A prayer to the iris
The spark in your eye, I speak out to you. I call out your name, knowing that it’s time to let go of the restrictions that have been placed around me, the restrictions on my hands, my voice my soul. This is me, full color picture. This is me real and raw and exposed. What do you think of me now? Large and wild and full of energy, uncontrollable and beautiful and sexy and wild and ugly and vicious and free and untamed. It is everything and it is always changing. What do you think of me? What do you see? What do I see in myself?
For what I feel is the face of a zombie, a being devoid of life, a creature without soul, trapped beneath the surface of the ice. He always comes back, he cannot be killed, and I wish never to yet I kept shooting. The desire to have his masters head on a spike, I am sorry for creating you, I am sorry for giving you a life so alone. A life you could never escape from for you would be in it all alone, a bird pushes her own egg out of the nest to fall to its death in an effort to defend her position on the ledge, a win at all costs mentality cannot sustain. I am sorry.
How do we create a life full of love when so many around are gripped and pulled down by consistent pain? Eternal and consistent pain? Is the answer to shove myself under, to be harder, more disciplined, more rigid? Hold onto expectations of what I need to do and who I should be, how do I just find peace? Is searching for the light causing me this suffering?
Six suns fill the sky and I sit here as a stone does. I sit like a stone who does not move for what are the decisions I am meant to make? Distancing myself from my own body, leaving this experience, where am I to go? What am I supposed to do?
Do not let the fatigue pull you down, pull yourself back up, know that you are the portal to get through and you are so much stronger than you know. The end is near, it’s been a long journey yet the end is in sight. How can that ever truly be so? If a life lived is full and so rich could just be stripped and taken away at any moment? Days and months and years devoid of feeling the love, of holding it back for who am I to say I am worthy? Who am I to open up the the worthiness of divinity? Am I simply so because I am? Made in like image, I see, feel, intuit my way through.
Even the grinch can bust out a move, even the grinch can throw it back, even the grinch can find his groove.
The flames feel hot and the world feels like it’s burning, and still I keep breathing. The glass in my palm I hope to one day get out, yet maybe the magic in me can simply wish it gone, for it’s simply all just a dream. It’s all just been in a dream, so I hold tight to my body to ground me back to this space, back to this realm. I hold tight through the gentle surrender and the powerful release. I breathe to find my way through, I breathe to get to the other side.
It’s all experimental, extremely powerful, a mouse searching its way through a maze, the labyrinth of the mind to find its way to the soul because what would happen if I really truly let go, if I let it all go and surrendered into your arms, into your embrace. A face or a mask blocking out the truth, hiding me away from the light, an angel with wings bound and clipped, chained to the floor, a dirty mattress to catch her fall. A lean into my embrace as the authenticity pours through though it feels like a head held up by simply the grace of God. My lips have gone white and I breathe, I breathe and I breathe to understand. A collar around my neck that held me to the ground, a queen set on remembering, set on knowing it all to find balance and to learn compassion and to be the imperfect and entirely whole portal for the divine to travel through. A prayer saying strip me down, bare me raw, help me to understand, help me to remember, it’s safe to remember now, now it is my time. It’s time to bring it all forth and around, to put it all together, it’s time to put all of the pieces together, for I’ve dreamt of this for months, years, ages, lifetimes, of endurance and perseverance and resilience and now it’s time to put all the pieces back together and into place.
I breathe into the present moment where all the stories come together. Where the feelings and the emotions and the memories and the experiences beg for release, they yearn and crave and demand expression. The need their release because otherwise I will drown. So this is what I do; I am safe within the embrace of a friend, yet my body remembers, and my body knows. So I breathe, and I breathe and I breathe and I fall back into sync. Into myself. And here I remember.
I am sorry for leaving you, I am sorry for leaving it all behind, for forgetting and blinding myself to the sights. To the lights and brightness and the signs and the fullness. “I’ll do anything you say” I proclaimed in order to get myself out of the traps of the mind.
I’ll get on my hands and knees and pray boy, bound in chains at the wrists, a great bird constricted and contained in the snow. A phoenix in the process of thaw yet not entirely yet actualized and known, a knowing of a box that no longer fits, a volcano that has already erupted with nine streams of lava going down the sides. “I have a dream, I hope will come true, you’re here with me, and I’m here with you. Won’t you send me someone to love” I prayed from the bottom of the tower, in the cellar chained deep, rats and scraps of food to keep me company. Crusty bread and old water that trickles by. A prisoner in a stone tower. I prayed it to the moon on that fateful night, the sliver of faith left in a heart that refused to break, a heart that stopped the cart in the middle of the road and made it turned away. This lifetime, this lifetime I go against what I’ve been told, this lifetime I refuse to submit. This lifetime I live on the edge of mercury, this lifetime I speak it. I share, I erupt even if it gets me killed. I do it in the name of all those that were silenced. This lifetime I do it for vengeance, yet the vengeance is pure of heart and innocent and it’s the kind of power that shifts thieves. It transforms the hands of fate itself. It’s puts all the pieces back together to reveal the full picture. It is not for the faint of heart for it is those who have the hearts of lions. A reminder I wrote on my wall since the time I was small. “You have the heart if a lion” it said and I laid my eyes to rest each night with it in my vision, a tapestry of peace amidst such sharp lines and darkness, the light shone through, lights twinkling in warmth over my bed. A sanctuary I created for myself, a room within a house grown hollow without the laughter to ricochet off the walls.
Sun. My dear, you blind me with your light and I have never felt warmer in my life, I would stare into you at the risk of my blindness in order to know your brilliance. I will and I do.
A house filled with pain, bodies that held onto it so tightly without any known expression, yet to make a cake and eat it too. Can we avenge the last? The revolutions that have been fought, do we do this again? This time with poetic tongue and paint and the steady inquisitive beat of a dream. A Spanish guitar and a harpist that has lost her hands, how can we sing the tales of revolution off a tongue that’s been severed in the name of service to the nation. I hoped our generation wouldn’t have to fight the wars of our ancestors, for we are simply the same ones come back around in new bodies with fresh stories it tell and history within our cells, our bones chatter our remembering yet this is where we discover ourselves. What we have trained for, fought for, died for, loved for, what it is that we have lived for. This is what we put into the tool kit, the puzzle that finally all comes together.
Can we delete the whole age, release the attachments to what we gave birth to from inside and let it go? To know us as mere portals of creation? What comes through on the other side?
Does each thing we build, crate, construct, fantasize, have a life of its own beyond us? Here to suffer, to feel, to transform pain into creation, to open portals of light in through our bodies until we know ourselves to shine like the stars that light up the sky, that guide our way through the incredulous darkness of night. Stars of hope, everything on earth born through a violent past, everything one day will find its peace, be rested back into the ground where the final dance will be spun like silk from the spiders web. A blanket overhead and a healing to all of us, everywhere that we are, eternally.
I see you in light until the last stars burn out and then whatever happens finally exhales its release. I love you under the depths of the sea and under the pressure of every misery. I love you eternally.
Every witch needs a warrior. I am yours more than I belong to any god or cause, love eternal.
