Traditions
In the days of monograms 
and pink as the flesh,
reigned the ancient traditions
divided my flesh
lost voices that they were
guiding my choices
when I loved because I lived
striking down the paths
among limestone cliffs, they were
familiar beauties,
a folktale of broken knees
named from my stumbles,
then to be where I would hide
burial grounds of days,
my distant hazy treasures
they’re still unnumbered
painted by the mid-day sun
that is still rising,
The days when sunrise was just
the sun just rising,
Then dreams painted by sunset,
forgotten oranges,
the nights when sunset was just
the sun just setting,
the prophetic predictors
of what I should and
what I could yet still become,
when motions and words
and thoughts I had were just those,
untethered by hands
that foretold my existence.

South
Is it pain that draws me back there, to the warmth of summer days, humid, popsicles dripping, washing my sticky fingers off in the waters, the same ones that feed us, that take us, that lead us. That pain seeps into the earth and grows its roots, tendrils wrapped among the heart lines, the same ones keeping the beating heart together. I count backwards with fingers, 6 generations, 7 generations, undefined generations and unnamed ancestors we forgot, knowingly, unknowingly, drawn into these grounds where the pain was sown. The cords pull me back to there, to cultivate and to harvest what was given to me, though never honestly mine, an earth beaten and abused, taken and unrightfully given, an earth that was made the stage of horrors without consent. But that earth made itself a home against all odds and nevertheless, a giving ground, a remembering ground, a ground that has voice, voices that whisper to us who went away.

Transylvania
Meet me in the open grounds where the maple grows red in the fall,
With the heaviness of a string of feldspar beads strung around our necks,
Our only weight keeping us tied to the earth hinged unable to float up into the sky.
Let’s gather in the woodland clearings where we can again ring dance,
Hand in hand, eye to eye, glancing a tradition we will never let die,
So as long as we can breathe air, so as long as we can imagine,
We are the mattered spirits of this world, the fantasy in our human forms.
Across the woods and here we were born, between lakes, among meadows,
Flowing into this existence along the brooks streaming down from misty hills,
We were born with an understanding that we were here to love,
To love each other as natural as the grass blows blue under our feet,
To love each other beyond the limits of the wide rivers passing beyond us.
Into the tunnels down below with spacious caverns the old days formed,
We will store our treasures and we will bring up from the earth our names,
Where we will emerge again born among golden flowers and crimson birds,
From within the foundations of a land that has brought us into a loving world,
Born from the love in a land that still exists across the woods.

Gentleness
Life moves in wavelike patterns, in sunlight, the winds, the waters, a continual rhythmic movement, a current with no intension, only to exist, to make way for existing, to push a gentle place to rest.

Knick knacks
Beautiful fiction, I spend my time at parties asking for a secret, or a joke, because in my head they sound the same, a forbidden necromancy, a true dance with the devil, the devil being what I’m sure I will soon collect, but secrets, like a riddle to be traded for passage, a password for entry, entry into my own secrets, the verbalized handshake of an eye for an eye, a truth for a truth, a hurt for a loss, a loss that can hurt, an agreement that I collect all that you give to me, tucked away, never to resurface, and I will care for them, or simply burry them down below, mementos of your mind stacks, the knick knacks on my shelve holding up these walls.

Holy words
Those who’ve found words must speak them and be true to what they must say. For it is God’s voice and our holy truth, to speak into our existence, something worth living for. We become a living holy text with human mouths cast out from halls of cathedrals taking with us the scattered colors from the panes of glass. We flow as the source of holy water into the valleys, to be living streams in a cold world, to be the prophets of our own beautiful selves.

Family lines
I was heartbroken to hear the news you lost a love. How I wanted one of us to pull it all together, to be the one put all together, whole, that our histories could all converge through even just one of us that would be the one who bested us all, the shining lone star. How the tree of us became the traveling rode side band, split up somewhere along the winding back roads, diverging terrains. I was heartbroken because you were heartbroken, how much I wanted us to be whole in you, to be healed in you, to be in peace in you, to find the holy land we always felt we were promised, I prayed you found it, so all of us could find each other there too.

Roots
I miss you like hot summer nights.
The rolling hills filled with humidity and the flashes of lighting bugs, the buzzes of moths on the porch, the clamor of crickets in the field.

I think of you like early morning dew.
How cold my feet felt on the grass, covered in chill and dampness, a memory of midnight heat, how the mist rises from it, the slightest haze of cover.

I hold onto you like Virginia creeper.
Lifting myself onto the foundation of your strength, a strength that supports my own, becomes my own, inseparable and tied by roots of our nature.

I will return to you like the middle of June.
On dark early summer nights I’ll find my way back, to scoop up the dirt once again like precious jewels, to place into my chest next to my heartstrings, keeping the holler of the living voices that brought me to this place, living in one body full of so much spirit and many souls.