we have forgotten what night tastes like, salted by full moon silver rupturingthe dark. we have forgotten how the skin sings when the lunar fervor unfurls across its follicles.

God,is there no faith left?He has not told. I would not know Him if I saw Him.

we have forgotten how to press our fingers to the tilting planet's jugular and measure her pulse. we have forgotten symbiosis, that she is our mother.we have forgotten that when we rape our world we rape ourselves.

what is poetry if not seeing and feeling, and feeling, feelings running deepand okay – do I see, notice the gray pigeon feathers that heave by on drafts of passing cars reeking, leaking gasoline fumesand okay – do I feel?

she prays to feel as powerful as she might if God sang silentwords into her ear and answeredall the rattling questions now

absencelooks like a lake bed flooded with skysounds like cotton howlingtastes like tear-stained pillowssmells like churning bile and burnt hairfeels like screaming agony, my heart dying and dying

do you dare to step in-to the vulnerable black, stripped to the soul with human blindness – when the full and weeping moon steps from the shade of a tumult of mountains – when, in the fragrant dim, day's tree stump transformsinto some nether-worldly other – when time's skin is thin and you arebared – when there is nothing between you and the Wildest Onewhose name is your own?

I stand in my own power now, the questions of permission that I used to choke on for my every meal now dead in a fallen heap, and when they tell me that I will fall, I nod. I will fall, I reply, and my words are a whispermy words are a howlI will fall , I say, and the tumbling will be all my own. The skinned palms and oozing knees are holy wounds, stigmata of my She. I will catch my own spilled blood, and not a drop will be wasted.

the mind is a treasuretrove, an almanac, a tomb.