1222.

Now for the words that cannot be spoken in polite company. The words that I won't say here. The words I won't say anywhere. But I remember blueberry blue and the smell of milk. And I remember the crushing end of nothing and so many things. A future, a beginning. But not mine. Yours.

limestone leaks.

Calpe, I'm calling your name and begging for clemency. I stand here, bearing your weight with a straight back and ask you to let me crumble. This monolith is tired and my calcite bones ache to put down their armor. Let me sink into the straits and lay with Moorish castles covered over by sand and salt.

Take this moment and claim it before it disappears into the fog that tangles the view over my shoulder. I give you and this and now all of the hopes I don't hope and dreams I don't dream.

Take from me what you can, while you can. I am running out of words.

Trimurti.

The Trimurti Sadasiva stared impassively with three sets of eyes, a chameleons range of vision, at the pathetic pilgrim I'd become. Searching, yes, always searching for the thing I couldn't name with words or pictures or wild gyrations or dreams, I had arrived after so long at the altar of answered questions. So I opened my mouth to ask, and silence wound itself out of my parted lips like an unraveling ball of twine. Just a gasp of tangled half-thoughts and riddles posed to draw out my meanings for no one, not even this God. Sinking down and on the brink, my eyes blurred with emotions I'd thought long spent.

What did I want? Pity for the miles I'd crawled on humbled knees, bloody with a journey's long desperation? Compassion for the tear-spent nightmares and groaning hunger always gnawing, never sated? Why was I here? To validate my flight from oblivion? To etch out lines suggested in shadows? To unveil some fallacy of purpose? I raised empty hands that offered no tribute of wealth or devotion and waited to be understood.

Unblinking, my God's face emerged from the field of opposites like a perfect earth emerging from heaven and hell. It's sexless voice a whisper threading my atoms like a skilled seamstress, filling my mouth with It's words- 'My child, whom I neither adorn with praise nor condemn with judgement, there is no answer to be found.' And weeping, I embraced this reverberation and slipped from the temple no more a pilgrim searching for truth but a pillar rising underneath it.

five.

i have been holding the ocean in my mouth like a fabled chinese brother. all the treasures and bounty of the sea lay bare on the sandy expanse where water once kept them secret. i swallowed it to show you everything i've been hiding, so that you could gather it up and take it away. but i can feel the waves press against my lungs and my heart and it's only a matter of time before the tide rises out of me to cover it all back again. so, please come back to shore before i drown you, because i have no brothers to save me from the death devices of the angry crowds.

it is not more than it is.

oh, eleanor, your promises lay flat against my heart.  in spite of it all, i can still feel the space where you laid your hands in rest across my neck.  i defiled my temples and abandoned my posts to keep that memory, the only one i have.  here, where i last knew that touch, i named you everyday in the blades of grass at my feet and the quiet pulse of blood in my veins.  eleanor, eleanor, eleanor...

i can recall an earth-warm place where we sat drinking tea and asking the winds our fate.  like a mist, your lilting voice spread wide and soft against the heavy night, a solemn prayer, a humble offering.  you heard a call and i followed you into the tangled wood, torn skin and skirt a small price to pay for the humming of our fingers as they brushed each other.  at the end there was only an empty field, a broken camp fled of dancing women and fortune tellers.  we scoured the ground for a sign and found a handful of coins.  the gypsy faces printed on the wooden tokens were a poor excuse for divination, so we took our cups and swirled our own tasted tea leaves to read our future path. the result was muddled and false.  so you left me standing there with the cups and the coins as you promised your way backwards and away from me.  

and i stood there as the world grew in around me, listening for the familiar tremble in my heart, waiting for you to come and find me.  i rooted myself down so that you would always have a home.  i stood silent under rain and snow and punishing sun so that you could always find me. but, even though i have been waiting for a thousand years, i can no longer remember who you are coming to find.  so i let the cups and the coins fall from my aching fingers and i lower my tired arms.  all the broken pieces lay like shattered suns across the kitchen floor, and i will not sidestep them today.  for all that will not appear or disappear, i lay myself open to see it tumble out- the cowardice and fear and schizophrenic crush of everything i cannot see clearly, just in blurs, as i fall/fly past.  

i will not wander the earth for you, i will not stay in this place til you come for me.  i will walk until i remember my own name and then i will stop and dance with the world and say 'thank you'.  

brambleberry rose.

i have been here, mostly. unraveling ever so slightly at the ends, sometimes the center. but the sweater was thread bare and everyone needs a little indecent exposure to show what needs to be fixed.

i want to ditch work and go lay on a blanket in the park with a stack of books (poetry, even though i don't usually have a passion for it) and drink wine and eat fruit and bread. i need to soak up the sun and repair what's set on it's side. i have been inside too long. i want to sleep in the grass like i'm still innocent and wrap myself around a brightness i haven't yet lost.

i feel vibrant and obvious and rash.
lush, if waning.
potent, if fading.
surging and blazing and
every other delicious swath of colour that paints me brighter than i actually am.
but what other words can describe without failing the agony and resplendence that is being here.

in comes a ghost.

i wake with fire and acid.  and the  stalks of grass and the african dancers sway in time and push their visions toward me.  the full and pregnant moon whispers brush strokes curved and caressing and resplendent while my eyelids tremble in sleep.  for as long as a caught breath after an unexpected shadow, i hold these things of beauty in my hands.  they kiss my fingertips as they alight and fly to another open vessel.  with the glow that never lasts long enough, i try and i try and i try to smear the discarded trinkets and bits of lace with life.  with the life that i cannot hold on to, with the life that is not mine was never mine but some small piece of divinity and perfection that quite by accident fluttered across me on it's way to some opaline utopia i can sometimes almost almost see.  madness swells against me, furiously working my hands and face and self into a barely contained scream of motion.  it flows with my blood out of nowhere and everywhere and is it me?  

then the pang of feeling more than i want to the space where the god touched be nothing again.  not empty, not devoid, just plain and nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.  

a gift.  a glimpse.  a wisdom.  it was never me to begin with.  it was a voice that needed me to be heard, a vision that needed me to be seen.  i need it too, sometimes, to have purpose.