polyamorous hindu

you can fall in love a million times in the eyes of your wife
let them seep into her skin and in to her hair
whisper and scream through her toes like
a bluster of buds in the spring
the spit of its wind
let them grow children out of her mouth
all men all women embraced in the dream
there they are always clean always lost in their hope
brighter than a coin at the bottom of pail
brighter than a cow feasting in her pasture
i hold all men and all women there in the dream
and my blood turns to juiced stars
a saltless ocean
my heart is no longer a deadly purple thing
but a bird made of jasmines

first pantoum ever..

Everything holds like salt
The day is sour and dry
But our night is peeled and grainy
We are each other’s island

The day is sour and dry
And the children are getting wild
But our night is peeled and grainy
even the houses are still dark

And the children are getting wild
But our night is peeled and grainy
even the houses are still dark
Everything holds like salt

footnotes

It started when I began to light candles.

I knew that their light was too familiar.

The flame seemed ancient but also my child.

I was told a story about medieval sage.

Isaac Luria has traced the lineage of the flame.

I imagine him trying to sew each weary candle into the sun.

How many individual flames are in the sun?

Sometimes I can feel other lives through my own.

Sometimes I know there has never been any other.

How can I be we and also I at the same time?

Whose flame is this that I remember?

Why is this heat sometimes covered in shadow?

Who is making this shade?

The world is at once burning and freezing.

The world is floating in space.

Where does space come from?

Who has been carved?

Then your town was radioed in.

Your rural town with its apples.

Your rural town with its clean skin.

I could hear you like I could hear the flame.

You sometimes were the living cells.

And sang together from one throat.

But you also sometimes were banished from each other.

You sometimes were lost in your freedom.

I heard your children laughing.

I heard your fathers breaking.

I could see your town sparkling.

You are wolves and you are the rain.

You are tiny and you are insufferable.

You are somewhere where America is good.

And I have fallen in love with you.

Because you are far away.

Because you are embedded into me.

Like a blade.

As the sun is warming us with its infinite knives.

The sun is a stomach which is fed by us.

I hear you now when I sing for my bread.

When I light candles now I am embracing you.

This light is broken

This light is in us all

We must keep sewing

We must keep sewing

We must keep sewing

truth about bodies

"we let ourselves know that our bodies are made up of water

but we cannot let ourselves let go of the body completely”--Goethe

body               not a capsule

bones mess of blood & meat are not strung         not weaved

     

we are

a river has no geography too thin too moveable for mapping

flip our minds into our knees into our wings

                                                     
                                                                            liquid     s p i n d l e s

we have grown gnarled feet from nightmares

have imagine      clay       rock       iron        skulls




                                                              what we have is a body of wet wind