my spine is a bouquet.

a bundle of nerves. A house in all of my vertebrae, to hold a bundle of nerves—a focus of knowing and awareness. Each of my nerves a river of cells, every cellular river composed of sacred atoms, each to hold an ocean of empty space.

A world of emptiness to house every atom-star, celestial in its space taking, one atom-star per world of space.

I look, and then I find, god, source, ecstasy within every world of spacious nothing that holds, like a pearl, a secret, a present, a burst of laughter, a field of flowers in bloom, a brilliant flash of sunlight, an atom-star in sacred constellation to more world-holding atom-stars to build up a celestial star house cell, many flowers blooming and laughing in a nerve cell house, with a hearth and a fireplace to bloom in and burn in and talk late around in.

All my nerve cells running in rivers and lines to find every line over my body. Every nerve impulse blossoming and bursting lightning, running from my spine in every direction from my center spine. I’m a miracle of rivers running, flowers laughing, stars building houses along my center spine to create a knowing. A star bursts into being to know from whence it came. The flower laughter generating in my spine center is a nerve impulse within my electric field. It’s a field of knowing. Every impulse is a love gone forth to know, stars willing to love. An earth body here to house celestial love, to hold a bouquet of nerve cell explorations into a field yet to be known, a space to be loved.

breaking up

I said

I don’t want

to support you

in that way/

the way you want

I can’t authentically give that

I can’t really give that

energy field

I look inward to my field of energy. what does my field of energy feel like right now? how does my energy field exist in the present moment? what does it feel like to watch my energy in this moment and the next moment?

Delta

I am swimming up a delta. I have just discovered the fringe of the delta and am emerging, mammalian, old with inchoate decades in the water, and I grasp rivulets of sand and water like a ladder to pull myself upstream.

TWO BATHS

I turn on a hot bath, leave one of the drains open

the bath is large enough to roll around in

it’s made of concrete and bigger than my bed


water runs over me

I ask for support in being open

that the running water can bear some of my tension

and carry it to the ocean. The baths perch cliffside over the shore.


The ocean is feminine as is the earth 

I look at the core of the earth

and close the drain to the hot bath.


I fill a second bath, cold water in a bright bathtub

the surface of the water is a source of light

bright gray to reflect the afternoon


my heartbeat slows

I slow my breath

the hot bath nearly runs over

water brims on the wide concrete lip.


Water moves easily

it’s the element of emotions

emotions are fluid and mine dissolve in the body of water.


The surface of the cold bath stills and I hold my breath

my heart beat pulses the whole body of water, an extension of my body:

I can see the shadows of my heartbeat rippling the water minutely


I draw in breath

as the hot water spills over

I step to the hot bath

prepare to lay back in the water like diving into a bigger body

I anticipate and desire the overflow of water onto the floor


I think to stay in the bath until I am too hot. I move the water with my arms

it crashes soft over the floor, goes to the ocean


standing

the head rush comes out of nowhere

the rate is undetectable

almost like dreaming

how I can almost tell it’s happening

like I can almost tell I’m dreaming when I’m sleeping


Yet I’m standing and awake when 

the rush has run the course of my body, and 

the room, perched cliffside, feels surprisingly 

quiet despite the crash of waves below. 

Shapeless Pile of Sand

I am a shapeless pile of sand. When you look, there's a body. But when no one is looking, I no longer remain suspended in form. I drift into a pile like a pin dropping. Instead of a spine I have an antenna. Maybe, I pick up on someone's shock a hundred miles north. As soon as you look away, I fall towards her, all sand.

I can do several things at once, to manage being both embodied and out-of-body. But when alone, I simply let pile after pile come into focus. I fold over and over in waves of sand. So elegant. I assume you could do the same thing, if you wanted. If you want, drop your body and notice your electric spine plug into the oceanic currant of human nerves. Before you understand your new shape, let the mystery wash over you. In that split second, forget something. Before someone looks at you, before you resume, while you are still stranded on the ground without lungs or a brain, forgive something. And then someone will look at you and once again you compose your body.

We walk outside. A bird flies overhead. Instinctively, both our eyes snap up. You remember your own flightiness, an unvoiced longing to be free, and an old knowingness that you are; and in the moment that you follow the bird, I collapse into sand, I turn to nothing on the ground, I am a nervous impulse connecting fleeting thoughts and when you look over to see if I saw the bird too, of course I’m standing right next to you but I am also sprawled on the ground. It all happens so fast and when you break eye contact, this time I collapse into all but dust and I am swept aloft, I follow our darting attention, I get caught up in a rush and run alongside the bird in midair. We both laugh and I am back in my body, and the wind-borne sand is gone.

Knots that Live in the Body after an Ankle Breaks

My ankle is tied in a knot, equipped with a spring mechanism. The woman who built it is a biologist studying the lichen colonies holding down rocks, boulders, and in one case, a whole mountain.

The woman was chopping firewood on her sister's property and happened to cut a piece of wood very squarely: it was the width of her hand. She gazed at the ripples, from which she could draw parallels to similar earthly habits of lichen. She looked more deeply, pressing her forehead to the square block of wood so that it appeared to be larger than she knew it to be. The woman squeezed her body between the lines in the wood grain. Once inside she grasped striations in either hand and pulled. She wished to see more closely; hypnotized, the woman spent the rest of her life pulling the block of wood tighter and tighter.

It was only after she had been at it for a long time—for several times the length of a usual human life span—though not longer than lichen would live, the logistics of which, thanks to her considerable years of study, she was able to apply to her own practice—it was only after this lengthy commitment to increasingly closer inspection of that hypnotic specimen she had chopped from a tree fallen on her sister's property that the block of wood was so compressed and pressurized that when I fell off a slippery, dirty boulder while running to blow off steam that the increment of wood was so tiny and fierce in density that it was able to pierce the skin of my ankle upon the impact of the fall.

I, too, was compressed, everything: stressed out of my mind, out of body, and I am under the impression that only when two environments are identically pressurized can they collapse into one spatial identity.

I came to the conclusion about the woman in my ankle in the same way that I came to know that the rest of my body houses other spring mechanisms. I learned it by noticing the sun's spring mechanism, the lichen's, the heart ventricle's mechanism, the vernal release of plant life every march. And once I knew about the woman in my ankle, once the ligaments had healed—and I do wonder if that woman helped in the process, so tender and specific was she with her attention to the wood grain lines—once I was walking similar to how I did before the fall, the woman said, “I am finished."

I do not know if she was able to find anything within the splinter of wood that lives in my ankle, or how deeply she was able to go, but she took my hand before she left, and holding it, her gaze rested on my eyes and I know she was resting because she could have picked me apart with her eyes had she not been resting, could have slipped between the striations of my iris, could have stepped into my soul. She did not do this but rather held me in her focus and then let go of my hand and walked away.