Aftermath

Aftermath

The dust has settled
We have been divided
By ground zero.

When a storm comes through
With sound and fury
With thunderbolt and flurry
You can tell.

The land is stricken with the
Swift crack of charged particles
Come so quickly
And gone so soon
That the earth and sky
Pretend that the attraction
Was only imagined.

There are other calamities
That leave their mark
In a more subtle fashion
It's not immediately apparent
Where and how the damage was done.

What does it look like exactly
In the aftermath of anxiety?

You never call first anymore.
You know when you dial my number
It's a coin toss as to who will answer
Me or the misguided wildness within me.
The starved repression.
The self-medicated disaster.

Even when I apologized
and promised that I would give you
all the love in the world.

You could never believe me.

To admit you are sick
Is to have every word you say
From that point on
Taken in the context of your disease.

Baby.

I am not my disease.

I am not the coin tosser.
I am the tossed coin.



I am not the traitor.
I am the neuro-political prisoner waiting for brain
To turn against me to turn against you to turn against me
to turn back again against brain.
Wash the cerebral fluid, rinse , and repeat
A closed loop of betrayal.

I am not the time bomb
I am the wires
I would cut myself in half
If it meant saving you from my blast radius.

In the aftermath
I always call first.

In the aftermath
I am the non-action
Regretting what it didn't do.

In the aftermath
I am waiting for you
to come around.

This isn't me asking for salvation.
I don't need you to save me.

Salvation is not a momentary action.
Salvation is a process.

Tumblr Spells

Serendipity is the phenomenon by which the stubborn heart
nudges itself in the direction of familiarity and attributes it
to the whimsy of some preternatural force.

What have you lost?

A pleasant surprise.
A dissociation of the result from its effort.
A cardiovascular psychosis.

This is the allure of magic.

Who could believe that the late night ritual
of tumblr, sad music, and spiritual hemorrhage
could amount to something real.

What have you lost?

Grave-digging the past
and pulling the skeletons of yesterday
into the present.

Flesh and bone and blood and tendon.

The nerve of you,
the necrotic maniac.
Crazed and obsessive.
Searching through the rifts of time
For the opportunity to say the unsaid.

What have you lost?

Your body of arcane knowledge as atrophied.
The only magic you remember are the bondage spells.
The fetishist predisposition to resurrection that gets you off
on your own ability to imitate life and power.
Juxtaposed against the growing famine of your form.

I have seen you lose weight.
I have seen you refuse meals.
All you drink is mercury now.
So your tongue can move quick-silver and razor-sharp.

As it should when reciting spells.
You only talk in aphorisms now.

Like the relationship between a mage and his magic
is one of trust.

Consequently, trust is like building a bridge from outside in
because building from beginning to end is for charlatans and upstarts.

Yet every time you have brought someone back from the otherside.

They have crumbled to dust.
Grown mad, zombified, and decadent.
Or have simply failed to hear your call in the ether.

Maybe your pentagram was smudged at a crucial energy nexus.
Maybe you were a second too late for the solstice.
Or maybe the virgin you sacrificed was a liar.

Or maybe the magic doesn't trust the mage.
Your past doesn't trust your present.
And it's time to move on.
Get a day job.
Scrub your floor clean of blood and chalk.

Gaia's Arms

Come.

Enter the cathedral that is
My body
My seismic activity
Is merely
The pulse
Of the world

My magma
Flows in tandem with your blood
Do not think I know nothing
of you
I know everything of you
You are of me
Of course

When you were born
Heaved out of the womb
Assembled by the constituents
Of my core and crust
Draped in the mantle of my blessing
My mouth moaned a subtle thank you
Rejoiced as I felt you
roll, crawl, walk, run
Cradled in my earthen arms
My solid body to support you
You were fascinated with me in your younger years
But as you grew older
You resented my guidance and empathy
As all children turn to rebellion

Child -- I have felt the quickening of your anxiety
Trust me when I say I know it too
My anxiety is tectonic
I know all too well the relief of smashing plates
together to release the tension
I called out to you
Reminding you
I am your mother
I am earth
I know what it's like to pull yourself together
In spite of everyone walking all over you
When overwhelmed, look to Mother Earth
I wrote the book on cracking under pressure

When you're depression took you under
Ugly and strange
I cried out
Look at me
Look at my grand canyon
My deep and open wound
And know that not all scars are carved in fits of violence
Some are carved in fits of divine inspiration

Your scars are divine inspirations
Relaying the message
The worst enemy you will ever face
Sits between your ears
Don't beat yourself up
Use your powers for good
There is more strength in creating
Than in destroying

Come into my arms
Weave yourself into my stony cathedral
Pray at the altar of my molten womb
I will heave you out new and immaculate
Coarse Sand must burn before Fine Glass takes its turn
Listen to me
Never refuse help
From the one who said thank you
On the day
You were born.

Tantra

 Press self together into compressed pact of self-love

Hands meld together into flesh-colored hand-cuffs

The hand that holds your hand is your hand

It is re-aligning the lifelines of proximal palms

Getting reacquainted with own body in the flesh grinding psalm

In this way—skin becomes tantra, body of teachings

Sweat the mantra through your pores:

“It is not healthy to hate yourself.”

“It is not healthy to hate yourself.”

“It is not healthy to hate yourself.”

“It is not healthy to hate yourself.”

Repeat five times a day

While bending self back into shape

Spine, fits, skull, sits crown.

You are so perfect.

Green Tea Walls

It would seem that a hospital and an ultimatum are synonymous with one another
Going to a hospital seems to always result in the presentation of binary suggestions
In fact, before you even walk into the facility, you are given two options.

Enter or Exit.

I enter and upon entering I observe the convalescent walls
Painted in a color reminiscent of green tea
I guess to promote a feeling of healing
This holistic Feng Sui suggests the cleansing of energy.

I find your room.
I find the doctor suggesting what you need to do to get better
Implicating what would happen if you don't.

He said if you don't control your diet or take a couple of baby aspirin
Every now and then to keep your blood thin
Then your blood would turn thicker than the soil we'd have to bury you in
Said at that point your blood would stagger up to your brain
And choke it out until everything was black, blacker, and blacker still.

When he said the word stroke.
You looked at your hands the way
a man does when he knows he is not finished yet.

Your left hand was clinically unaffected.
Your right hand was puffy like the way eyes get
In the skull of someone who just went through a bad breakup.
When the right side of your body lost connection with
your central nervous system due to an interference in transmission
Did it feel like your body was breaking up?

He asked you where you worked and for long.
You said you'd been at the same company for 43 years.
And then it came.
The question that you, me, and these fucking green tea walls knew was coming came:
Do you plan on retiring soon?

You look at your hands again.
You only have two options.
Right. Left.
Yes. No. 
Finished. Not.
And through tears and a broken voice you say in a hushed tone.
I think I'm ready to now.
Work. Don't.
Die. Live.
Heal. Decay.

I walk out of the room.
Make my way to the hospital doors.
The sign hangs sullenly there as if trying to communicate with the shame in me.
Enter/Exit.

I exit the hospital.
I exit the ultimatum.