excerpt from short story: I remember that morning so vividly, even after all these years. The fine, sterile details of the health clinic on the corner of St. John and Rescue Me... I did not deserve to be there to face the nurse on my own. I had known it in my gut, long before making the appointment. I felt the natural energy of what was innately feminine and fertile begin to spin like a whirlpool deep within my womb. But still, I was not ready to face such answers and consequences alone. The experience from prologue to end was an entirely visceral one. I cannot tell you for certain the specific day we created such life together, but I know in my heart it to be the sunny morning in September after we returned from the gym. Him and I... our bodies already warm and limber from stretches, delighting in one another's scent. To reach out and taste, the beads of sweat forming between my breasts and around his face. We looked at each other as if we had just met, there in the mirrored walls of his bathroom, unable to contain our desire as we peeled off our moist clothes. I felt his body pressed up against mine hot, and wrapped myself around him tight - feverish after being apart for so long. Half a year had passed without a kiss or embrace. I thought I would never see this love of mine again, but here he was now, unhibited and hungry with his touch. We melted onto his bed the way honey drips from a bottle. Slow, constant... clinging to one another in ripe yearning. There was no curve or bend of my body he did not take with his senses. He had me in every way, unrushed and fueled by an insatiable desire that had been present since the moment we had been reconnected again. And I felt my body yield, I felt it release. I made way for him, and felt the kundalini of my sex tremor with ripples of ecstasy. We had become one on many occasions in the past, we had connected deeply before. Our lovemaking had known the divine heights of meditation through passing season... but the soul chose to descend then, on that otherwise ordinary day... as if it knew. That despite our hearts manifest in passion, my lover buried his secret deep within me and knew before I did that the end of our fate together was closer than could at that moment have ever been fathomed, much less expected. His guilt was masked with renewed devotion during the few weeks I slept unassuming by his side. He loved me deeply, and shed tears for reasons I was too naive and trusting to know why. Still, my intuition stirred me that despite our passions, I was not at rest with him in peace. I was disturbed through our relationship by my biting and persistent dreams foreshadowing cruel events to pass. I feared my sanity and thought paranoia took over the best of me. He let me all the while believe this, a grotesque and glorified lie to save his own grace. When I discovered a week later, in the beginning weeks of Autumn that my beloved had betrayed me, I wept and screamed the way Ophelia had. I had, in that time, gone mad. There was something that had ruthlessly been severed within me. My first heartbreak carried on from one death to another, unending... torturously drawn out in the most emotionally and physically scarring way. The life bloomed only days before the death of my devotion to him. I could not bear to look at this man after what had been revealed. I wept when he touched me, as the food of love had turned to ash in my mouth. I forced myself to make love and found our connection had turned perverse and deeply painful, recoiling each time. Feeling hot tears stream down my face in the realization that my passions for him had died as well. The man whose scent and body left me intoxicated now repelled me in the most heartbreaking way. Any sexual release felt forced and void of any emotion except for followed disgust. I had died in every way, and yet still unknown to me, carried the budding of new life in my veins. |
Years passed. When I left the country, I wiped off the wet paint of art and romance. Memories of blood and tears stained the crevice canyons of a city that was once home. I packed my belongings, and did not return. Not for a long, long time... There was a period of great turmoil that followed after. A period of unrest and emotional chaos, only with no where else to run, I was left to face my emptiness. I involuntarily came face to face with the mask of loneliness parading this entire time as if a terrifying truth. Its company gradually became my greatest ally, and formed the foundations of a new strength. When my mother left her country, she left with me around her hip. Fatherless. The karma of the absent masculine. I found my drive as she had. Baby, less. Gone. Buried. To cut the umbilical cord of karma, all the while with guilt streaking my inner thighs, because... who was I to decide the Fate of such things? No one. I left and despite the constant pain of such memories that resurfaced once a month, I clung to the small redemption of something tangible... It was time to finish what I began years ago and kept leaving behind me. In the world of academics, the dry pages of scripted words which all my life I read with disdain became my only source of stability. I befriended a young woman whose life I would have had. Then another. And another. Young, talented, persevering yet fragile mothers everywhere around me with their young children, all of them without fathers. Alongside the painful abandonment of their children's father, these mothers also all seemed to share the experience of a fortuitous assault at the hands of strangers. Men without faces. Sons of an anarchy wasted in the hellish sphere of what it means to be human. How peculiar to be invited into the inner world of these women's past, connected to one another through trauma as if by some grand design... and the eerie coincidence that brought me to them. Why? This was the burning question I kept asking, yet never could discover the answer for. And I passed through the seasons clinging to the bureaucracies that cage these single mothers with debt. I clung to the financial loans that allowed me to endure a continual, unraveling Unknown. It is a strange feeling... for a woman's womb overnight to turn into a tomb in which an unformed soul is aborted back to the Unknown. And there were many nights that I wept in secret, against the pressing desire of wishing only to be known. I spent years traveling across the Pacific and Atlantic seas... drawing love to me, and clinging still to only that which was tangible. As love, you may know, was always the most intangible phenomenon of all. |
Emotion. How it stirs us into action... into expression, of words formed to confession. The fountain overflows, whatever the feeling is, it overwhelms. How can something shake me as intensely as this? A woman of poise and intellect. Cool in demeanor, of stature... when I begin to love, I lose all I have gained and always stand before the court of my own judgement as: Guilty. In my adolescence, I had moved from city to city and played on the affections of men and women alike. The great poet, with words drawn out as silk, recited by smoothe vocal cords. I spoke to seduce, and had before the ripe age of womanhood, already repaid my debts. My heart was softened for the trials of women, though hardened still in matters of love. For a long time I believed myself to prefer the company of natural women, and continued to disdain even the most sincere men. I would find a chink in their armor and shatter their facade to ruins. But after such endless days of witnessing the pain of men and women alike, the polar sexes began to merge as one. I saw little difference in the yearnings of both and began to question why for years we stood in opposition. My compassion grew for the suffering of this collective. To live in a world and long desperately for love, but be unable to accept it because the wound of our survival runs too deep. This was a tragedy we all shared, and my personal contempt for one sex over the other did not have enough sustenance to endure. To reject the masculine was to reject an aspect of myself that I had only recently learned to love so well. I could not turn myself cold to either, or. But still, I could not allow myself to be touched in earnest by them. Their tenderness frightened me only because I was afraid to hold on. ~~~ Graduating the world of scholarly appraisal was not as gratifying as I imagined it to be. I felt no more accomplished afterward, than I had before. It was the end of one chapter, and the beginning of another. Only I could no longer continue to indoctrinate my false sense of stability with the hunt of academia or career. I would always be the dreamer, feverish and wild in my heart. I could ground in routine, but even I struggled to discipline myself. How noble is the struggle in which destruction intertwines itself like a raw vein around the limb of our passions. Try as we might, we can never seem to separate the two, like stubborn lovers, they grasp onto one another with tenacity. My heart was full, and my body ripe to be discovered. I had to release the currents of my ache and desire somewhere it could be received in all its capacity. I knew only the elements would understand the thirst of my need for connection. I had spent a lifetime searching for it in the eyes of another and witnessed only the dull reflection of fear gaze back at me in return. Or the shallow limpet stare of lust coax me into feeling. When you open yourself to such a lover, how one laments in the illusion of what was never there... No... I did not want to lose myself in the insincere, confused embrace of Man. I wanted the earth instead to cradle me back to birth. I wanted my baby back, to breastfeed the river my thirst and hunger. My child and I, whose presence of a father was needed for psychological security, had instead pressured for the removal of this potential. I could not allow myself to love another man, despite my want. I could not. And I comforted myself with this as an ideology, romantic to those whose hearts like mine were also left scattered in pieces. I intended to lose myself in the wilderness of the earth. Alone. One, with my Maker. My passion translated in its fullest potential. But the Spirit of this world had other plans for me it seemed... and like Alice, I found myself somewhere in between dream and reality... tumbling once more down the rabbit hole. |
He came to me first in a dream years before meeting. I was torn between him and someone else who loved me deeply but ultimately, I discovered my heart belonged to this dark haired man who understood and accepted my every shade. Time and again, in these dreams I would push away in fear but his persistence was what I remembered clearly, and what was instantly recognized when at last we came to meet. He held on to the fate and refused to let go. He knew before I did, that we were meant to walk these plains together. In every dream, I would always find myself returning to the arms of his unwavering love. Initially, I did not recognize him to be the faceless love I had already married in other worlds. This man's beauty was overwhelming, and the intensity of our attraction frightened me. I sensed the grounds beneath my feet stir, and instead of celebrating the connection between us, I lamented in any feelings that resembled love. He was wild, like I had dreamed, yet incredibly grounded. I had never before met anyone with such depth of character, and refused to believe it were true. I was certain it was a grand illusion the world would test my own character with, to see whether or not I had grown. So I stayed away and prepared myself for his departure. But like a moth, he followed… unable to stay away. The day was smoldering as I made my way down the canyons, intent on finding water. I knew there was a spring somewhere close and risked the idea of losing myself in the wilderness to find it. The sun inched its way closer to horizon by the time I finally reached the sweet, blue calm untainted yet by our urban hands. I removed my clothes and felt the waters rush to me with welcome. I rejoiced in the sensation of her embrace as I slipped under. Nothing had ever been more natural, to return to the place I was birthed from. I felt her move into my every part, healing the aspects that had once forsaken the feminine. My tears were washed away by the wetness all around. There was no moment to separate the waters and me. We were one. At last, I felt the heartbeat of the goddess inside my womb. ~~~ For a lifetime, I had imagined that when I met my beloved, he would find me lost in some danger or tundra of vacant space, appearing from nowhere to lead me back to safety. Yet I realized after my heartbreak that I was holding on to an unformed memory of what fathers felt like for their daughters. It was not in my place to lean on a knight in shining armor. I had my own dragon to vanquish and self to save. In fact, it was at that moment of pure bliss and calm, the beloved appeared. He was Divinity's child, as I and all of creation around me. Beloved, manifest. There between the corridors of alabaster stone, our eyes met and all that was found, was in an instant seized. I had allowed the earth and her elements to rescue me. |
He gave, he gave all of himself holy. How can I describe to you what it felt like to be held? Oh, ethereal... it echoed across the dry earth. And I shook long before the apex of my release. Luminous and wet beneath him, held there steadfast and trembling. His gaze did not waver, not when I turned my head to escape it, this love. To escape the pain it surfaced. The unending heartbreak that a thousand lifetimes could not mend. There was no end to, Our bodies streaked with white ash, as he pushed me deeper into the dust with his sex. We trembled against the marble, against the sands. Wanting to blend further in, wanting to stain. Stain with new blood and white dust alkaline my outline without guilt or regret. Gently, he turned my head back to face him... Slowly, he moved. Slower still, deep within the canal of what was begging to be healed. My eyes met his, and tears released. They fell past my cheek and onto the dry earth beneath us. Hips lifted slightly to meet his motion, and I dug my nails into him, closing quivering eyelids to feel the music between our sex. The movements deepened, it did not quicken. He grasped under my neck and kissed my open mouth, rejoicing in each other's song. I heard us, moans across the canyons gentle and long. I felt us. Legs spread further, moving rhythmically. Together, trust in him finally. To make love, and continue after our peak. To spill the seed deep within the roots of all meant to be holy. I had never heard someone pray to me "I love you" a hundred times with his eyes and embrace. There we lay, stained sacred. Still. Inside. Lips hovering over one another with shuddering sensitivity, Inhale, exhale... Regaining our breath, I felt sweet tears fall on my chest. I looked up to see his eyes wet and expression raw. To taste the salt in his sweat, in his tears. Our scent, our limbs... all of it mixed up. As it was and has been. This unbridled passion, Eros making love, to his Storm, to his sea... tell me how to capture this in poetry. |