender laying in the back of the truck, sprawled on my back with legs and arms akimbo and sobbing. It was as if the beauty and the glory of the sky itself was crucifying my body, laid out like a dead fish trying just to finally give up the drink and dry out in the sun.

Particles of truth-piercing ferocity penetrated my molecules and I felt for the first time the charged atmosphere of the sacred mantras so loyally sent out from the plentitude of the devout. We hadn't found the Stupa, but stopped to view the valley and chat in front of a Zen monastery.

I told Setting Sun that I was not merely Demian, but Demian Lyte, and had earned the name Lyte by falling in love with a hippy girl back in San Diego. My industrial punkrock friends, fans of guns and motors, biting and rabid zombie play, had dubbed me so in reference to the phenomena of a Bud Light, no longer the unadulterated Budweiser but a pale less harmful version.

I lost the girl but kept the name as an allegiance to my own unwinding karma, to announce that I am able to walk this wicked garden of the world immersed in both sides of the flesh, pleasure and pain, clarity and confusion, sickness and health. Was I? Could I swim from one side to the other, exposing the darkness hidden in the light, and bringing the light to the dark that is without? I am trying, I am stretching this rubber band of duality until the two points are so far into their own side of things the tension will snap. It should not be a matter of which side will I land on. I intend the rubber band to disintegrate, to disperse back into the Earth with nothing but a memory... “I once was a rubber band, but now I am no more. I have returned to the elements with grace. Now I only appear as an emotion sliding through your silken hair as the wind.”

Anyway, Setting Sun liked the story and began to behave towards me with a touch more warmth and sweetness from then on, rather than slaying me all the damn time just for a name. The elders always have to make me prove my long and tedious walk before they will let me be in peace with my confusion, as though the scars I bear upon my bleeding heart are ribbons and medals. Once they see these sad stories, they always look at me like Neil Young would beg, ‘Old man take a look at my life, I’m a lot like you.’

Is it just a name this Demian Lyte? A name that conjured up an energy, an energy that surely was going to kill me. Had I known then what I know now, I would have accepted her slaying humbly and let go my stories of life’s battlefield.

The sky was humongous, rolling over the misty valley like a tidal wave. Kingdoms of large fluffy clouds dwarfed all that we knew as solid, morphing shape in flowing chunks of vapor, intimating the triumph of the spirit world over our small Earth's... how much larger and complex it really is. Or perhaps, they are really the exact same thing and all I say and do or don't say or do is repeated on infinite levels of subtle and improbable existence. Hope so... who could maintain such a vision? I know not this mighty Maintainence Janitor but if you meet him tell him I’m not crazy and I have a job and I’m sticking to it. Tell him I’ll meet him in the Halls of Ascension when Spirit’s Breath finally leaves me.

The relief of sickness is like squeezing the trigger of a gun that has lain fully loaded for decades. Pow! Somebody shot my water main and I leaked from my heart through my eyes along with my nasal passages. What relief. How fitting to be alone and sprawled beneath the majesty of Sky as I released almost 3 years of geographic stagnancy in the back of her truck, so conveniently padded. Why the world has not yet learnt to pad it’s rooms before I enter I never understand. I just bleed my red red blood, I just give my red blood away.

I could not believe it had been three years since I lived on the road. Three long and painful years of taking life seriously, how boring and stifling for an infinite and immortal spirit such as mine. The pain was teaching me, grounding me, showing me my weakness and all that I had run from for so long and brilliant. The pain was putting me out like the final cigarette of the world, roots grew from my unwilling startled feet. I was a deer on a leash so that I could someday become a tree. Not an easy feat for one with such itchy feet as me.

How to train a fawn not to run back into the woods at sight of first reflection? You out there who pedestal the wanderer, the hitch hiking mythos of pseudo freedom, you do not know what you admire... the chaos and vulnerable broken child who cannot find a warm place to lay and so decide they do not need one, reaching for hot temperatures in glass bottles, burning loins, fires of disgrace and hearts who do not speak the truth. You do not know what you esteem, value your soft clean bed, roll in and go back to sleep. We the dirty ones with blackened fingertips, we touch eternity in each breath, praying for a quick short death. We grow old young while other elders regret their youth. We make perfect love always for there is nothing else to live for.

I was looking at myself in a dead stare, all that I ran from, all that I did that could not be made undone. The lies I told that destroyed my purest loves, the ego I allowed to run rampant over soft and trusting hearts, the things I stole just to give away to someone so that they might love me again. It was a sad and terrible thing. My eyes had been locked in with myself, coming down, detoxing, burning holes in an unsoiled perfect mirror, going to work and school on time with holes still in my pants.

My body sang joy truck bumping back into the unknown where no one knew my fucked up song, of course it did. The only safe way for me to travel was in pilgrimage format anymore. It was far too easy to walk away from tax payer realities back to my safe place in the unknown wilds of burning raging heart and bewildered mind, bewitched by falling leaves on the side of the street while passerbys reached for known destinies.

For some a mystery is unbearable, the unknown a fearful dark terrible thing. For others it is simply being known that strikes the shadow gong into a lifetime of escapism. I am the latter, I do not struggle to open or escape a box or prison. I struggle to climb down from my tall tree and do the same thing every day without resentment or needless destruction. My fire burns hot but it also burns black. The starry eyed citizens block out the color and transfix upon a mystic tragedy as though it were a Truth. The only thing that keeps them from buying my black energy is my own egotistical leashing. I do not lie.

We had taken a wrong turn and run into a friend of Setting Sun's in his driveway. I wanted to find the Padmasambhava Stupa, as the Buddha of Compassion is the one I hold in my heart. It is a bewildering and breaking onion to peel through as one approaches a Holy Structure. My false beliefs and stagnancy were ripped away in a synchronized progression. All the time reluctant and yet insistent to plod forward, my body taking me blindly through what my spirit was too afraid to endure. My ego screaming NO! STOP! DO NOT ADVANCE FORWARD! RUN AWAY! USE YOUR THUMB STICK IT OUT AND GO!

It is not bravery, it is ignorance that takes us to be cleansed. It is numbness that carries us through the terrible, and it is the Great Hand of Whatever that won’t let us skip the uglies. In the mirror is a million reflections but only one is truly you. The rest must be slowly masticated, lived through, faced, burnt, defecated, bowed to as all humble students yearning to fly on the golden wings of total freedom bow to the wicked teachers of their own darkness.

The cherub girl's mother walked me to her car to give me a dose of her homeopathic allergy remedy. Compassion is always a beautiful miracle, an expression of the grace who only comes when it is unexpected, unprayed for. The pill did not heal my facial orifices, but the concern of the mother healed my mind and heart, forever leaving a strong impression of the town and it's inhabitants.

From the other side of compassion, that of the originator, it is like a crisp deep warm oily moment of meaning and purpose, the swaying rays of the endless circle become crystallized into significant and synchronized meaning. To care for another's happiness, to give freely and with well-directed meaning- how to ever express the many layers of spiritual juice in such a moment of overwhelming connection?

You do not know me Mother of three children, and yet you care for me! How to say more than 'thank you'? To give a solemn speech, forever destroying this tiny moment of my life. I acquiesce, I happily am reduced into a simple human. Ancient surges push 'thank you' from my sunburnt lips.

I love you oh Mother of the doomed and karmic-free child! I love your story and your life! I love your pure and fighting heart- ever strong and merciful! I love the way you raise your children and I honor the decency of your tiny frame in braids, the brazen truth of life declared in your dedication "I will raise this child with Cerebral Palsy. I am honored to be her Protector and to Provide her with the most rare and delicious bites of earth life!"

The little girl stared at me, healthily curious and unafraid, the essence of both our lives commingling, questioning, recognizing and soothing our sojourn thus far. Hers was far the more beautiful than mine, but the familiarity made us equals. It was brief, but I had touched my inner innocence once... a long time ago.

I could feel her stare extracting my experience from my memory, the dirtied adventures of making sex and drugged journies, all the stanky dives, the horrific moments of exorcism; all aspects of human life she already transcended. I could feel every cigarette I ever touched and every insect I had squashed in that moment. Her purity of this incarnation was a white lilac trimmed in opalescent violets and blues, a standing altar in the droving greedy rivers of humanity. Love does not describe what I felt for her. I cherished her presence like the cooling touch of a saint on my burning forehead. Little girl, your lives have been long and arduous and I am tiny and vexed waiting far in line behind you.

Her siblings, the Guardians, wise enough to know about the befouled ways of many grown-ups, would not look at me. Pretending to be too engrossed, focused and protective to give heed to the mysterious fumes of a stranger's stare. They were ready to leave, already in the car full of their possessions and little dog, crawling around in flitty little fairy movements.

Their Mother asked one to hand her the allergy medicine and I felt a twinge of guilt at having inadvertently interrupted their sacred play in order to perform a menial task. Still, they would not look at me but watched as their Mother worriedly handed me the cap with a pill in it, instructing me not to let it touch my lips or fingers but just to use it to toss the pill into my mouth.

I felt so intimate to this divine family, holding the same pill bottle cap and flicking the same pill under my tongue for the same horrible sickness. Acutely aware of my defilement and in great respect to their familial cleanliness, I handled the plastic lid deftly and kept it far from my mouth hole. I treaded sacred ground with the Visitor family. I had not asked nor planned, but solely was invited. This family was so well-bonded by love and use of the earth, I knew that for anyone it was by invitation only.

I wanted to be back in the truck badly, out of the air, out of the little girl's painfully blinding light. I said my goodbye, projecting it to see if the older children would respond. They did not, but the youngest angel girl, clear as day and ever tuned in to her surroundings bleated "bye!" with none of the reluctance other children would display. I was warmed and returned hurriedly to the truck to resume the search for the great and hallowed Stupa.

A few moments later we were driving up a perilous dirt mountain road. I was emotionally stung by something Setting Sun had said to me earlier and observing the internal quarrel between my higher self and ego; the instinct to retaliate in rage of cold behavior, and the yearning of my soul to forgive and transcend the karmic complications that caused me to be stung in the first place. Lay me down into the recesses of mankind, to the witness I am fair. To sink deeper and deeper as the sky grows always higher, to not be a liar to you is

why I continue to reach for roads that lay beyond the reach of feet.

We began our departure in silence. I am so tired, I never want to be born again. Crouched in the tiny porthole of the backseat of a truck, nose ever-running rivulets of water over my stinging lazered lips. The sun is close in the mountains of Colorado, it does not forgive our mushy weakness of flesh, it fries it. We found our way to the washed out dirt driveway. Winding slowly up the side of the first layer of mountain in, we gasped at the massive flat valley and stopped to watch the paint stroke of gray rain run across the plain. A patchwork of sunlight and mist washed everything into an infinite static image of golds, grays, blues and greens, the celebration of purple... This Holy Image ignited my heart with hope and promise. Prayer flags flapped like flocks of seagulls and the glory of the Truth was everywhere.

A cool and shadowy turn in the road revealed a small waterfall running out from beneath a water drain covered in dirt and giving us a way across the stream. A particular angle of the road revealed a glimpse of an alter covered in Malas and a simple wooden folding chair with pale green peeling paint on the creekbed beside it. A picture of emptiness, so perfect and worn, holding space in the woods for all who yearn.

Setting Sun commented that people usually walked up the road, and I didn't blame them. Everything about it was absolutely beautiful. But it was the hour before dusk and the stream, flowing alongside the road, was alive with the buzzing of stellar sonic tiny little mosquitoes, the highest pitched little bizzers I ever heard. And I know a thing or two about mosquitoes.

I now sit frying under fluorescent tubes riding the city bus at night in Boulder. I am surprised to find myself here and the world is still empty but good. So anyway, we continue on up the road in the truck.

"Hallelujah!" I cried, "We're in heaven!".

I could feel all the prayers in the land begin to shower me. Ambrosia was in every sweet breath, plucked out of the air like tuftfuls of cotton candy. An erratic breathing pattern came into me. Three quick inhalations fill the lungs in three layers, and one well meant exhalation. Through the nose. I was so excited to be there.

Giant prayer flags hung lengthwise off tall poles penetrating the sky in silence. More than you could count maybe. Or more than I could count, my mind was drunk with the moment and counting was too heavy.

The earth meets the sky in violence, chaos and confusion down to the pebble and worm, down to the gnats and microorganisms crawling in the dirt. Sky is too big for it, Sky tells the Earth it is little. Earth feels too complex. Sky is simple and mostly clear. They battle it out in eternal restructuring, Earth always trying out a new surface to impress with. Sky loves it. It is a beautiful dance always. The Stupa said so by it's presence.

I am blessed for all infinity beyond time holding every aspect of existence within my small palms. I can see that all existence is what my palms are made of, that is what is all the time crawling on the surface. I chuckle to myself and move forward.

We arrived into a parking lot composed of gray sharp rocks, the size of fat thumbs. The lot was raised above the nook in the mountainside the Stupa was built into. Oh Holy of Holies, the perfect curves of solid white tipped by a golden head carved into a giant torch.

Astral rays began to sprout out of the mountaintops behind us. One had to descend a stone path curling back on itself in neat order. I of course stop to take pictures and spy Lily and Setting Sun already down at the foot of the Stupa.

Helter skeltering my way down in giant leaps over the trails, I weightlessly halted in mid-prance before a sign. “Please respect the silence people are meditating”. My body, obediently cradled in a warm hand of love, was guided to gently step upon the remainder of the stone path.

As the Stupa began to dwarf me in size, reverence rose like clouds of doves in my heart. The kindly tendrils who had been calling to my body since it was first conceived finally clasped my pilgrim weary soul and made me small and with good intent. I was filled with silence and the moment.

Oh to be before a place of many far-reaching prayers! The atmosphere was condensed yet light in weight. The cotton candy airpockets began to pump into my system. My meridians rushed open and golden light streamed through my tired demon-worn matrix. Prayers of music rung in my hard thick skull and I felt that I could do anything I wanted with my life. I knew again that this was truth. I knew again, the Holy Angel as the end, and the Wicked Demon as the vehicle. All was forgiven, all was pure. My dark acts, my raging ego, the need to control all was rolled into one vibration of peace. I knew that on my death bed my wings would once again shine white. And outside all lattes, all ego driven conversations about the removal of the ego, every cigarette, every drunkenly cut knee, slewn curse word and drug induced delusion of the truth, there was a cherub who was waiting for me to weave my way home through the broken slime of my ancient soul. I knew I would die like the little girl in crutches, just as fascinated by the elements, just as innocent seeing only purity even in a demon for that is all she is and that is all she will ever see is her beautiful sacred purest self.

More doves erupted from my forehead, I circumambulated. I looked up and saw the Golden Buddah of Rock in the window, hands making the ancient gesture pinky and pointer finger raised, the others curled together. Of course the Buddah who sits upon the mightiest throne in North America is the King of Rock. Hahahaha! I struck a lotus and prayed Om Mani Padme Om in my low voice. I did it 108 times and gave thanks for sacredness. I decided some day I would pray like this professionally. Then I felt the breeze as it passed through a layer of prayer flags and toussled the top of a pine tree. I saw how that movement could never be redone, how the wind is like curling smoke, an invisible art that communicates through touch. I gave up my praying career as soon as it began. The sun ate my eyes below from the line where the ground meets the sky forever. The sun didn't leave any of me at all but a mouthed thank you while I lay in the dirt slowly pulsing.

cup of dying

I once visited a woman on hospice in her home 3 times a week for hands on healing. It was honestly some of the most beautiful days I can remember. The way the autumn light slanted in through her windows onto her chair, where she lay in and out of awareness of her own death. At times she would fight it and others she would forget. She thought I was her priest and I would read passages to her from Psalms because it comforted her while I'd practice Reiki or ever so gently paw at her flesh and beg it to give her some fleeting relief. Her spine and hips had frozen in one posture and going to the toilet, a foot away from her chair, was a nightmarish ritual of yowling and scratching. Every time my heart would break for her. I never understood the caregivers that were always there, watching Jerry Springer and yapping on their phones. Couldn't they see the raven peeking in the window? Couldn't they feel the autumn turning into winter, the same claws of ice taking her an inch at a time as the claws she feebly waggled around trying to make some lasting sense of her decay? I could see the way her judgments had shaped her age, the walls around her heart made of steel, so thick and heavy and permanent they were never acknowledged. A lifetime of sandwiches and swatting away anything that might change her small and comfortable life. She had no family never had, I had just lost mine through deceit so deep it washed away any faded memory of love like how oil spills and takes over a blue and thriving sea until nothing can live there anymore. I too, was alone in my witness of the taking over of the black. Inch by inch, we were dying together. Her heart trying and wanting to break through the patterns of her tight mouth with it's pointed tongue, my heart too big and dumb shattered over our heads dumping glitter and confetti, desperate to illuminate the small precious moments of our death together, of our tired pitiful efforts to get right before the black would come into the room like an ocean through the window. She died that winter. I was so happy for her.

thanks for the wounds

thanks for the wounds humanity

thanks for wounding me into a human
I'm like you now, grown-ups
covered in sores
oozing honeys
and poisons
calculating friend or foe
home or lost

thanks for this chance to live and then die

may the songs inside my heart
be heard before
I finish
letting
you
go

like an eagle diving to the earth

my imperfections inspire instant retribution

like all good things with wings

we must touch the ground 

eventually
feathers become roots
heavy with the need
to be known
in the darkness
of
existence
holding on

like all who love the Truth

we must suffer and mistake

to find her
we must push against
the buried soil
for a moment of light

without these faults, oh divinity

mirrors have no dimension to reflect with

take heart 

in this the salty ocean

wear no skin to seperate it's sting

the grimace is the smile

the laughter is the truest when sobbing

I put my heart on an altar
for a soul to be free
now it is I whom
must transmute
the disease

the callous know

nothing of 

this.