Poetry
I Wish to Say Something
I wish to say something profound To sound wise To convey the thousands of seasons my life has seen To show everyone that I'm smart, and can speak well, and use big words A persistent wound, that one, fed by the waters of tearful inadequacy and the spiritual assault of my people Moose Trees Ocean Sea glass that acts like a radio transmitter if you know how to ask Passamaquoddy I am certain they're why I love the dawn so much Coyote and chickadee Flowers that some call paintbrushes, and the ice that taught me how to walk its frozen body through the texture of its cracking Mountain lion, whose eyes reached out from the shadows to caress my body at only eight years of age That's how I learned death was erotic I began making love the day I was born No one needed to teach me It was all there stowed away in the sinews handed down to me like a pair of mocs worn for eaons by Anubis, Glooskap, and Medusa My body This body, so soft and always ready for battle, bears scars Markings that speak of gender, ancestral hybridity, cultural assertion, and intergenerational pain They tell me I'm a "woman" but I know I'm a creature A monster that cheek rubs Chaos and spills tears over dying bumblebees I went home recently back to the forests that grew me Their towering embrace and flaring colors always held the promise of that rich smell that comes with decay Did you know that decidua is the uterine lining that's shed after birth I think that's what will happen when I die I'll emerge from the roots of those deciduous elders, pressing my body through the fallen foliage to walk alongside those who come after me They call that mychorrizal, I call it belonging But those forests, the ones that grew me, are being cut down Nearly severn acres of my kin had disappeared exposing the creek beds I wandered when I was young I wish to say something profound To sound wise My ancestors tell me "Say it simple," but I've been trained to speak it big, and that wound has a heartbeat my feet can barely resist But, here it goes These are the losses that I am here for Here and here again My body knows the heartbreak of beginnings and my soul knows no end
Grandfather Remembrance
I remember when this used to be all forest The deer could slip like sinew in and out of the trees, winding their way toward unknown places. Beckoned by unknown voices that, to this day rattle the leaves and scratch at the hidden vestiges of air and light. The breath of the ancestors has grown laborious as the world oscillates between forgetfulness and remembrance. Our bodies know great shifts are afoot, and the chasm is yawning wide making the leaps of faith more treacherous and critical. Recently a great, great and not so ancient Grandfather spoke through the sinews and musculature of my body. I could see him tirelessly chopping wood, as if no one had ever told he could stop. Even if they had - and I did try - he refuses. He said he doesn't want his people to disappear. A kind of disappearance that's deeper than language or tradition. I can feel it in my heart and belly, what he's speaking of, but my tongue doesn't yet know the words. I just know I can't forget. I knelt down before him, holding his not so ancient hands in mine, and have begun chopping wood with him. The remembering lives in the coming together, in the tending of simple things that bind our tenderness to fleeting moments pregnant with our aliveness. His devotion is a prayer that lives outside of time, and binds itself to me like muscle to bone. You are not alone. You are not alone.
Future's Alchemy
There’s an ache in my heart whose sonorous voice speaks out-of-place languages; dialects that do not belong to these times. They slithered out of the chasm of despair-ity, and snaked their way up my mothers legs toward her womb, pregnant with ancestral song, in pursuit of my gestation. Slipping past the lips of creation, they chewed through my umbilical chord fashioning themselves to me in its stead; feeding me composted futures and emergent pasts. She didn’t know she would give birth to a monstrous mutation, but my mercurial eyes, sloshing about like silver sunsets, gave me away. As did the wings growing out of my small body. They were far too big to fit in a cradle, let alone arms fatigued by generations of sadness. I’ve had to grow my way into them. Their weight subluxates my spine, bestowing me genealogical pain that will live on long after I’m gone; when my body is busy feeding a microbial womb. I suspect they’ll know what to do with all of that sorrow. It didn’t take long for her breasts to rebel, engorged with resistance. And every time she set me down to sleep I would cry because my lullabies were traded for prophecies foretelling a world where murky intersections mark cites awaiting benevolent transgressions. Some days I feel like the only place for me is hunched over at despair-ity’s edge where no translations are needed and the fluency of my bestial body is welcomed with heretical delight. Where I can sing crisp longings into the yawning deep: “I am here, I am here waiting for my time.” But isn’t this how futures are born? Through dislocated wisdoms lodged in precious bodies watered by the wounds of love?
Guide-Dance
I’m not here to rescue or save you from your experiences. I’m here to ally myself with the great liberations waiting to grow out of the compost of your life. I’m devoted to listening for the transgressive voices assembling on your behalf who know the scent and sound of your next transformation bound, as all transformations are, with the wider and entangled transformations of the world. I’m here in support of the outgrowths that mark leaps of heretical faith as old narratives are weeped over and praised for their full-bodied contributions. I’m committed to tending the soft-belly of experience; the raw exposures that come with being alive, and sensitize each of us with aching precision. I’m here to greet and welcome, with a devilish smile, the freshly sprung riots and rebellions of your heart, planted like seeds by your multi-specied ancestors. I’m here as an emissarial lover of paradox; as an agent of the erotic intelligence binding death to birth, and birth to death. I’m here to meet you compassionately in the moments of impossibility, impasse, and doubt, as I know, all too well, the rigorous and unforgiving nature of such terrain. I’m here to witness you in the moments where the bitter medicine of betrayal is at its most potent when you realize you’ve betrayed yourself. I’m here to honor you even as guilt and shame serpentine their constricting views around your lungs. I’m here to read the signs of ensouled amnesia, and wonder with you what such forgettings have enabled. I’m here holding the truth that there is presence in absence, and each possibility lives as a dream awaiting the conjunction of circumstance. I’m here to remind you that surrendering your resistance to personal and ancestral territories of pain is an immense gesture of love. Im here because the world mattered you and I into existence, even though I don’t always understand why. Each life is an ecstatic agony sprung from the tanglings of mystery. But know this, I will not save you. I love you and this world far too much for that.
Purpose is Exhausting
Purpose is exhausting. I much prefer devoting myself to my own wyrd, beautiful aliveness. Wyrd as in sub-versive. An undercurrent of poetic strangeness and melodic r/evolution. Beautiful as in mysterious. A spiraling interstitial dance of dendrites. Aliveness as in hymn-notic. A being-ness that dwells within the pregnant immensity of silence & song. by Tempist Jade
This Body
This body, an earth body, was set loose by the bloodied decidua of a now empty womb. This body is an earth body risen from the rot whose delicious musk heralds the darkening of days where time slips through short fingers and stars tell tales of spring. This body is an earthen body made of ancestral sinew crafted by a line of endless hands and ancient hearts who spin yards of wonder for the great weavers of worlds. This body, a body of soil and breath, knows what it means to be grabbed at and clutched by unwanted gazes whose weight is measured in shadow and whose shape is forged by lonely desperation. This body, relishing in skin touching the foliage of change, understands the forgotten truths of erotic tongues who shout the secrets of longing that live in the hunger for blood and the rubbing together of cheeks; in the digging for grubs and the full-guttural chatter of ravens mid-flight. This body is a sovereign body whose very existence is inextricably bound to the decomposing lands of love; the place where stories offer their flesh to the mycelial marauders of a heavenish hell. This body is a supple-edged terra-story jiggling and humming to the anarchy of decay and the delicious thrum of wind plucking roots. Can’t you feel it? Even now, the Earth longs to kiss your spine with their golden lips glossy with holy delight.
Fuck Being Good
How many of us were praised for being good? Bound by the manacles of appeasement, hoping to belong long enough to survive. Fuck being good. I want to be like the gnarled juniper whose twisted limbs come alive with movement in the moonlight, casting eerie shadows across the placid waters of another's imagination. I want to be like the swift mountain lion slipping in and out of the tree line unsettling the sanctity of calm as a quickened heartbeat reminds the listless they're, indeed, alive and edges away from death. I want to be like the irreverent raven whose ravishing cackles echo through the chambers of the heart like small stones tossed down a forgotten well. I want to be like the mighty humpback whale whose laboring body knows the strength of tides and the great joy of leaping from the depths just long enough to crash magnificently against the surface of waves kissing each other with fleeting desire. I want to be like the coyote meandering through the tall grasses of trickery, their fur brushed by the fading light of a day that watches the tender approach of every fresh, dark night of the soul. I want to be like the vibrant sunset spilling the language of wonder across the sky with such flare that onlookers can't help but melt into the delectable truth of every terrifying moment. I want to be like the lightning whose raging, quick-witted heat cuts open the eyes, spilling dark pupils across the ground like tiny black holes waiting to devour every soft-footed prayer. I want to be like the elk whose deep throated song cuts through the trees, clearing a path for the ancestors to walk with erotic disregard. I want to be like the mountain bee who greedily rests their pollinated limbs inside the curve of a sunflower, dreaming the world in an out, in and out, in and out, in and out of bee-ing.
Chaos is a Serpent
Sometimes it feels like I’m supposed to choose a side, and deny others. But my body speaks the language of hybridity, distributed as I am across Wisdom's web. Crossroads announced my arrival at every bend and curve where love and pain intersected, deforming the possibility of an untenable perfection. I know that I wouldn’t be who I am if it weren’t for all these conflicting edges because just over these edges lies something entirely unknown. A place where the unexpected emerges, where all of the monsters I so dearly love dwell. They are children of Chaos and Wonder just like I am. I suppose that’s one of the many reasons I love them so much. We share a faith in Creation. The kind of faith that rides that great body of destruction, touching down with its reticulated knowing and unfathomable precision. Have you ever noticed how the beauty of what-is birthed its way out of death and decay? Clawed its way through the soft tissue of life, sliding belly-wise across amniotic swamps littered with the garish debris of all the love in the world. When you comprehend time as anything but linear you begin to see how the past and the future slip their sinuous bodies through the space between the-things-of-now, and you begin to crave that imminent moment of longed-for-release. Where the serpents jaw unhinges, liberating its tale. That’s when you know all you knew teeters at the tip of a forked tongue.
I Don't Want to Be of Service
I don't want to be of service. I want to plant my heartache beneath a full moon so that is future limbs might feel the sweet grip of tiny paws. I want my imagination to transgress well-worn narratives, and to feast upon the plump body of normativity. I want to kiss the soft belly of experience, and celebrate life's rowdy r/evolutions. I want to dream with my ancestors, and radicalize my tears. I want to laugh with the forests, and grind my hips into whirlpools of delight. I want to massage territories of deprivation with oil made from the fruits of longing and love. I want to live a life where my pleasure pollinates the world, and sinks its teeth into luscious necks. I want to sacrifice my importance so I can remember the significane of my life. I want to listen for the whispers of rebellion that hitch rides on the backs of butterflies. I want to die a thousand deaths, and feel my unyielding aliveness mark each one a threshold of change.
Every Once in a While...
Every once in a while I pick up on a sadness that's so much bigger than me and I feel the exhaustion of the world wrap its large arms around my own exhaustion pulling me into a dance where all efforting is abandoned and all that's left to do is lay my sweating body and racing thrum bum bum heart down upon the grass and cry my way toward rest, surrendering every muscle to the ground beneath my grief. In those moments where the gravity of being alive plants me like a seed in the soil of an ancient earth I am home. by Tempist Jade
May I Be Somebody's Ocean, Today
I don’t know how to speak with fluency all of the languages of my ancestors, and there is not enough time to learn. Passamaquoddy Moose Greek Bobcat Sicilian Flounder Egyptian Macedonian But, I do know the ancestral language of water. My learning began in the womb, though the ocean was my first parent. The place where my sorrow fell into the buoyancy of communal solitude. Where the ache in my heart could seep out through my pores and snake its way toward an unpredictable tide. I don’t think grief is any different than a river. It eventually finds its way back to that vast belly of ancient darkness where lost souls engrave poems into the soft and sifting sands of remembrance. That’s why no words were ever needed to convey the thick sadness and persistent wonder living inside my heart. Such is the mother tongue of the sea. Even now, I speak with you from across the mountains. Wind currents carry my words of longing while lofting gulls toward the sun. I like to think their shrill cries are a recitation of my love. Do you remember how, with every step, I would wind my way through the streets of youth toward the rhythm of your wisdom? Of course you do. My ears and nose were always the first to sense you. The booming crash. The wafting salt. That moment when all of the pretense whose strained existence running through the muscle of my life dissolved. Everything, all of the pain all of the loneliness all of the exhaustion spilled out like an honest hymn. Because you speak in overwhelm and are fluent in complexity I got to inhabit the precision of my life; the shifting truth of my experience. Your constant movement has always been an invitation to rest. And the rolling iterations of wave upon wave, punctuated by each inspiring pause, have always massaged away an inheritance of tension whose weight gifted me the slowness of step. Your absence reminds me of the immutable gift of wide-reaching water where the space between shorelines invokes the possibility of aliveness. You always seem to know how to hold everything. It’s because of you that I practice each day how to hold the world as it falls apart. by Tempist Jade
Empress of the Sea
Theirs is an unquestionable kind of belonging, as if they’ve been here before time itself danced its way across the dark horizon of space. Theirs is a regal rhetoric whose sloshing body engulfs the insincere, dragging their ships down to where devotion lounges upon a bed of rusty red bones. Their tentacles aren’t bad either, suctioning against a patchwork of exposure composting all the lies you ever told yourself. “What is it you really want? What lives in that belly of your longing, coiled like a hungry snake waiting to unleash its venomous desire upon the world?” Only the most guttural response will do. The kind that churns upward and out across the horizontal bowl of your hips, spilling down your thighs the way milk, thick and sweet, rolls over lips or swelling breasts. The kind that tickles your throat with groans and vibrates your tongue with feral song. The kind of answers that compel your feet to pound the sky with a jiggity boom beat. No, no these ones are not for the wavering heart or timid soul. They desire audacity, and the occasional bout of trickery. Their demand is this: a full-bodied love affair with the world.