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.
wyrdwind 