An Invocation

Is time for tidal waves
Shall we steel our blood to curdle our hedonistic cries some more
The ones that go unheard
The ones we stifle and cover and deny
Until we get our way
But will we ever get our way

My body rushes to altars that will not have me
Refuse even to notice my love
While I bend at the knees in reverence
In anguish
In parallellitude

Are we desperate
No more than aching beasts in gowns and tuxedos lauding equality and guilt-like mannerism
Is it fitting to turn away from such hunger
Do you sleep at night while I turn in my knotted sheets of deviancy

And if I really wanted matrimony
Why do you care
Why do you still deny the craving to stand before a room that swells with the breasts of crones at howl
Claiming “till death”
Simply to have the last word in our war

It is not I who needs a cure
Alone, I am more than the description of my parts and their cleaving to similarity
Body carved out of the etheric, caustic copulating of Goddesses dispersed throughout the cosmos
Call me what you will
I know my place among the stars

I will swill your wine
And walk upon your ranks
And bow to you if it is necessary
But I promise you will not escape my rage
The compromises I’ve withstood
My arm, a bow and arrow, will take its aim
Cupid’s kiss





You will see my love
A sure fit
You will cover your cheeks as I reach for you
And when I touch you, you will know your truth
Nature lining our skirts
The mirrors will become shadows to the soul-less haunt you left in your wake
As you denied me
As you doomed me
As you dedicated your votes to God
Whose weary eyes indeed turned from a fight ancient and uncalled for

You vomit the words of biblical poets dead and gone
But who are you
Who are you when you stand before your will
And what do you truly will when in my presence you cannot argue with the validity of my spirit

I live not to bury governments
But to resurrect Gods and Goddesses whose effigies tremble in indiscriminate discord
Shun me and shun yourself
Shun me and shun yourself
Shun me and shun yourself
And to what end

What will you claim for your spoils
The right to chain me to my wishes
Hearts buried in soot and soil and seeping through to saturation
I would condemn you too
But protest is only successful when we can love who we are protesting against as much as we love the one whom we would stand next to and exchange rings and vows and longing looks and bites of flawlessness

If I hold your hand and place it upon my exposed chest
Will you feel my humanity
Will you recognize me as kinfolk
Will you understand why I want what I want as much as you want what you want
Can we agree to disagree in a way that allows me equality, simultaneously

Do you know how you make me weep
Do you know how you take from me what I would willingly give if it were not so vehemently withheld
Do you know how you keep me from fully embodying the American Dream
Do you know that the American Dream is irreparably fractured
Do you know that you are flawed in your attempts to break me
Do you know that we are all minorities within certain sects
Do you know that you could be me
Six degrees baby



You could be my mother
My father
My brother
My sister
My teacher
My cousin
My friend
My lover

For just a moment, though
Imagine that you and I are interchangeable
That we wear one another’s skin
That my fight is your fight
Is it so easy to call me a degenerate
Is it so easy to condemn yourself as you do me
Is it so easy to say I should not marry
That my heart is diseased and wrong and perverted and confused and irreligious and hell-bound

If you can imagine such a world
Where those we hate most become our own fleshy wandering
Would you so quickly give in to the intolerance you have laid upon my head in sentence
Or would you relinquish your venom
Remove your fangs
And relent your point

All I want is to be married… to another woman
Is that so awful
Really
Why

Love Letters

1. Dots on the bottom of my wine glass. Your sustain petal creates reverb like a dreamworld. If I could write a song with your name in the title, I’d be all in. Tricky radio. For the healing of a lesser god, I give praise. For what I cannot claim to own, you have inhabited me like the stroke of midnight. I’m peeling off my clothes to your strum. I am breathing loudly but trying to seem “alright.” My feet are cold. And I’ve had nothing to drink but you. Count it all joy, and yet, we ache for one another. You are the repetition of my heart. Reverberating off oil slicks satirized in their appeal to satiate my hunger for just another appeasing.

2. You stumble in late and I’m supposed to accept it. We bounce off all the walls like rubber bands and I will try not to cut myself up into leaflets you will mourn in the morning. Though I am happy to have you back, I am fully aware of your distractions. And how much you did not miss me while you were away… I will play it safe. Create another distraction for you. I was never a good housewife. Laundry and dishes and sweeping and dusting and the like…I always thought you were better. Not because I didn’t want to do them, though. I loved it all. It was grand. It was all that I wanted. It was you and me and Saturday nights and wine and kissing and you being as interested in the moonlight as I am.

3. I believe in our co-existence. I believe in co-habitation. I believe in cooperation. I believe in companionship. I believe in collapsing into you. I believe in cats. I believe that catastrophes can be avoided or dealt with gracefully. I believe in catapulting myself into your worryship. I believe in cutting through bullshit. I believe in calling you when we are apart one from another. I believe in carving my initials into your unyielding heart. I believe that cacophonies have ruined us. I believe in naming the culprit, even when nothing can be changed. And I believe in changing our minds…

Howling at the Moon

I’m fully awake in my rage tonight
Nails sharpened to snaggly talons scraping at the fibrous black patterns choking me
When your mouth hung loose I ate the air that escaped
It dazzled me, the thought of filling up my belly on your wines
My legs cannot carry me fast enough to reach the white-hearted moon child riding on the backs of all that is moving
Moving every filmy figure out of her way
I am
Closer now to being in her way
Choosing to engulf her madness
Like rain water from the gods sliding down my wide opened throat
The dark bird is settling into her knotted nest squawking and craning its stiff neck to let the sound filter into the psychedelic thoughts dancing past
I am
One of those thoughts
Heavy with coins to toss into the vastness spreading out like wildfires
Hopes for new days to come
New moons to ravage
In my haste, I will pour a little shine into her void
All the masks are jumping off the walls here and it is affecting me like cotton mouth
That sensation of dry swallowing, squeezing every drop of moisture under the tongue, begging for it to stick around but it never does till you end up gulping at the water you ignored for too long: that’s me
Twisting and twirling my hair ‘round dizzy fingers getting tangled up in those talons that have bloody sprouted
I am
Shaking my fists at a mocking sky
Demanding reprieve from a deaf cosmological ear now crest-fallen
Hurting in my wander, barefoot and sheer searching for shelter from these temptations to call it all worthless
All the prayers that have hung themselves like nooses made of exquisite pearls so shimmering in their appeal
I’d appeal to the ‘highest’ yet she’s too busy spinning, opening and closing her eyes amid shadow constellations to notice me upon her heels and that cotton mouth feeling is back again
And in mid-sentence, I realize I have been holding my breath since I was thirteen
That’s the day I forgot how to scream
And here, tonight, finally
I am
Ready to howl

here/on earth

it frightens me/when I let go/when I forget I’m some kinda ego/when the threat of distance carries me/from the face of pity/and fear, she wears a gardener’s cloak/drenched in feelings/too hollow her throat/I’m a little bit off/a little bit strange/I promise there’s a point/there’s a nothing to attain/I’m not here/you see me/I’m dancing, your peer/but baby, I’m not here/I’m an experiment/a figment/and if I justify my existence/it’s pointless/this forgetfulness/begging for attention/’cause it feels too much to abandon/yet it cuts me to the crunch/I’m laughin’/I’m talkin’/I’m walkin’ amongst you, but my brokenness aches of the nothingness I can’t fix/forget it/let it go/she knows no promise of tomorrows/there’s so much I wish I could change/the less, the more, the broken, the strange/and if these lungs give out before they’re due/I pray for another body in which to save you/I’m a song/a poem/a line in a book/an eye that sees/every cranny/every nook/I’m not a girl/not alive/not a dream/a breath/a sigh/but relief in unknown places/a letting go in the solace/of godly embraces/a daughter of moons/of suns/of stars/of bellies/of mothers/of lions/and arts/you see/I may be a bit off/and a whole lotta strange/but in flesh/chained to all that I would change/there’s so many hungry/and uncovered/and alone/as I stand/as I sing/as I share, I beckon them home/’cause I’m just a figment/an apparition/imagined peer/and though I am among you/I’m not here/I’m begging for you to feel 50 percent of my tears/and 30 percent of the randomness that gets lodged in my fears/or maybe just 15 percent of the lies I’ve told myself to keep alive/that it’s fixable/these broken lines/if you’ll take just a bit off me/a thought/a healing/then maybe/just maybe/I would finally/in moments really/though painfully/be/here/on earth

Elephant

She’s placed herself, a drowned capsule,
inside your shadow box (cowarding)
Stuffed down
crouching and bent over like fallen leaves
in a storm drain

You eat her love
Uncured, unprocessed
Holy meat upon your shovel tongue
And did you get all you came here for?

She is an explanation of temperance
peppered with anxiety
You eat her, a monstrosity…
Full up
Carved out
the lining ripped from abysmal shreds of dignity
long gone

She remembers this dance in every body
one step forward,
two steps back
“That’s it”
“Take it again”
“Yeah”

Leave the money on the table
and the mess where it lands
She’s got her apron and broom on
It’s what she’s prepared to do
She’s porn for it

Endless
You will bite her
Break her
Call her despicable epithets
and she will not complain
Later, you will beat back her tears
Somewhere a hole in her esophagus
She will bleed
and she will tether herself inexplicably further to your
tyrannical wolves
And still, she will not complain
She will ache for another

Another useless name
Another pair of short shorts
Another sunset of smeared silver and black
and blue dripping
off her
like a muddied shower
Fungal
Somewhere, a hole in her heart

and still…
unable to recognize the girl that once stood in her stilettos
She will not complain
A sea of foamed-up thoughts will pass her by
in a wink
in a blink
like a flapping party banner that reads:

“Honey, I think there’s a problem here.”

Shadows


It began with a tree
It will end with a tree

This intangible belly with its roots exposed, giving into me
I stared into this infinitely armed, gentle beast with total abandon
Just a moment longer than the natural inclination to continue the path I’ve tread
Just long enough to hear her pulling me into a collapsed lean
Her whisper like a shout without words
Just a thought

“Listen”

When we give up these ghostly eyes, we will go into the trees
One breath at a time
Becoming the dusting and the dews of her echo
Hovering like the winds, we will giggle and wink at the dramas we have played out here
like blind children in their sand boxes

And on and on and on it goes
Our dance
In one body after the next
In one corpse after and so on…willingly
No matter the cost or all that has come before

None of us will be able to account for when and how it will come to an end
(These bodies)
When we will dance our last

We are shadows
Though we creep and crawl entombed in flesh and bone thoughts
Busy with securing elusive immortality
I imagine such shadows will retreat when there are no branches left to bear our fruits
Then we will see if our Great Mother will give us a different kind of legs to go on gathering

(copyright by Chana Ylahne Orr 2010)