Healing Prayer, in honor of the tide at last night's full moon

This is a prayer for wholeness, peace. This is for Carrot, that she travel well and trust her own deeds, for Kirsten that she and her family know peace. This is for Katie and sacrifices, her old ways offered to the vision and hope for what could be. This is for me, this is for me, this is for Poetry. This is for Susan and Emma and each generation stronger than the next, this is for Sis and Carol, mom and Maggie and the woman who've seen it all. This is for Kim and Patty who teach me, this is for every strong woman who ever challenged me, this is for Mom, this is for Dad. This is for Sean and Jamie content in their move, this is for Kate and Micah as they fly and learn to trust the tides. This is for Kelly and for all prayers for a home. This is for Mandy and Jessica and every sister I've ever known, this is for Laura and trusting her song. This is for Brooks and his patience and wisdom, this is for every man who ever fought with his heart, this is for Tom who loves and believes in being a friend. This is for Sam that he trust his way. This is for healing hands, this is for tea, this is for moonlight, this is for the ocean, this is for the drug addicts and those sick on booze, this is for violence and for poverty, this is for money and caves and islands and pain that still breathes. This is for Erika and believing you have a chance. This is for Reyna, Santiago, Umberto and Joel. This is for ancesters, this is for foul weather. This is for garnachas and black cherry sodas and dancing in the sun. This is for bonfires, this is for volcanoes, this is for stars, this is for family, and babies, and marriages and Meggie, and memories of who we love. This is for Amy who teaches every day. This is for the loving, breathing, healing earth. This is for alchemy, this is for ecstasy, this is for roots and bands. This is for madness. This is for sweet. This is for the tides. This is for Brandon and Brook, this is for music and gardens and tribes. This is for all of it, the heart and the loss, the love and the tears the laughing and music the fears and the coughs the hate and the anger the pain. This is for Chop. This is for teachers and presents, this is for students and awful hopelessness, this is for not having a voice. This is for Mike and Sarah, this is for Sarah and Tony, this is for Jackie and Chris, this is for Bernadette and her kids. This is for every boss I ever had, this is for Adult Ed Adult Ed Adult Ed. This is for Josh. This is for friends, this is for music, this is for beginnings, this is for ends. This is for the full moon and the planets and the stars and the apex and the zenith in every one of our hearts. This is for love. This is for him this is for him this is for Him.

Reprinted from We'Moon with gratitude, the chant & how I'll end this prayer:
by Mama Donna Henes 2006
We Are All in This Together
We all come from the earth and return to her belly. We are all made of the same substance, same as the sea, the soil, the stars. Birth, growth, death, development, change, adaptation, transformation, evolution, it is all really just about recycling.

We breathe the same air as our cave-dwelling ancestors--inhaling and exhaling, exchanging carbon dioxide and oxygen with our plant relatives untold billions of times over the millenia. And the same holds true for water. We drink the tears of the crocodiles and elephants. It rains, it pools, it evaporates, it rains. We drink, we pee. Again and again and again, in a grand scale cosmic round robin.

All borders and boundaries and separations are pure illusion. Each time we touch someone, we leave some particle of our skin atoms behind and pick up a parcel of new ones. Thus we merge, literally becoming part of each other. I am you and you are me and we are we.

We are all in this together, inextricably bound by our beautiful blue planet spinning though space. We are one family, one community, one world, one living, breathing entity.

A'jo & blessed be. By 3 by 3 by 3.

BURNT UP

The first thing that happened is I chose to let my house start to go.

By that I mean my apartment, of course. But it's the first time since I moved in and got unpacked that I stopped picking up after myself at least every third day. And I watched in a madness that was rimmed mostly by delight as the order around here, bit by bit, started to whittle away.

I knew all along. This is a need to have some control: when it gets real bad, when it's real bad I'll know and then I will open the windows and go gangbusters in here and get to clean up and feel like I have some sort of power over this place.

I have poems accumulating again, lots of them and I have started to want to post them, but I wont. Bc there are some things I get about myself now, about my voice, about how I write. And to post them would mean to change the formats, and the formats are good because they are intimate to me. My artistry. I am 33 woah no I'm not but I almost am--I am soon 33 and have been writing poems in spiral backed books since I was 14. I am 33 soon and I know me now, know my voice really for the first time and I've never before now felt good about that. I have been writing as my first religion since the choice I made on the steel-posted squeaky twin bed I fell in love with Brandon with at Libby's old pad on Wash Ave: This is it. This, writing, this is what--no matter what else--I will do. "This" to quote my fave line from a poem back then, This, all I ever had to fall back on. So I am for the first time in my life secure enough now, secure in my style choices--affect on the rhythm and cadence of things--in voice choices for reasons I only just recently fully got are political to me, in content and theme that arent choices but that compel and create and are simply born of me much as I turn to and motivate them.

And so it is February again, that bone-haired last week of February that always singes me to deadened discretion on the inside. I am an assault pariah when it comes to that silly toss of the head term Winter Blues. Blues aint the half of it. But I keep going I keep going I keep going the words take me there and write me all the way through. And I refuse to substantiate the society claims, the impartial explanations: it's just chemical, merely the result of lac of light. Of course! But we dont get what we mean when we say that because most of us dont get IT'S ALL LIGHT. IT'S ALL, AT OUR ESSENCE, ABOUT LIGHT. This is soul stuff we're talking about. This is the twinkling nebulous of mythos that glistens on the inner wall of tramps and blue bloods alike. What are your darkest secrets, those rat-teeth gnaws that have you crawling the walls of you in there, especially when the Great Everything with preened deliverance is making us all East Coasters--where the deep blood of societal injury cellularly and in the very earth remains--sit still from snow again and again? Think not of dead-ends but reasons--those are the motivators: The Divine Hungers. The ashes that linger are deceptive, we forget they are reason and once were bone tissue and scars and are meant to feed the later-coming new life of things.

Take medicine or get drunk or stoned or mean fucked-up, or, the best, lie to your self lots and all you want. I'm booted at this now--a soldier who knows the cadence of the diligent rhythm ellipses of her own soul. So I know the truth of me this time for sure: I am burnt out. Going over the same exact chart of this same exact time last year--when my ailments manifested truly in dis-ease. I literally remember standing in the back office at a family support center this very time last year, way out in the country looking at all the bureaucratic broke ass stuff I was required to do, feeling so hopeless and powerless, Haitian refugees literally crowding the door in the shy way they do when they dont speak the language and also dont know you yet. And being on the phone with someone else from work and her laughing about all the excess: the numbers of numbers of students out in the sticks we are responsible for/to. And I felt that same thing break, and it happened, the same thing but not nearly as deep a break or elemental, again this very week. My job is one fit for a liar contented on kicking the ashes. So much of society stays content on this, on the look-down at your feet neck-stuck cramped stare. There are eyes I suppose that must stay most-way closed because to open them up, and I know this, takes a lot of willingness and mostly can be an awful, awful lot of pain and grief. Dealing with reality, at first, often is...

But my eyes are opened, and have been.

My voice, carrying crying laughing learning loving seiging destroying but all the while leading me through, and fighting for my own ability to trust in it all along, is the reason why.

i ride

Poem for the day, in honor of good things yet to come. Po'girl show tmrw nite, (Night Cat you still blow my mind) yeeeeaaaaaa!!!!! St.Vincent tonight w walshie, and a personal day and excursion to the home land all day today.

This is my favorite poem by Ms. Lucille Clifton, in honor of her life and her vision. She was the former poet laureate of maryland and died the day before valentine's this year. Amen amen amen.

hag riding

why
is what i ask myself
maybe it is the afrikan in me
still trying to get home
after all these years
but when i wake to the heat of morning
galloping down the highway of my life
something hopeful rises in me
rises and runs me out into the road
and i lob my fierce thigh high
over the rump of the day and honey
i ride i ride

Mad Vision

Remember when Dylan did that Unplugged thing on MTV? Same one Lauryn Hill did that caught her a ton of flack, sort of gave her her final docking papers? I was never crazy about Unplugged after that, after the way ppl couldn't get down with Lauryn un-pared. I loved her, the bones sans flesh feeling of the whole thing. But that spoiled me on MTV for good for the ill media hype they gave my grl.

But Dylan. He did this version of Knocking on Heaven's Door. He was aged, you could tell, it was before the whole tumor thing tho bc I remember seeing him preform after that and that happened later. But still, you can hear it. The age, which, much as age is wisdom it too is doubt, remorse, the looking back. You can hear it in his voice but it's all alright bc most of all you recognize that the hoarseness, the spine crunch of deliverance, the throaty almost about to break in there is the aged expression of Devout Hunger itself. His very voice, always such a part of his epic-ness, his whole persona and legend specifically because IT was inherent to his artistry, I saw so clearly how human that instrument really is. What fuels it then? What powers that Epicness?

I dont know what year it was released or made, but on the Peir in 95 peddling cassettes and CD singles as the prizes for a betting game that I worked the mic for, Dylan Unplugged was one of the many tapes that themed my days. Rolling up the tarp side of my game stand in the early morning breeze the sea glittering all tinseley, sick with no sleep and chemicals behind my shades but always lighted up on the inside in that slappy happy day-after-still-drunk-way that the sun and salt always did for me. The blue sky and the ferris wheel looming high above, spreading, big as hell, big as the world, big as heaven had to be. I dont know why I got to thinking of it this morning--maybe cuz Muller, whose dad owned that betting game we both worked for, just showed in my life all these years later. Or bc I saw Notorious for the second time over the weekend down the beach, or at least part of it before the cable went out, and Ready to Die dropped so huge that year and the CD single for One More Chance, with Meth and Big doing The What on the B side, made us all say we were getting FTW tatted on us by Chico that summer. Which makes me think even more of of Legend and Epicness and Hunger. Big and Puff. And what makes the difference. And what you regret.

It's not what you do but what you dont that you regret? That's what I've heard anyway I dont know tho. I would say it's all a matter of, all part of the being Epic. Torture is what you sign your bones too, what you hang your clothes too, what you name your song. What you love is always what you regret because if you're like me it's all you're ever truly willing to lay down for. And no matter what, laying down will always have a quality of recklessness to it. Frenzy-inducing. It's what we call Hunger. Why so many of us are scared to live.

The crazy, unadulterated full surrender.

I got changes coming, Mad Vision. What I used to bemoan bc I always used to fight my Epic tides, the ones that propel my indefinite forward motion. I'm stoked now tho. Fueled and fired, ready to go.

Destiny's not something that happens to you. It's something you step in to if you're brave enough to seethingly grasp at the Holy Amen.

Amen. Amen amen amen!!

Dreams

I'm dreaming again.

It happened last moon cycle, too. I woke up at 6:39 this morning to the traffic on Goldsborough, barely squinted through one eye at the clock and sighed and covered myself up deep under the covers and was out again almost immediately--but fell asleep with this light, laughing sense remembering the dream I'd just had. A bonfire with old friends from Catholic school in the rubble driveway in the woods at Ocean Pines. It was very pagan.

Then I had a second one, with my brother in it and Jamie, his girl. There were turtles, big ones, they were happy for the snow wanted us to see they were still there but scrambled over this funny scrappy wall Sean made and was proud of, of wood posts cross-hatched and leveled in this very crafty way. The turtles made sure we saw there big bodies flop over the wall. On the other side of the wood wall the turtles covered them selves in leaves. You could still see them, but at the base of the fense the snow had melted, the soil was super moist and the leaves generated enough heat to act as a thermal for them and they were happy to be covered there. The leaves and snow, the cycles, it all was a good thing.

There are bluberry muffins in the oven, I am squeaky body-tired and my consciousness is hairy, lots of little crevices in there where I've been slipping all day. Some days are just like that. Some days I miss things, I am tired, I get full of doubt. I have to work at noon today and then tonight and it will be all new students new students new students Hi dont be nervous You can do it Relax relax it's not a test it's so we can help and also Bienvenido hola, he-llo. Ugh I am so tired--and I was off for the snow a full week last week!! I will come home tonight, hopefully before 10, then Erika and I have a phone date to discuss our latest submissions to each other.

Erika, who just got the best news news that made me smile smile smile, Erika who on days like these makes me swoon to remember 7th grade Catholic school in the mildew basement where we could see people's feet on the concrete parking lot out the vented windows near the ceilings top of some of those rooms. Sr. Francis's class and we were all afraid, Ms. Fouse's class and under the desks Erika's long scrawl, on fringed loose leaf, characters even then seeped deep in the history of another time. My precious friend who holds roots in there, the way plants and trees are connected deep under ground in ways we will never, by the light of day, ever see.

O mama if I could I would write and laugh and cook all day breathe the smells of your frozen earth my face in the tall window here in your sun. I would smile, happy to remember all my dreams. I would talk to the maple tree let the crevices inside grow wide and whole until they weren't cracks anymore but simply whole new landscapes of me.

what i am listening to: The High Strung