Poetry

Something in you is changed,
Something wild and right:
The part of you that is animal shines
Out wetly
In the dew tonight.
You howl
and drink the midnight sap,
held holy, up, in ancient laps
of ash and elm
and dewy realms//
you rise and sink in cold and inky moon glow
you call out in a voice that only Crow knows.
You unfold your head and dance,
entranced with your own shadows.

My body speaks to me in dialogues of pain.

She is showing me
Where there are cracks in my sacred temple
She is showing me the memories of how they chiseled in
To the shadowy nooks
And were lost (but always there)

below sea level.

My body reaches up to me ‘You are the librarian of this castle.
You sweep the dust, and make neat all the nooks,
But you never stoop to see the words torn into the inner eyelids of the stones.
You wash the walls but you never read the graffiti.’
‘look’
She says ‘Here is where you hurt.’
And here.
These are the holes you need to know,
But don’t deny them,
Because they let the moonlight in
And little moon-made flowers grow out of the cracks and crags the light seeks with its nimble silver fingers.

Make of the holes an altar.
Pour a salty scream or two into it, and then build the space up anew.
Find the most jagged places and press your lips against them until the skin gives way and when you see the blood, admire it for its color and the way it catches the light.

Carry a bowl to catch your tears in and love them all like little wishes dancing out into the great spiral
Of the night.
All the edges give you so much space
For flowers, and stars, and all the things of magic.
Keep these broken walls, but keep them neat and kind and clean
Sweep the dust and listen to her stories.

Call out to the night and finally agree:
We are dark when we are in shadow, except for when we dance.
The broken places are all welcome to dwell among the books and all the candles of the temple.
We will write them new stories and release this redblue fire out into the bundle of the sky.

Our doors will stay kindly cracked and the windows of our eyes stay open

But we will never
Invite
Razor sharp people

To dance within our pink hallways
Again.

In the beginning, there was a fury of noise

Black cloaked maidens spat ribbons of gray stars,

Arcing into brilliant rivers,

And shaking off their casings,

They fell across the empty blackness;

Fell

into a white, etheric dance.

In the beginning,

Ancient spirits peaked through invisible doors and

Plucked through thickets of stars

They pulled their black hems across the threshold-

They came: solemn, dark, demonic, godlike, gross, and gay-

The sorceress of night, the grandmother of Fae

They came one after another

With long and timeworn faces

To watch the unfurling of the Great Spiral.

In the beginning, you were there-

And I.

We sat dewy-lipped with silent smiles

In the center of a great seed,

Watching as All-Everything snaked across the sky:

Illuminating our new veins, lightning of each color

Stained our umbilicus with pregnant possibility.

The greatest drum pounded proud songs out into new ears

And the first tears were formed and fell across the face of the night,

Watering the seeds that would sprout into All-Life

We held our hearts and whispered songs

Into new and unborn palms

Breathing in and out anew

In the sacred tongue that filled our lungs and slipped from lips before the dawn of time.

It was there waiting for us,

And written in the sky:

The secret language of everything.

It is there still

It lingers silent in the center of the great eye

For us to slip across it,

To slide with impossible beauty,

To cry the first words….

To breathe fresh stars

Into the spiral anew.

Fashion an altar of the souls of your feet:
Sticks and stones and ocean bones//
Save the thickest tears for the center.

Let your roots roll out from underneath you
Until you find the perfect place (you will know it)

It is untouched by the wind.

This is the place where you are tethered.

Lay your stories down here
Lay down all your wind and rain.

Pluck a twig from the right tree and lay it across just so.
Bleach your bones in the sun

One deep scream
Three drops of rich umber blood

It is finished.

Welcome back to the land of the living

Look at how your hand begins to pulse pinkly now; do you remember?

There were veins and they carried moments into your heart. You had eyes and they used to open- see?

You climbed over the fence from the endless fields of once-grass:
Dry and wind-splintered now.
And the sky without stars held you down like a clean glass window.

You are a beetle, needle-pierced and pressed in velvet

You straddled the worlds and moon and sun both disavowed you.

Do you remember their stony faces as you floated through the gate?
We will take you back, because you left a small tea candle burning
On the sill of your brow.
You bent your will on the wind like a sail and when the storm came, you surrendered

We will take you back now into the hearth of life.

It is beating, do you remember?

You left us once, but only like a cow that gives its hide to a drum, and something small and musical still whispered up from the empty space once graced by the letters of your name.

silently, you pressed small seeds into the ground, and the burial mounds all stared up at you in wonder,

as little gray-blue petals pushed out of the pores of the earth; her ashen face now flowering sullenly.

We looked at you then and saw two wheels spinning in opposite directions.

We beckoned you back and you dully slid over the land toward the band that bundles earth to ever-after.

your leg became entagled on the metal brambles of barb, as you blindly made the passage over cold-dead-ancient stones.

You scraped your knees on scorched shadows and the skeletons of stories.

You slid away then,
And the people said it was over:

What was you
had gone home
Like salt from stones,
And the sun licked the blood from your bones,
And your lips slipped away with your moans
Sunken ships////
In blue shadows.
Your Split pelvis sank in the shallows. Life loosely lay across it, undecided.
Your teeth broke like ice on the empty nest of your breath.

Then

Your eyes opened like pales of oceanic milk:: blinking at a vast new field of stars.
They spoke out, and in an ancient dance, they said to the lost council of everyone:

Babies,
You are going to hurt
When you’re walking this earth
Crawling lost through this dirt

Women,
you will crawl bent-armed and backwards, scratching Lillith’s rhythms into the skull of the new world
You will carry the black moon in the hull of your pelvis and your womb will breathe your tears and all your stories out onto the earth.

Even your blackest seeds will carry life within their bellies.

Come:

We will take you back.

I am making soft and purple waves in this world; I am drinking in tarot and tea,
I am slicing my stories on silver slivers of Moon.
I am seducing myself
Back into Self Love,
Basking in a new womb.
Sliding into One Rhythm with my slow hips-
My twisted spine, my stained fingertips,
And all the stories spilling through my skin in black ink.

There is peace in the space between and breath in the stones
There is sun in your lungs and song in your bones.

The moon’s white eyes see everything

She smiles silverly down on miles of darkened green.

(Sometimes I think the night is even darker than what we can see)

sometimes (I think) the light gets lost for years before it sees the sea

Sometimes I find lost patches of the gray and black, like glass in me.

I stare up to the dome of sky, I offer up a salty cry, I lick lost lips, kiss fingertips.

And find my broken home within.

I curse the night and nurse my hips

I clutch the wheel and glance at cold eternity

She stares her silver eyes right back at me-

The mirrored ceiling of the sky is laughing and bending,

It watches firey tears and lovers lie, as all-everything unravels, to coil back to One.

I travel up a lonely mountain, I fill my cup up with the sun

I shout up to the emptiness

And lay down my lost tongue

I find the first foot on the ladder

And I start to climb the rungs

The veil is lifted

sand is sifted

The sea is gifted to the ground now.

I am lost and I am found now.

I belong to the sea glass,

Scraping itself smooth

On the ocean floor.

I belong to the sand dunes and

To the fire at the core

I belong to twisted grace and this place could never hold my space for long.

In haste,

I untie all my prayers and untether my blessings

I pray my soul up to the air and spread out in all directions

I float all up, up and away, and they never find a body

I peak through rain clouds in the day

And cherry pick through star clusters in the darkey-dark.

My teeth are stars strung across the ceiling

I sew the lights, the blackness healing.

The sky’s a lavish tapestry sewn up with all the threads of me.

((There’s a side of empty that you never see))

And there’s a pitch black-black within the sun (the darkey-dark of everyone).

It sinks: everything.

The sun and the moon go their different ways now,

And suddenly, there’s no one here.

But the women’s wombs are here to stay now

And the earth is pregnant with seeds.

Dance with me

O sacred one

I will make an altar of the souls of my feet

And slice open the web of silence

Dance with me

O ancient one

I will hold the space for all the fallen stars

To crawl out of the mud and hug open the bright new dawn

Dance with me

Oh mother moon

I will fashion a drum of my heart

Dance with me

Oh, fill my womb

With sacred beats

And untold wings.

Let all the ravens unfold across my sun-bleached bones

Let all the cats stretch out across my soul.

Mark me, scathe me, make me whole

Let us catch all the tears in the sacred bowl,

And offer them up to the center

Queen ISIS I evoke you

Rub the mud from the mirror

Take us home to the shared soul

Where we will see clearer

We will dance the story untold

And make right the ripe unfolding.

We will Tether back the great umbilicus

And sing the song of remembrance.

We will feed the field of golden fruit again.

We will flow and we will ebb

The stars will fall into the web

We offer up our holy hands and the salt from our eyes

The story never ends

And the ink never dries /////

They marched through biting cold and frozen mold with a halos of stars

strung right-round

the Sogging heads

they carried through the rain

Through the forest they came

Dancing through a thicket of stars

To tap their slender fingers up against my window pane

‘Til cracks spread like lace and spider web

Shadowing my face and tearing into my head

My window fell like icicles onto the forest floor

My face was naked

Cold and famous among the brush and all the nameless leaves

The slender fingers lingering, uncurled to me

My eyes were frozen shut but in the dark room of the nighttime I could see

The slender slice of moon bobbing; a buoy in the trees

The kiss of your lips and the swoon of your knees

Your opal eyes as you returned to me

With arms outstretched like galaxies.

I rolled past honey drenched hills

And fields sewn of golden soma

Under windows of the sky,

Beneath her eye,

I always wandered.

Unspooling golden twine,

My wound-up spooled spine-

Unwinding in its time.

(always I wandered).

Between great wheels with ivory arms, holding up the sky

I swam down rivers and snakes of tar, always beneath her eye.

Against the coast, I tasted ocean brine,

Sneaking like a small dream

Between these lips of mine….

I lost my train of thought

And fought the tears I sought

Between lost mounds

With tales of death

(their flowers spoke of resurrection.)

I rolled past painted signs with half dead faces pointing me in all directions.

Bold gods of many millennia frowned, sienna and umber up from the ground, their regal chins jutting into child-bearing towns,

And when I gave them my tears, they gave me the sound of the stream, crystalline, gurgling up from the mound.

(Everything is a cycle, child.)

between sties and silos,

scythe’s and halos

I swam wildly

Winding golden twine into a great hawthorn nest.

I hooked my heart and beat my breast

Great birds with hooked beaks gazed down and eyed me with mild fascination as I drove myself like a stake, into some heart-somewhere.

I wound up and down taffy hills, and rolled through cotton candy sunsets.

I tarried down juniper-lined streets and rocky high roads,

My eyes scanned for something unknown.

I always wandered.

I found myself in books and nooks off beaten trails

In rocks and rails

I lost my sails and all my screws

My honey too,

(my honey too).

I burnt the map and drank the sap

I followed the visions.

I lost myself.

I always wandered.

I tore down all the golden thread, let loose the ropes that held my head

I sat beneath a good wide tree and silently, found me.

No sign could point me to this place,

No twine can decorate my face.

I salvaged fallen stars and golden grace.

I hollered up at empty space

And wandered where no one could see.

Beneath her twinkling eye,

And her lips of lullaby,

I read the book of me.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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