wyrdwind

Right to Roam

If you will,

imagine

an intricately planted

series of wildlife corridors.

Great green highways and bridges

connecting the entire country.

Roofless follies designed

to resemble vaulted Catholic churches,

no priests or confessionals, just hearths

and wishing wells. Along the way,

wildcrafted shelters

and loosely tended campsites

dotting the new wilderness.

Enforcement of Dark Sky.

To wander as a human right.

Subsidize any and all, whatever scale,

willing to participate. Tree laws

enshrined. Consider them

family members, community centers,

felling is an absolute last resort,

not a business plan. Ask your children,

all of them, to draw a forest. Paint. Write reports.

Go to bat for their favorites.

Cede creative control

to each region within reason.

Say fuck it we ball coastal redwoods,

which pair well with huckleberry,

salmonberry, elderberry, salal, and hazelnut,

many ferns. When planting,

remember when mature they are god-sized

and count their years in the thousands.

They require ocean mist.

Weave territories between oak and pecan,

carefully understoried with pawpaw,

various brambles, medicinals, and edibles.

Get you some birch, beech, and sugar maple

for their nutritious water and syrup, not to mention

exquisite beauty. Monocrops are a sin. Look,

when I was a little girl

I was always happiest

with scuffed knees in a pretty dress

covered in dirt with a critter in my hand.

Give them that.

Diaper Baby Basics

Animism and by extension

shamanism are not the same

as religion. At the risk of sounding

Native as fuck, all of life is connected,

everything has a spirit and the soul

is a complex, part of a much larger

organism. We’re here for a time.

Then we’re something else. Call it

carbon cycling, reincarnation, whatever.

Humans

are uniquely capable of perceiving

and interfacing with massive ecosystems

and the collective subconscious, which I’ve said

is the most powerful tool on Earth.

Spirit.

Imagination and pattern recognition,

the meaning we grant life, both with emotions

and observation. Art. Song. Rhythm. More on that

in a bit.

Was a time we never asked

where our ancestors went. They resided

within us, and within our trees,

so long as they stood

we knew our place.

You know, wood

is probably one of the rarest

and most precious things in the universe.

So very much has to go just right

for it to exist.

Point is,

when a member of our community,

for reasons trauma, genetics, and fate decide,

robbed of our forest and spiritually homeless,

cradle to grave exposed to industrial toxins,

begins seeing, hearing, feeling, and smelling shit we can’t,

it’s simply to be expected. It’s a symptom of damage

to our ecosystem, not a pearl-clutching personal failing.

All that pain

has to go somewhere. Be remembered.

The hurt must show its face,

be embodied,

in order for a people to act.

We are given the chance

to do right by our ancestors.

Black Magic

If we’re entertaining the concept,

healing is messy, dark, and grotesque.

A shaman is chosen by the spirits

and a crisis commence. If and only if

an initiate overcomes this trial

designed to crush their ego and sever

attachment to trifling concerns, traverse

the most harrowing waters

of the human psyche

and return as a hollow bone,

only then

is a shaman born.

The precise nature, severity, and duration

of that trial directly correlates

to a shaman’s power and intended function.

Was a time the Big Mamacita land spirits

could reasonably expect to keep it in the family,

but should their tribes forget how to listen,

allow the land’s corrosion, break the faith,

grow dejected and complacent, take far too long

to act,

it is not unheard of

for a Heavy Hitter to look abroad

for a better-tuned instrument, a wounded healer,

to prevent its soul and medicine from being lost,

fragmented.

A human mind

cannot sit with that depth of trauma

and function. Much less comprehend

what is going on, who has come to call,

devoid of direct context. At first.

The struggle is the point.

Grief doesn’t have to make sense,

it must be felt.

One way or another,

an initiation results

in death.

Chambers

See it’s not the adversity itself

that makes you strong. It’s having healed

in the correct direction, with nourishing bonds

and coping mechanisms. Bones must be aligned

properly to set. Wounds need fresh edges.

It’s plasma and resonance, antibodies,

a vaccine. Infections must be eliminated

with extreme prejudice.

The very first thing

a fetus is ever aware of

is its mother’s water. Her heartbeat.

Tides of respiration.

It is just the same

as the primordial ocean,

in which all life was female, from whence

all life has come. Music

and language are seated

in separate regions of the brain.

Words are more recent. Prefrontal cortex. But Song

is very, very old. Nothing less

than a biological imperative, our blood

and bones, Her pulse. No two people

sound exactly the same when they sing,

nor can they easily hide their emotions doing so.

I’ve said

Music itself is the only currency that matters,

the very bonds

of social and neurological cohesion.

It penetrates

when all other communication fails.

Reverberation and remembrance.

Every musician alive regardless of talent,

every clumsy five fingered clap on mommy’s hands,

every key smash and twinkle twinkle little star,

every back-bent AHHHhhwbwwb-b,

babble and happy food-smeared hum

is doing something more important

than any president or prime minister.

You can quote me on that.

And when it comes to love,

any discussion of the mythical One,

that’s when you are so moved

by another’s fine spirit

for all its joy, agony, and quirks,

there’s visceral appreciation

for its growth habits,

and somehow so far apart, a song

between two sets of bones, a language

only you know.

It doesn’t have to make sense.

Osiris

Now sans the woo woo drum circle bullshit,

as well as the misguided uppity bias of psych,

I can give you the nightmare skinny dip

on soul retrieval, what to do

when you have missing parts—

and lemme tell ya, ages ago, ever since

my childhood friend got wasted,

screwed around with some cards

and then randomly texted me to say

my soulmate’s soul was shattered, just FYI,

boy tore up from the floor up

Possessed of the Blues, and I

was his only hope at a happy endng

despite my own life look a bomb went off,

well,

I’ve thought about it—

sorry champ your parents failed,

assuming they ain’t dead, so,

now you gotta go on a quest.

Like several.

Gotta parent yourself.

It’s almost impossible to do alone,

and I would never suggest

you walk the path I have, but

if you were there here I am,

wherever I’m needed,

the cold third wind from a crack inside

where you found a reason,

any reason,

my love, we have all night.

Pray you live somewhere with healthcare

if nothing and no one else, go everywhere

you puked and shat, every miserable hole

you crawled into and out of

for the sake of, I’m guessing, shooting up,

’cause there’s really only one drug

acts a pale substitute for a real woman’s love,

and my wild guesses are very rarely wrong,

unless you’ve got more tedious and convoluted

addictions—and hey man,

at least you’re not a shitstain oil tycoon

or an insurance agent, not to be like

It Could Be Worse—

I digress.

Gotta change your own diapers.

Snatch clown shit out your own mouth. Create

a support network. Crash pads. Meet yourself

where you’re at. Make friends,

even if they aren’t real. Talk to them.

I said what I said, who cares

what normies think. Run commentary,

but this time,

be kind,

you know like Long Night at the Me Museum.

Remember, you are not less

worthy of affection

than a dog. Any given stray. Parvo or mange.

Think back. Is there anything else

your new friends observe?

No matter how small. A chubby cloud,

a tasty snack, a chip of paint.

Clean underwear. Warm socks.

Managed to put on pants.

Went outside and sat.

Here’s one of mine:

One time I almost died.

Alcohol poisoning. Don’t ask.

Someone I thought hated my guts

stayed by my side, herself drunk,

while I vomited until I turned blue,

forced me to sip water and threatened

to put her fingers down my throat if I stopped.

In the end,

she had to bodily support my torso.

My limbs were useless noodles.

I bled through my pants.

Gotta love being a woman.

I couldn’t even lift my own head,

cold as toilet bowl porcelain.

So very tired.

She fell into the tub first,

because drunk,

and said I was supposed to be there,

indignant huff.

Once she achieved her original objective,

and turned the shower knob

as hot as it would go,

hoisted my naked body in there

with many a grunt,

that was the best shower ever, man,

if I was gonna go, at least I’d die knowing

the supreme comfort

of rock bottom shower slump,

hypothermia edition. I was one

with that tub. My horrible mermaid cradle.

Once I regained sufficient color we emerged

from a wall of steam

and there

was my terrified Good Girl roommate,

her Catholic ass holding a candle wide-eyed,

strange boys asleep on our floor

(in an all-girls dorm),

someone told me I sounded like Satan,

never before heard such noises

coming out of a human—my body

had expelled, well, everything, with such force

it became a cavernous death growl

in a tiled amplifier—

and at some point,

my bed.

The cheapest piece of shit ever, half a step above floor,

but man, in that moment,

Best Bed.

Quickly followed by Best Sleep.

In the morning I was glowing.

The second I opened my eyes,

a stage whisper squeak,

“Are you okay?”

My poor roommate, in utter silence

had tracked my breaths

all night, vowed

to keep me alive.

From then on, I decided

that should anyone ever need my help,

I’d go at least that hard. So.

You’re coming with me,

silly papa goose, if I gotta

huck you over my shoulders

and strap you into a wheelchair,

and I tell you, after all that,

you’ll never taste

pizza so good, I’m talking whole pie,

don’t

make me do airplane sounds,

here comes the choo choo train.

Third Space

What did I mean by uppity bias?

That’s professionals

from middle to upper class backgrounds

placing the biomedicalized onus on the individual

without first and foremost

examining the system itself,

particularly

the allostatic load

of poverty. Race. Sex.

Salt when a white collar

spends their life

polishing their personal gear, a cog really,

in the Suffering and Exploitation Machine

thinking it won’t be what it be

the brighter it gleams, chasing money,

retirement—the ultimate pipe dream—

it’ll hurt less if you lubricate. Maybe.

The point is,

do you want to function,

or do you want to live?

Go outside.

Social Services are just janitors

mopping slime off the slaughterhouse floor

right before the next round gets shoved

through the meat grinder.

Go outside.

Salt cedars, crabgrass, broken glass,

cactus, burs, bugs, reptiles and dogs

were all I had. It didn’t matter

that my reading comprehension tested at

university levels

when I was six years old.

Thanks grandpa.

Nothing people hate more

than a girl with a smart mouth

and an excellent bullshit detector.

Rural teachers had no fucking idea

what to do

when we drew wonky crayon picture books

and mine featured a serial killer

in a field of flowers

and pipe bomb instructions, which I sussed

after having a think about fireworks

and tweaker junk.

I did not have…people. Peers.

Parents who gave a fuck.

They asked me to teach

the second language learners

because I was such a good girl.

Which doesn’t work

on neglected baby gangsters

unless you write smut. Lemme tell ya,

Mexicans love Dragon Ball Z, especially

Bulma and Vegeta. Just FYI.

We’ll pass the Proper Person Exams

with flying colors boys, just hold tight.

When you’re older

I’ll be the grand interpreter

of wordy paperwork bullshit,

three pages just to say

your mom has advanced arthritis in her hips

in early middle age from being a maid.

Here’s some tamarind, black pepper,

ginger and turmeric about it

’cause you sure as fuck can’t afford meds,

much less double hip replacement.

Also, city’s on your ass with a 500 dollar fine

about weeds.

God forbid there’s a grass. A single speck of green.

Went to college for a bit.

Wasn’t impressed.

When it comes to the world of men,

my life’s been one long Ron Swanson

I Know More Than You meme. Don’t

mistake my processing speed

for flippancy. Don’t

ever feel discouraged by a diagnosis

’cause these fools done goddamn fuck all

with their pedigree Very Good Brains.

Just fancy pawns

for the military industrial complex,

which is what you get

chasing recognition and accolades,

when schools are structured

to funnel you into STEM saying

you just need to be “challenged”

and notice

that challenge is never

forestry or humanities.

What good are executive functions,

metacognition, if all you do

is bend over and spread your cheeks?

Dawdle on red herrings as our planet dies?

Choose which evil organization

to sell your patented cell-injecting nanites?

Sometimes, I just call a spade a spade.

Better to be loyal, loving, and brave.

Walk a path for the music it makes.

There only needs to be one of me.

Go outside. Don’t be afraid.

This place done everything in its power

to insist

that I too would be a pathetic coward

if only I Understood the Rules,

knew how much tings huwt.

I comprehend.

Tree is good.