How did it happen? The soft cotton sarong of orange and plum and cream in wide swarths of colour and simmering moons became a snake with many eyes. I know by the way it winds around my neck while I sway on the floor.

Serpents of protection.

Am I hallucinating?

Dozens of gold snakes cling to me, pour over my undulating arms, wrap around my curving belly as I shimmy and gyrate to the sensuous rhythms of flute and sitar.

I am possessed. The writhing waterfall of coppery snakes stream while I hold earth lightning in my hands like the Minoan Snake Goddess. I can't stop dancing. I writhe and undulate and spin like a whirling wind, a belly dancer, a dervish, a dakini.

I am the lady of serpents.

Everywhere they slither and coil, opening deep chthonic mysteries, an energy of creativity that persists despite inner dissentions, or the envy of the other.

The face of envy on the dance floor is a mass of dry, dead hair, an austere, thin frame, a rigid torso that wiggles without sensuality, or warmth, the cruelty exposed. Its breath re-inhaled, the fumes. Unable to prevent. Incapable of damaging. Useless flap of useless motion. Rendered impotent, powerless.

Today the dictator died; the despot is deposed.¹

Afterwards the cries and laughter of freedom rise to the skies.
______________

¹I wrote this the day Pinochet died.

Almost done! Two more pieces, I think. Then letting it grow through editing and drafts, rhizomatically.

Only about 17,000 words and perhaps 60 pages, and most of you haven't a clue what's been going on I'm sure, but I am drawing it to a close.

Who knows if it'll be back to regular programming or not at Rubies in Crystal?

Life is so different now.

:)

-early drafts of these poems have been removed by the author-

Blessing

On that day, the light that bathed the world was visionary. The sun shone with a relentless determination against the cold. I shivered in your arms. We stood in the weak Winter light receiving its lucent blessing. Even when the earth tilts and we are far away, the sun illumines us.

In your embrace, I am illumined.

Pulse

Is love always a revelation?

Or is it the underlying synthesis of existence, what we are founded on, what keeps the mystery unfolding from its nascence? Is love what embraces us or what we continually strive for? Is love a substrata that we can align ourselves with, open ourselves to, if we could clarify our vision?

Is the universe a pulsation of love?

Is love light, what is evident, or the deeper hidden energy of creation?

Surely, mon amor, love is all this and more.

Devotion

I know my love for you by my passion for you.

Eternity

Monsieur, yes, of course I understand what romantic love is, and it's capricious, dependent on sexual passion, it's created out of desire and obsession, fantasy and the colliding of bodies in ecstasies.

It's not the stability of secure love, the compassion of creation, what is strong and unyielding in its devotion to life. The foundation is mother-love, flowing sustenance, support, what is at the depths.

When I meditate I meditate into that flow, reality, substrata, vision.

Then the molecules that comprise our reality sing of love. Existence vibrates with unifying energies of love, the life force itself. Who could not respond with bliss?

To meditate is to dip into an energy of ecstasy and re-emerge cleansed and energized with cynicism and pain transmuted, rinsed away.

In these moments love is complete.

When love is everywhere, and easily accessible, why do we resist its flow? What causes us to shut ourselves off, slam the doors, refuse?

Why are we often hostile to each other? Hurt, wound, maim, destroy.

Is it because, even with love's promise, there is no eternity?

Threat

When she isn't swearing at the ocean, she is at her computer, blandishing other writers. Everyone is a threat; she battles everyone. No-one is safe.

Escape

Monsieur, you fell into that place of great chaos in me.

I didn't know if we could continue. When you left it was okay because none of the difficulties had to be faced.

Why are we always escaping each other?

Fragments

I wished to write a conventional letter of love, Monsieur. But all I've managed are fragments and far too many questions on the nature of love itself.

Sand

At the seashore she shouted incoherently to herself and flung handfuls of sand into the air.

Sand from a beach so white it was like the pause between paragraphs.

Horizon

I wanted to make it over the event horizon this time,
to get desire past fantasy into the real.

But I couldn't.

Wind

In the angry, cold wind at the bus stop sand blew in my eyes.

My eyes filled with tears, the world of bright sun became unfocused.

When I stepped on the bus, my collar was wet with salt tears. The bus driver was concerned, 'How are you this morning? It's cold.' 'Yes, and that high wind blew sand into my eye - I'm not crying,' I laughed, 'it's okay.' And he smiled and closed the door and pulled the bus out into the traffic.

Nomad

You are a floater, tumbleweed, a fellow nomad.

How could it be any different?

Tracks

The point in the tracks where the switcher is.

You pulled it and we separated;
or, you went off elsewhere.

Gleaming steel,
it frightened me.

The trainyard was
a terrible vision
of the conventional.

I am responsible
for the manoeuver
that caused the
track switching.

The trains sometimes run beside the ocean and she was there, skeletal,
antique black lace gown, shrieking,
flinging sand.

You said all your women are possessive
and you had to hide them
from each other.

Joust

Monsieur, what you are suggesting is so unexpected, and breaks all the rules of jousting.

Deleuze knows: we cannot be anything other than rhizomatic nomads.

Switchboard

I sit at the switchboard, connecting people, transferring calls.

All day I do this.

Wonder

Thrust forward
into the unknown.

What carries us though?

How do we rise each day
and move with such agility.

I'm not sure how I breathe,
eat, walk, see or hear, how my heart beats,
let alone write my way through
this manuscript.

What is talent? What is the muse?
Why do we have to make art, create
businesses, produce culture, perpetually
shape our world?

This morning is full of
questions.

This morning you are too far
away to share in this conversation
of wonder.

Transparency

Monsieur, when you pull away after an event, trip, workshop, conference, when you say, let's just be friends, or let's take a break, or suddenly stop writing erotic notes, it is clear you are pursuing other interests.

How can you not know of the transparency?

With your worldly desire for encounters, I offer you up without complaint to your pursuit and conquest.

When it ends I may not be here, and that's a risk, but you don't care at departure (you have your eyes set elsewhere, mon cher).

But then, somehow I remain.

Only you could not know the complexity underneath, the way resistances and acceptances flow chaotically. Loyalty, consistency, these are crucial, yes, but, ultimately love rules over everything.

You are a good man, Monsieur, and you love me, I know that.

In your absence I don't stop loving you.

Explore

I explore the configurations of desire in a mutable world of connections.

Glare

Shades of love
in an over-bright world.

Is love ever found
in the glare?

Possessive

Monsieur, stop! I have never laid
claim to you.

Nor shall I ever.

No, I've never said, mon homme, mon amour, you're mine.

What a strange idea, Monsieur!

How opposite to the way I am. Impermanence rules!

Fever

As if a fever broke.

In the shower, warm water pouring over me but as if I came in from the storm somewhere out in the wilderness. The steamy fog unrolled itself and you found me sipping morning coffee and we talked.

Of uncertainty and even though decisions were made I felt they were also being unmade and that endings were beginnings.

Can the paint on the canvas be unpainted? Or must we whitewash and re-paint? Will sandpaper take it off? Could I sand myself to an essence, a place of blank openness, the untouched whiteness of the beginning?

Forgive

To forgive is not to condone, to allow the same behaviour to continue, the patterns to play out their relentless rhythms.

I forgive myself.

For being there: for being hurt or hurting.

That is all we can do.

Wild Heart

It is so precarious, day after day,
these inner desires, meltings,
flames.

The Mirror I Don't Want to Hold Up

Do I pick men who can't make a commitment, unattached, single, deliciously attractive, brilliant, because then I don't have to?

How many years did it take me to learn how to spell commitment? It was the word I balked on, always. Entrapment. Then I had to become liquid and be what he wanted.

Commitment is a deep promise.

Not ownership; not possession. I can make a deep promise to love you unconditionally and with futurity.

Whoever you are.

Culpable

In what ways are we culpable?

In what ways do we cause the events that befall us?

How often do we set up situations that implode and then we can disappear back into our lethargies. Perhaps whining; perhaps blaming; perhaps only sad.

If I look deeply at the words I spew forth I find hidden pins, off-putting things, tiny hisses and flashes, not quite the blinding spitting snake, but almost. Or do I exaggerate?

Sometimes I prevent myself from having what I most want. It's a determination against myself.

What can I say, Monsieur? I am a complex woman.

Trapped

I am trapped in my own fears, fears which disperse and vanish like fog in the gleaming sun when confronted.

Fears don't like to be faced: they hide; they lie; they rationalize; they obfuscate.

Like insects fleeing the light in the night on the counters of an old kitchen.

Insomnia

When I decided to obsess about writing the way I do a lover, I stopped sleeping. Now I keep my notebook with its empty white sheets beside me to write blindly in the night with a pencil without looking.

Words that flow in the symbolic between the imaginal and the real.

Reflecting and shaping.

All day, euphoric and tired,
such nights of intense love-making.

Sea-breaker

It was a small sea-breaker, Monsieur. But love flowed over it.

An ocean of love that could not be
held back.

The trail, Monsieur, is a decoy. It does not reveal my whereabouts, or my perspective. I could be elsewhere in the terrain where it is dense and dark and dangerous. You would never guess from my notes and messages. I could be escaping from our field of connections, and yet appear to be available, even stable. If you could know what maintaining these appearances cost you might be surprised.

But this is how I deal with my capricious interior.

Even with falling away, I remain close.

There was a moment of confidence, but it's gone now.

When a writer leaves that many spaces between paragraphs, I find it threatening.

What's in the white spaces?

Is it a white font of writing that curses us? Hidden writing that... She talks under her breath, muttering, blaming; I hear her the way one hears the ocean in a seashell held up to one's ear. In those spaces between the blocks of black words.

Especially when I see virid and cinnabar feathers lying about, and can hear the swishing of the endless sea foam beneath her squawking, the way she belittles us.