Poetry

I used to try to make myself so small

Like if I could fit into the cracks and crags

No one would see me

Huge and amplified

All my insecurities

All of my beauty

Would shrink along with me

And then maybe,

I wouldn’t have to be

So huge

Now, with my ideas

Now with my full moons and my love

Now with my wet eyes

Now with my thunder thighs

I used to try to shrink myself way down

A silver sliver that would slide into oblivion

Who would not have to stand at the grand podium of god and shine in golden shimmers of light and say

This Is Me

all my edges all my mounds all my might and all my insecurity

here I am, this is me, and

I am grown now

Responsible for my glory

I own my fate

And all this love flows from my hips

Again and again

I return

Larger toward the grand union, the one

Here I am

Big thighs

Wet eyes and all,

Here I am

For all to see.

When he left me, I was an uncorked bottle of primordial mud oozing down past the crust of the earth.

Flickering into earth worms and spreading my stench, like death, through millennia of dust.

I was the stuff of menstrual blood

A pre-lingual woman who squats in the dirt

Fermented heart and eyes like vinegar

Eyes like a jagged scream

Eyes just like no one ever knew me

-Eyes like the endless dunes of night….

And a mouth just as long and as loathsome as your tattered feet in flight

A Mouth as lost and hollow as the empty street light

That hung its heavy head like a bent (spent) poppy

and splattered shattered fragments of light across the night

Under the moon, by the river

The night we broke our promises.

When he left me, I was a shattered window pain

And the empty space of a forgotten name

The stars were all blinking out and it was I to blame.

When you met me

I was whole, as whole as can be

I was strong and miles tall but soft as a stream

And steady in my dreams

I was one woman and not half of one circle

For years that woman slipped away

Quietly

Into the nooks and crannies of your neck

But she’s come to call on you now

And tell you

I’m back.

Thighs like sledgehammers and mouth like a diamond

I’m back.

Flanked by wolves and scabs of night

I slip across my shadow, and tear long holes in my soul but its real and it’s me.

You are such a slippery thing, like a gust of wind you ripple through my hair

My fingers tare across the air but then;

You’re Gone.

I sit within the pool of my molten soul, so hot and cold.

You’re gone.

I wonder if you were ever really there at all.

This is the part where I grow strong.

I

Was a babe

Blinking, spinning

Tumbling out

The soft machine of skin

Gave way to me

Again, again

I was a babe

Not knowing the course teeth of womanhood

Of course

Not knowing

The delicate balance of being and showing

Of grounding and growing

I was a babe and unafraid

My only point of reference was sweet love

No words plotted to box in my existence

To limit my reverence

To create a fate for me

It is late now but I see

That there’s still that babe in me

The round pewter and cream

The tarnished varnish of the dream

The drizzle splash and gleam

The soul that lives between

The skin,

the bones,

the dreams;

The most authentic bit of me

The ends that justify my means.

It is dark now, the veil is thin and I can see

The immortality in me.

The rounds from ground to sky to earth

The mound, to spirit, back to birth.

Nature, in her immortal beauty, reclaims your breath

Again and again

You return

You reach a pinnacle:

A life that burns

With purpose

You are newborn and anointed by the milk of stars

I am newborn, I am space worn

We are wartorn and this world is ours.

I am a child born in bones and skin

I am a child of stardust virtues and of earthly sins

And one of many

Scrying for stars in my tealeafs

Screaming out between the lines of injustice and corruption

Dreaming out between the minds of lust and trust and loving

Screaming and crying

Dreaming and scrying

Learning how to live between the birthing and the dying

Learning how to take the wake standing, sitting, lying

Learning

how to breath

underwater.

Coming up for air and breathing stars and musk,

Between the cycling dawn and dusk.

This is me and I am

one of many.

we are the warriors of the new dawn

we are praying to keep moving on

we are praying for disclosure

we are praying for change

we are praying to remember

the wisdom of our ancestors

our prayers burn the world like embers

and open up the ancient eyes of earth

this fire turns the land and offers up rebirth

our people are the hopeful menders

the fire tenders

our people are moon people

our people are bone people

our people are sun people

our people are stone people

our people are lying in the grass of self discovery

whispering prayers into the creases of each other’s palms

our people have strong hands that are lined in secret psalms

our people are a strong people to inherit the earth with all her bounty joy and pain

and we are praying to ourselves and all those prayers gather like rain

we are praying for our health

we are praying to ascend

we are praying for salvation

for the hate and war to end

we are praying for creation

we have a tear which we must mend

we are praying for the means to be justified by the end

we are praying to the everything, which is woven in impossible oneness, and nevertheless,

is.

We are praying to resurrect heaven on earth

Not for some, but for all

We are praying to the earth and to the moon and to the air

We are praying to each other to hold the light and take the stages

We are praying for our mothers, sisters, brothers,

For our lovers, for the witches, for the moon strung mages

We are not praying for some far off god to take a hand and mend the tear

We pray to the spark in each of us

To the thread that connects each spark

We are praying to tear down the curtains and light up the dark

To bring the babes, marching and dancing,

Scrying crying,

Snaking and prancing

Out of the dark ages and into the newborn light.

We are here to light a path

We are here to hold the door

We are here to stop waiting

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

When I first heard your heartbeat, it was drumming out across the earth

It started deep, down in red clay

And worked its way on up to birth

When I first new you were coming,

Old trees bowed their heads to me

They had held you in their roots, you see,

And couldn’t wait for us to meet!

When I first knew you were coming, the wind wept joyfully

She was an old, old friend of yours

And she had danced among the trees

For many centuries

Calling your body up from the dust and your soul down from the stars.

Theres a tree outside my window

And her name is Emily

Shes got curling pubes of mossy green and arms of ebony

Shes got yonis and stories and bark bitten memories

She’s got rooms in your heart even you haven’t seen.

Through the window pane she harkens me with fierce and barken beams

Can’t say how I know we share a name

But her lips!

They breath to me.

Whispering crinkly through the forest grounds, loose leaves leave and fall free.

Oh! My heart, my brain, my moon

My stars!

My Emily.

Oh moon and stars

Oh great mother mystery

Oh higher self, oh god in me

Why have you left me in this place

Dropped me from the sky

A round peg into a square hole

What will this disgraced land teach my ever living soul

And why could I not learn those things

Safely in your starry bossom

How can I blossom

With this concrete lid

Orchids never grow on the sidewalk

And I may never know how to talk the talk and walk the walk

I may never wax fierce and fit the mold and pick the lock

And I may never have that roar

That all my friends think I need

I may stay forever a

Meak green unsprouted seed

Beneath a burning sidewalk

I absorb each footfall

And people say hey little seed why don’t you scream

And bear your teeth

And scratch

And I say I’m a fucking seed I have no teeth

Why do I burn burn burn

And yearn for a home I can’t remember

Why do my words

Catch in my throat

Like dying bees

Or sizzling embers

Oh mother

Oh father

Oh People magazine

And vogue

Why have you taught me to be mild and meak

I’m going rogue

I’ve got to speak or ill explode

There’s hatred in the water

They put fluoride in your dreams

There is poison in the medicine

There is runoff in the streams

There’s commercial propaganda splenda spam wam bam thank you ma’am chemotherapy media mcdonalds bullshit

There is Misunderstanding.

Misinformation spreads like oil over the masses

There is a big bleeding hurricane of racism

That everyday, gets fed

The icebergs are melting

The rainforest’s dead

And everywhere

Republicans roam the earth

And I feel this

I feel all of these

From my little seed

Beneath the side walk

Now I’m sprouting

And you’re doubting

The substance of what I say

You stupid genius

With your fingers on the keys

And your insults up your sleeves

And your opinion

Come at me

A crack forms along my outer shell

I am sprouting

Leaves curling into fists

And ascending into this mockery of daylight

Come at me

Lets ascend together

I have walked beyond

The hungry gates of darkness

I have passed the bridge into the night

I have seen them

Swimming like minnows

Flickering, beating pin pricks of light

Floating with something more than gravity

Back into the tender eyes of source

I have called out to you

Across the long chasm of silence

Deep and wide and full of emptiness

I have shared my last loaf of light

I have walked

Naked and empty handed through the soul’s darkest night

My last crumbs fell across your shoes like stars

And hours, days, infinite moments, passed, as we grasped at fleeting light in the deepest patch of shadow

And here we stand hand to hand

Wide awake and open

Our veins uncovered

Our shadows outspoken

Twilight lingers where our edges touched.

I have read all the unwritten maps

Folding and unfolding

In every inch of my skin

I have walked through dusk and dawn

And I will tread this path again

I have wandered-empty-across the plain of darkness

And felt the weight of ripples

Ripping through reality like fingers tearing tissue paper

Echoing on every layer

The tide goes out

The tide comes in

The web is spun

The minnows swim

My eyes have seen

All my myriad lives spread out before me

Eternal, in every direction

The cycle unfolding

A circle, a sphere

We’re blossoming, molding,

Becoming more real

Multiplying faster and faster

The velocity tears the fear away, and the edges of your tears all fray, moaning into laughter

I have seen this, again and again

A million million stars hanging on to a web

A billion little pieces of blue glass

The darkest sky, the brightest stars

The night’s untold grey mystery:

She unfolds into day

The suns the rocks the stars the people:

We all explode

And fade away

I have watched the hills of many lives turn over,

Sitting on the bank next to you.

I have drank the brew and stirred the stew

I have faced the moon,

A stony mirror that hangs forever

In the ether

I have stood stone still

On the banks beneath her

Waiting for the tide to open up his arms of sunspeckles and seafoam

Waiting for the tide to turn

For the sun to burn

For the hills to bear their ancient bones

Waiting for the grandest celestial symphony

To loose the light and take me home

Dear Human,

You will get a heart. It will be made of butterflies and barbed wire.

And earth and moon and sky and break ups and forget me not’s and the little bell of Babies cries and tiny moments and golden eyelashes lacing the lids of your first Love’s moon blue eyes

It will bleed and break and mend

And send you over heaven’s fence

It will tear your fucking world apart.

You will hold up the carnage of your heart in your hands and think how you can never love again

But those moments will wane away and in time, your feet will find you at a door

The door will unlock a room in your heart that you’ve never seen before

In the room there is a box with a primordial spark

And it never goes out

This light never goes out

Dear human,

This is what being human is all about

We crash into each other like bits of flint

The heart sparks and burns and lights again

Dear human

LEAN IN

Wander off the middle path

Decompose your composure

Squander your security until your left empty with only eternity and a map in secret language

Dive into this

Naked, head first

No toes in the water

This life is meant to be lived

Dive into this

Write the story of your life in dew drops, tears, in blood and kisses

Dance in moonlight in the margins

Grab somebody’s holding hand and waltz right off the page

Hook your heart around the moon and lean into her gaze

When you look up at the stars you are watching ancient light

And those same stars that illuminate your sweet hands in the night

Course coolly through your veins

And blink bright out of your skull

There is a lullaby in the hull of your heart that only you can tell

And there is a darkness in your heart that’s dark as dark

And that is just as well

There’s a box that you can make in life; your own special hell

But there are boundaries you can break in life and places you can dwell

Where each breath sits up resoundingly astounding me as well

So gasp

Cry

Breath

Wipe your snot on your sleeve

Fuck and bumble

Sing and rumble

Pound a drum

Every hue of you

Each facet

Is alive

In this universal hive

We’re all swimming through the spark plug moon dew sky

Honey drenched and dripping

The whole place vibrating and rippling

We were running; now we’re tripping

We were gulping, now we’re sipping

We both drank the drink that dreamers brew

From sip to sip

From moon to you

We are crossing this ocean from lip to lip

One way or another

I hope this trip

Brings us close to each other

Just as close as we could be

When I am you and you are me and we

Are made of songs and light

We are made of sound and sight

We are logic, love and fright

We are magic, data, heartbeats and heartbreaks

We are Meta, moon, sun and might

We are tarnished burnt and bright

Dearest one

Throw down your heart and let loose this light

In my heart, there is a dark steep holocaust

Where suburbs grow like smoky jagged crystals

Looming sharp shadows that hang over my dreams

And in a tucked away neighborhood

Just beyond the trees

With the 3d printed houses where kids learn their ABCs

And skin their knees on their own little rectangles of grass and stolen earth

There, I tear my heart down

First

With an exhale giving up

I crush my compass at a chapel and resign myself to you

I burn my letters with a blue flame and I eat up all the ash

Lastly,

I tear my heart down

With a jagged piece of glass.

With a city and a street

With a silhouette of teeth

Where the paved down broken people meet and put all of their tokens neatly in the machine

It’s mostly silver and grey but there’s patches of green

Where the sheep all eat hay

And you lay down your dreams

And a man in a suit gives you a receipt and a child and a roof and a slice of rotten meat and everything you thought you were going to be burns away suddenly into cinders on your tongue

And the greenhouse gases from your dreams collect up in your lungs

And you struggle, something in you screams, but you keep climbing the rungs

And going to the grocery store

And washing your face

And tearing your heart out

Lace by red lace

You were a coyote

And a cactus with a crown

You were going to float around the world and make a lot of sound

But you sold your ticket and you gave up your crown for an insurance policy and a quiet place to drown

And you were doing just fine; all the knobs on your life support were beaming and bleeping

You were doing just fine,

You were screaming and seeping

And all your vital signs were right where we wanted them

You were going to quietly sleep through this life

With a suitcase and a wife and a summer home and an empty place to keep the empty electrical socket of your soul

And a shoebox and a Netflix account

And a rabbit in a hole

You were doing just fine until the sedative of slow emptiness wore off

And suddenly

You could feel

The teeth of the succubus slowly

Draining you out drop by crimson drop

and you cried out for more pain for more teeth

you cried out for a mirror so you could watch yourself bleed

you cried out for a time machine and a way to know what to need

your coinstacks all tumbled and you caved in your dreams

in your last breath you mumbled

but no one heard what you said

that last secret that you told

before your soul went to bed

but its been speculated

that the forest smiled that night

with dark and starspacled teeth

Maybe the world wrote off your taxes and granted you leave

and maybe the trees gulped you up

so you could finally breath.

Maybe you slipped away quietly into the dark sleeve of night

Maybe someone, somewhere flicked back on your lights.

Be still child

And listen to the sounds of the stars

You came naked on the backs of the celestial storks

Writing fresh folklore with every foot step

You crept over the blue threshold

Through manifest and manifold

Through tumbleweed and milky way,

Starspray, and mothers milk.

You grew through eyes of needles and bundles of sage

You knew through rings of trees, through wings of bees

through amber sap and rage

You came upon this moment in the golden age,

Smoulder cheeked and comet eyed

And that

was just the start

you lit a fire inside your heart

and crept through fields of sleeping stars

to hang your moon on the back of a mountain

and open up all your eyes with a gasp

clasping all the impossible moments with tiny hands

you drew a circle in the sand and

somehow, it saved you,

As you gazed through the grey dew

and gawked at all the silver strings

strung out between the mundane things;

shoeboxes full of dustmites and eternity

and me

somewhere, in some imagination

as every layer of time pealed back

I was you and you were her and all the hands were dust to dust

And ether to ether

Grass and earth and stones beneath her

Ancestors and bones to teach her

Be still child

And know the nectar of nothingness

In the beginning times when you and I were seeds of stars our heartbeat was a future memory and the melody that the sun tells to the sky

Let this momentary lull within your skull be your long lost lullaby

Let the sun slide down your tongue

Let the moon be your window

Let the river run through you

The water is alive.

Now I lay me down to sleep

The will of the goddess, mine to keep

She holds our lulling heads at night

And speaks through stars and firelight

I pray the mother gives me sight

And lifts my lips to drink in light

She emboldens the weak

And visits those who seek

and leak moonspeak through peaking slits in milky eyes

She rumbles in the echoes of your cries and mumbles through the gentle music of your thighs

She tumbles with your tears and bleeds with your births

We walk upon her, as the earth

she lies always across the threshold

just beyond the veil

In the long green country of dreams

Where the moon hangs boldly on the boughs of the trees

Her lips are wet with pearls and moss

She whispers her tidings into wanting ears

And soothes those who have loved and lost

At times she rises up; a burning light to behold

These times she stands on crumbling ground

Her long grey glances profound and old

She pears through silver eyes with primordial sight

She is our long lost guiding light

A wavering lantern

An impossible flame

As ancient as any sun

She remembers the days when her daughters and sons were as one

And beheld her their mother, the witch and the bitch, the number thirteen and the howling pitch

the early earth tone, that rakes your bones, and lifts the fog

have we all but forgotten the rotting of our cities? the people cry out and the wastelands burn

styrafoam castles melt into small impossibilities and a few muses muse and seek to believe

the last little embers can still make so much steam

The great mother bleeds, she sings and she seethes, the stars and seeds whisper of her return

The music of the spheres is ringing in your ears

A memory that is not your own passes silently into the marrow of your bones

And suddenly you know her, you’re born of her, her children all are your brothers and sisters

And she beheld them, her little children, standing in their own feet

She wore many faces

And striding the earth, her feet touched many places

she loved the world across all of the races

She strode across the magic lines that encircle the globe and bade blades of grass to bow down to her and the wind to whisper her many names

And even today she silently reigns

And we build skyscrapers and strip malls across her war-worn face

But in the nights, in the country of dreams,

Still all of us bow down and worship in the language of bones

And meet in secret circles of ancient stones

And when we intuit or empathize

her light peaks in through the tiniest window of our eyes

Into the paper plastic world of today

And slowly, as seeds sprout and cities burn

We transmute

And we reclaim

And she returns

Long may she reign.

She was beautiful.

It was not in a way that you could fit evenly into a frame,

Or rate on a sliding scale

Her features sometimes disagreed with each other

One eye would be more open

One arm a little stronger than the other

But she was beautiful.

Not in a way that fits perfectly with pen onto paper

Not like a model;

All of her features adding evenly up to an all around ten

No.

The way her body curled and bent and moved against the sky was not something that could stride a runway, or curl up comfy in the glossy perfumed pages of a magazine.

She didn’t have a waify body that all clothing hung perfectly around

She was short, and round, and imperfect.

But she was beautiful.

Her hair slid and curled in all directions and wound up at her waist.

There was a curling halo of mahogany frizz that framed her face

And when she danced her hair swung all around her and her body moved wildly like someone who had never unlearned the love you feel when you’re a brand new child.

The sun and the moon would shine their round faces down on her like new parents.

Sometimes she would get stark naked and dance with wild abandon, all the wildest parts of her untethered to any notion of worldly perfection.

All the bends and curves of her would flow rhythmically one with the air around them, her tiny hands and feet each dancing a dance of their own.

She would unbind herself from perfection, and in that moment she would find it, and it would find her.

There was always a little kiss waiting to be taken in the smallest crease of her smile

Sometimes, she would eat chocolate and write love letters to herself. The chocolate would wind up in imaginative places, leaving traces all over her body. The love letters would go straight to her hips.

Despite all, nothing could stop her from being herself. And nothing could stop her from being beautiful.

If you ever were around her, and felt the pure warmth radiating off of her,

Or if you ever looked her in the eyes and saw how they were chestnut brown in the shade of a tree but honey gold and ocean deep when the light pierced them, then you would know.

She had scars and hairs and tattoes lacing up her body like a network of a life fully lived.

She was soft and hugged truly, not out of necessity, but out of complete and utter love for you.

Whoever you are, she would hold you soft like a mother if that is what you needed. No questions asked.

She was beautiful.

I was communing with the moon when you came to me

I was stagnant, and static, and stationary

I was lit up like noon

On the backs of the dunes

When the sky whispered “soon”

And it opened its mouth

And it spit you right out

And you slipped around me

Like a halo round my head

Like ripples round my ankles

Like the ring around the moon

You are god and I am god

Our darkness is nakedness of the sky

Our veins are painted in the stars

Our heartbeat is a passing car

And death

Is the only dark egg

That ever hatched birth

Here we are in orbit

In this strange universal church

And I know now was it is to be scared

The way I know a squared and be squared is c squared

The way I know sometimes you have to scream to whisper

Everything slips away.

Our days are empty pages

Tearing through celestial phases

We are the pulse of the asphalt.

And the question mark is our temple.

We are broken and duct taped and bruised

We are the cult of the confused

Here we wander bath and forth

Tracing the veins of our dog eared maps toward our own true north

And every once in awhile I look at you and remember that you are me and we are god

And our souls are little embers burning endlessly

In the vacuous heart beat of eternity

You are a tiny torn thread in the tapestry

And You are exactly as you should be.

I called out across the echoing fractal cracks of myriad deserts

I called out to the wind

To blow me to my True Path

I called out to my feet

To show me the way.

I called out to emptiness,

To richness,

To nothingness,

to awaken the vines in the path of my spirit

I called out to my shadow self with her blade in hand, to clear it

I called out to the night

To sew fields of shadow that bear seeds of light

To carry me home in the basket of her cradle

Across the moonlit sky

When I was a babe in the celestial diamond’s eye

all that I knew was this magnetic ocean of love

And I was a dew drop sliding back in from above

With no expectations

I was not the pigments of my skin

I was not the shape of my flesh

I was just a scratch of ink on the parchment of forever

In the myriad books of bones and stones

Buried in the molten hearth of our mother earth

And all the words were written by the same hand.

And all our lives were momentary lines rippled in the desert sand

And the wind swept the sand to the plains

But the grains remained the same

And the ripples melted away

But the space they held would stay

All the moments were spoken in the language of stones

And when I hear the stars murmuring through my bones

Freely, my soul

Chooses to go home.

Rise up fork tongued women

Rise up from the ashes of your lips

Rise up thick snake of hips

Rise up and slake yourselves on the beaches of abandonment

Rise up and shake yourselves at all the people

Here is the church and here is the steeple

Here is the goddess

Naked and feeble

And crumbling with strength

a marble statue missing both arms

But not the lips

And not the hips

The last pagan

The last good witch

The last matriarch

Her stories are faded but her naked is stark

And Yes, they’ll tell a story to spin her in

to the old testament but when the try to close the hard covers her hips just wont fit

She’ll be bubbling and bursting

The good book with tits

She’ll be speaking in tongues with her eyes little slits

And maybe then we’ll remove the goldspun wool from our eyes

And we’ll realize that ten billion lifes have been wasted and people have died

Because there’s no sin in nature and the patriarch lied

Rise up long lost goddess

Make way for your fits and fears

adorn your tits with ash and tears

Scream the scream ten thousand women have screamed over ten thousand years

Who are we

And why

Our tears our fears our death cries

Stretch around the earth

And circle back to birth

we are all dark temptresses

orchids and coy fish

forlorn and then some

with lilly guilded forked tongues

embrace your mistakes

embrace your long and tangled hair

the red red dirt beneath your toes

Scream to the moss

To the moon

To the crows

Rise up and be purged of original sin

Rise up and love the earthy topsy turvy tangled curvy container you’re in

Rise up moon mama

The last pagan

Rise up and follow the dream that you’re after

Rise up and scream til the scream becomes laughter

by Emily Kell, 2012

I woke into my sleeping and dreamt that spores of myself were spreading somewhere in another dreamscape where

it was not fall in Savannah:

an empty space between the seasons

where siren screams did not ricochet against the sidewalks and the rooftops putting invisible creases in the map of the city where sobs gathered to run like rain drops to the gutter

and the sound never disperses but is fossilized

and hangs somewhere in the humidity

an ossified and collective emotional scar

even the sunflowers could feel it and they hung their pretty heads

like overripe southern bells

I felt the weight of my ephemeral skin sagging against the rusty wheels of the world

and prayed to the Great Blank Space above

that we were not the formless persistence of words

that drains the grains from our hour glass

not the afflicted knobs that filled our craniums with godlessness

not the flesh that filled our shoes

not our lips of ash

our pits of smoke, and skins of sin

the Great Blank Space rolled open for a moment just to tell me no

you are not asleep

you are not eternal

wake to the green dawn of great death

as the moon projects you like a needle on the record of yourself

relinquish

wake up

Now.

by Emily Kell, 2012

shelved away in my bed, scratches of suburbia fading from

false red wood window pane

expanding beyond my head, beyond my labyrinthic brain

penetrating the soft impossibility of skull

dipping into collective to resurrect the Lull before

behold, below

wayward tourists disguised as themselves

on the sidewalk of East Park Avenue chatter

in an accidental echo of the Universal Buffoonery

Remembering abstractedly

hungering, in some secret stomach, for clarity, for the

belch of eternity

and I, in my bed

coiled like a nautilus

a fetus

constellation

slowly peeling away from the flesh

and into the smoggy city of Nostalgia

embarking

on the shrink wrapped journey

of flacid clock hands

waiting

to be tried

for conspiracy of lineareality

waiting

feeling weight

of monstrous empty space crouching in vein laced hides of oculi

flailing tongues and prongs and rogue addendums in

a stab

of abalone luminescence

before unpinning myriad of selves from protoplasm to melt into

mirror image

and sink in star spangled puddle of time

back in tent now-

redwoods breathing and weaving me into the fabric of freedom

back now

on asphalt tongue of serpentine highway with the ever allusive exit sign

and the gray nipple of moon rolling in  its tunnel of sky

back in liquid cave of ovum

back in cradle

of  drum

of prehistory

its laughing cunt exhaling death

into the bowels of mystery

into the womb of night

back

into the emerald metronome of moldavite

back

in teeth of quartz

blinking splinters of

colors of

white

back

in Temple of Collective

back in thirsty skulls of youth

back

in ancient wordless Seed of truth

dissolving and revolving from and into

nameless, faceless

back,

Now

Back.

to window, bed, and body

to merlot and sourdough of  breathing relic of

Sacred Self

back through monument of impossible mortality to greet

illusion of death in the parking lot of plight

back to nautilus blanket shelf

through robotic fields of cattle

seeking vision without sight

back

to

Screaming

bleeding

blinking

birth

of light.

Prayer To No Thing Ness                                         Emily Kell 2012

Now sitting strangely on top of our own leathers

Scarcely breathing

For fear of falling off the moment

We found something out there,

And hung it in the attics of our skulls

And coddled it within our souls

Like a taxidermied buffalo

We found something out there more than our pelts or names

And mounted it on the monument where moment becomes place

Where you walk through the empty aqueducts of past to

Mourn the cold decay of time, of

Momentous moment

Where there was moon

And kinship among rocks

And the squirrels on the asphalt only slept and waited

To wake for the green dawn of wabi sabi.

We found something out there

Hung like an invisible question mark in the air

A belch of enlightened innocence

The sand blasted breeze to chisel us into ourselves,

We, who are really just fingers and toes of the great taxidermied buffalo but

We found something out there

And peeled the extra flesh away until we were all marrow and sinew

And golden

Everything is a great circle

And doused with dread and wonder

We found something out there

More than ourselves

All the world was eyes moving under lids

And our flesh was not afraid because it fell onto the moment

And groped and loved

And fell to feeling

To forget itself

And understand its creamy vessel

Crawling back into the garden

To move, pink and innocent

Over the great sphere of no thing ness

You Were Born Revised                                                                   Emily Kell 2012

You were born from

The shudder of an orgasm

Bliss conceived you as you came from one darkness to the sweet next

You were born, innocent and slippery

round and unashamed

A perfect avocado seed of a woman,

All that you knew was love.

You were soft

from the down feathers of your black hair

To the water that ran through you,

Soft,

And soon would learn

That people love

To shit in soft places.

They couldn’t understand how your umbilical chord was in tact,

How you were still tethered to sweetness.

You were born

And given everything,

And spent years in the milky fog of that guilt guilded gift

Punishing yourself

A little bit each day

you would open your eyes under water,

open pandora’s

legs

relish the chlorine.

you need to turn your mew into a roar

you need to sharpen your baby teeth

and learn that not everyone

is a hugger.

you need to build a burlap skin against the tyranny of dull minds

you are flowering

you need to tell your sweet rolls,

everyday,

that you love them.

Remember the white plastic ward

With its knobs and sobs

Of machinery

The way the ocean remembers the storm.

it is okay to be soft now,

it is okay to be beautiful.

You can scream and bleed and smile.

You are your own mother.

Circumpunt of sweetness

The parentheses of your hips are wide to hold

The pregnant thoughts within them.

You were born

beautiful

And no one can take that away from you.

Burn                                                                           Emily Kell 2012

And after we

burn ourselves in effigy,

our cinders return to the road

smoldering by the spray painted squares

of lacquer yellow liquid cookie crumbs

like Red number 3 popsicle stains on the asphalt tongues

of America.

and I can see myself in the mirror of its pointed teeth

feel its sawdust in my heart beat, feel its

equidistant cookie crumbs as they hit the road

fallen from some pocket of some wild child

some Hansel and some Gretel

and perfectly imperfect.

from ecstasy to effigy,

from dust to dust,

everything

is the same.

dictated by moons and flames

illuminated by black rock bottoms

motherless colorless children of age

with eyes of sage parched for truth.

flash flood, sand to mud, tits to teeth, vegan meat

me at the esplanade on a pedestal of my bloated self

how ridiculous

this meticulous image we waste the clock to compose like an ever dissolving symphony.

when dissolving is the true form of evolving

how ridiculous

and fit for the fire.

we turn we change

we spin, dwindle, and perspire

groping, fumbling, fucking on the cusp

of timelessness and wanderlust.

is it just me or do the rumble strips laugh like a western Buddha

nudging us, gently, joltingly, down our paths,

toward one inevitable conclusion

of death.

of disillusion,

of unity that surmounts any degree of separation.

we are those ants

climbing the hairy hollow limbs of the million legged spider to trudge the insurmountable mountain inside her

we reach the top only to lose ourselves

because that is the ultimate goal

the last line in the books of all of our souls

you have to let it all go, have to burn your ego

before you can realize your part of the whole.

Ode To Moon                                                                         Emily  Kell 2012

You pool me in your palm

And drop me through the head of a needle

Through a machinery of tides

Through cusps and ides

And weave my tweed

Through any tapestry you like

You wax me, wane me

Show me to myself

A stony mirror

Hung forever

In the ether

Life Pulp                                                                     Emily Kell 2012

Purple spines, like vein laced leaves,

mark the parchment of our hides

and the ink never dries

from the ink wells of my cuticles

from the ink wells of your eyes

from ashes of the feather

from the bossom of a bonzai

where we once twisted together,

Naked by nature,

Vine by vine,

and dropped our colors from spoon to cube

To melt our pelts between each others fingers

And leave a watermark that wouldn’t ever dry.

We are

Light bulb moments made of moss,

Mushroom spores in each other’s palms,

Singing moonlit psalms in the language of rain.

I could wash my hair forever and still there your little finger tips would dwell

Ginger with their braiding

And deliberate with their spell

From the ashes of the feather

To the ink within my well

When I Became Love                                                                        Emily Kell 2010

I see the triangles everywhere

glinting off the facets of my daisy paved heart

grazing

my circular atmosphere

a reluctant start

until gravity gives birth to motion

slipping into a rally of unkempt promises

silent and spoken

for you and for me and for all of the hopeless romantics

all of the peter pans and lost boys that prefer the lucid defiance of dreams to the angular semi-truths of daily life

so fragile

that they make you shudder and laugh quietly like some blue shadow on the plaster wall

with the hole in it hovering before the cold tile ground

where we lay in the time when life had not left behind light in your hardboiled eyes

would you leave me here

in this field of many tangled tides

the moon, a stony mirror

paved with the broken glitter of my thighs

on one of those star bitten nights

when I can see the sick spiral

the same way that you can see the milky way

when you’re in it

a night

when I seem to forget how old my soul is

and how young my soul is

as I try to break free from a destiny of living limited humanity

I see

so many words rendered obsolete by their meaning

the moment “Love” drips from my lips it splits into a colorful conduit of comprehension

an off kilter filter destined toward definition

through your own crazed maze of lust and betrayed trust

but, I think I touched love once

I grazed the gentle tooth of her skin with the indigo embers of my existence

wide eyed with electric finger tips

the moment was an island

Atlantis

and the moon

the crickets were like drops of thunder

the memory is harvested with echoes of shattered symbiosis

but if you look at it like this

you can see the laughter in every disaster

and when you wake to find that you are still dreaming

and you manifest your arrival to the fork in the dream

you find yourself redeemed

for every challenged notion that you nurtured in the face of doubt

and watch your fear fray

into fibers

to weave ropes of hope

here I am, twisted in this tangle

scraping at the right angles

when all I really want to be and to feel is

bathed in the moment

when I Became

Love