The Divine put a Tightrope around my Neck

I returned from New York a few weeks ago where I was attending the Women's Integral LIfe Practice Seminar. On my birthday, whiich occured while I was there, I was honored to be able to share this poem to the group of women who were in attendance. In many ways I feel it to be a "coming out poem". While composing it it turned itself into a form of slam poetry as a bunch of writing that I'd done over the last year sort of amalgamated into one "coherent" piece of writing. It's meant to be performed rather than read so I was hesitant to post it here, but decided to anyways. It looses some of its presence without the human voice and intonations but perhaps the punctuation will offer a conveyance for  the speed, breaks and silences that one would expereince if they were to hear it live. With all qualifications in place, here it goes...


Every moment afresh...No beginning or end...No attainment or Final Enlightenment.

And yet I rest... in search of no time, some place, no face. Anchored to a breath that rings clear through this empty heart, letting off the sweetest silence in need of no sound to entertain it.
But still this mind loves to read and these hands love to touch, but only because my heart loves to experience the moment of letting go...over and over again...until the touching is the letting go and I absorb information into the black holes behind my eyes, Third Eye, Saints Cry, I fly Home on the wings of blind ignorance, happy to indulge simplicity, happy to be the ground that sinners wipe their feet on.

But there was a time, before I had the good fortune to be the rug that kisses angels feet, that I lived a dream. In this dream I lived in a castle with thirteen floors exactly, most of which I visited regularly. But there came a day when this castle was no longer satisfactiory. It seemed that my lips only continually dripped with hypocrisy and I was you see, at once in need of electro-shock therapy. To jolt the hold of rationality and open the abyss for creativity, a catastrophe...at least it seemed at the time because I had no mind to fix time or swallow food with any solidity. I thought perhaps they should lock me away, so that I could use all my time to pray, for the quick salvation of insanity on our much too sane society. At least that's what Erich Fromm told me, just before Freud came to psychoanalyze me and told me that my problem stemmed from an unchosen castration, my frustration was due to this inherent humiliation. And I wondered whether this wasn't another form of manipulation. His recommendation: an immediate sex change to release this over stimulation, possibly through ejaculation? But I had my doubts that having a dick would undo the pain of this deeper penetration, this internalized insistence on limitation... I wanted a second opinion.

So I walked up to the seventh floor and consulted the feminist core as to why I felt like such a whore... and they said that riding the power of patriarchy was bound to make any woman sore. They were right, I expected no sympathy, and I knew I needed to find a new door to explore. So I traveled up to the thirteenth floor, the room I'd always made a habit to ignore. I was scared to open that door but there was no other place left unexplored. I'd consulted the other floors a million times with no new finds of any kind. I was trapped in a perpetual state of dejavu... so I opened the door to the thirteenth floor...

As soon as I smelled the scent of decay I felt the ground underneath give way until I was hovering directly over the Great Perfection, with my tip toes balancing on the edge of its knife. If I moved this way or that way even the slightest my soul would be flayed into a million pieces, my vulnerable body torn to shreds in the places where God shows us no mercy... the devils attacked from every direction, the swords aimed at my head, heart and neck, I screamed: But Wait!...who is this attacking me?
A breath caved, a presence stayed and I remembered something Milarepa said,
    "Stabbed in the front by the Great Perfection,
    Stabbed in the back by the Great Seal,
    I vomit the blood of instruction."
And then I remembered a hymn that suddenly illuminated my sin. The voice of a friend who once asked how much love I was choosing not to let in... and for a moment these cruel attacks ceased to pierce my skin...
It soon grew clear that the divine was torturing me...was awakening me to see my own prison... my self created haven of delusion and seclusion, inversion and perversion. Where I could see no one but myself, no reflection of my own, hidden behind every corner of what I once believed to be outside myself.

You see...I was now One Will...One Will divided into two and so intimately intertwined that if I moved my hand out too far She swiftly cut it off and brought me back again. She put a tightrope around my neck and when I deviated She would pull the rope so tight until no air could come in and I had no place left to go but within...
My demons were her angels, my ugliness Her offering of divine Grace... and in the moment when She finally cut off all life support She asked me one thing.
That I love no one before Her, that I see no one but Her in every face that I meet, for She was the turning of color on autumn leaves... I fell to my knees and told her, Please... if I ever praise anyone before Thee let me be thrown to the tormenting Hell of my mind and devoured whole. Only so that I might once again be broken enough to see, and able to whisper gently your name, knowing you'll come back for me time and time again...

I honor the souls who choose to see, who fight in this world for sincerity... I breathe and offer what I can of this hand, to reach, to teach and inner wisdom that might sustain them not to turn back. And I'd turn my heart into a canopy bed on which your blistered body could land when the rest of the world becomes quicksand.
I'd say just relax and enjoy the ride and refuse to hide when Kali awakes and spits blood in your face, instead retrace... follow the footprints of your fear back to thier origin. Make peace with your demons, lick the blood from your lips and kiss the mirror of your imperfection, it's only a minor inflection on the ever-present connection.
And when it comes time to tell your story, unlike me...try to refrain from the overuse of hyperbole. For it's in the quiet moment of the soul that the mystery becomes key and its stories only secondary.

-October 11 2006