Liminal Entreaties

Liminal entreaties

to knowings 

and understandings 

that blaze in their absence, 

ungraspable, 

they gawp in their vacuumed void, 

swimming just out 

of the colonised mind's eye, 

the twinkle of luminescent waters 

when the moon is dark.

The capacity for embedded thinking

thwarted by generations

of necessitated blindnesses. 

So fragile a willingness 

to be with the unknown 

to believe the unfathomable.

So easily overwhelmed by the petrifying belief

in my own annihilating seperateness, 

the insidious hegemony of insignificance,

the frozen landscapes of self inflicted 

and culturally commodified shame. 

So rigid and unyielding the scaffolding 

of my flimsy mind.

Can it surrender the banal violence 

the flaccid madness 

of it's own perceived innocence? 

And yet I turn toward 

the uncomfortable unrest 

of the alchemising body 

and it's deep feeling sense,

it's generous availability to metabolise 

the indoctrinated traumas 

of bloodline,

the weaponised conquest 

of the wildlands of interiority, 

the brutalising purification, 

the violent homogenisation, 

the agreigeous deforestation,

the disinfected sterility 

of modernity consciousness.

It is too easy to feel nothing 

of our organic inheritance, 

our mytho-poetic dowry, 

so easy to numb our exquisite burden 

to become. 

How do I court the new and ancient bacterium

of infectious connectivity, 

the creeping mycelium

of informational pollutants, 

linking past knowings to present delirium, 

broken trust to healed fecundity, 

barren ground to storied canopy. 

Like a spider weaving a web 

across millennia and continent, 

across oceanic current and feathered flyways

and groaning land masses 

of rootedness and migration, 

across extinguished languages 

and sacred undying flames 

of rhythm and pulse,

remembering. 

Like the tendriled strands 

on the grandmother's loom, 

on the grandfather's lute,

braiding starlight and lichen,  

birdsong and bone 

and the brail of ancestral bequeath. 

And I trust the bodies edge 

of comfort and pain,  

emptying and filling 

and emptying again.

I trust it more than the numb coldness 

of complicit acquiescence.

And knowing that I inhabit a body 

that is so shrouded and cushioned 

by layers and layers of protection,

in all it's enabled whiteness,

knowing I dwell not at the frontline,

I push past what feels safe, 

and all the world that ever was is here

and I let myself burn inside, 

break and flood and unfurl inside, 

bloom and unravel and dissolve inside,

occuping the liminal edge 

of the putrid pain, 

the hollow guilt,

the ragged shame,

the corrosive rage, 

the harrowing grief, 

the raucous desire,

asking to be beheld,

embodied, 

emblazoned 

with our long forgotten love, 

with our once remembered unison

so that a new world may seed 

in the nourished ground

of our abandoned obedience to shiny surfaces,

to relinquish the vacuous polishing 

of hollow identity.

May my body become the alter 

through which life prays.

My soul the passage of birth,

the cave, portal, cairn, burial mound

through which peace is born. 

How much innocent life must die, 

before my mind collapses, 

and my body, 

now soft and horizontal as soil 

is seeded and pollinated anew,

with wild ancient 

and tender fertile 

prayers of unending dream

of remedy 

and solace.

Vast Multiplicity

If, for most of my days 

alive upon this earth

I had been swallowed 

by an impotent collapse,

how would I rise 

into generative purpose

without abusing the animal softness 

of my body.

How do I also hold to the wisdom 

of that collapse 

that was something about gentleness 

and a longing for truth.

How do I slow, 

in the face of a harrowing regime 

of mindless obeyance to busyness, 

to learn to listen to the whispered wisdoms 

that sing inside 

the endless temple of soma?

How do I learn to listen?

If I have been taught to override,

with mind and vacant distraction,

how do I learn to slow and revere 

the voices that howl and moan, 

that ululate and keen 

in the holy resonance chamber,

the unruly menagerie

of my own interiority?

To drop to my knees and scry 

the star studded waters 

for hidden pleasure, 

treasured devotion, 

ancient hungering.

If I have been raised to suppress, 

to colonise and civilise 

the wild gestures,

the harrowing dance 

the tender beseeching

of my instinct,

how do I flower the great inner ear 

of my embracing becoming?

To seek and to coax 

and to patiently unfurl 

the tightly curled impulse 

of my wholeness?

How do I make peace 

with the driven tyrants 

that drive me forward 

in mechanised defence?

Driving me beyond my innate need 

for care and regeneration, 

for tenderness and communion, 

gestation and grief.

How do I dismantle the harrowing dictatorships 

that preside over my own body being?

How do I give equal weight 

to each of the subjugated voices 

that call in the dark chasm 

of my unconscious sub-terrain 

so that when I speak 

my voice is a generous multitude 

of possibilities?

That when I look I am seeing 

from the eye of both the bird and the worm, 

the blazing sun and also 

the dark eye at the centre of the heavy earth, 

from the driven imperative 

and the still reflection, 

from the silent 

and the beseeching both?

A receptive listening, 

an enduring council 

to the biodiversity of body speak, 

to the ecology of wisdoms, 

that swirl and erupt 

in the deep mystery 

of my own vast multiplicity.