Bending to my own Wounded Knee, I desecrate the land of self.
Bowling down my own elders in tall grass and first snow,
The wildness in us gnawing tepid and the bite growing bone.
Living at the fringes between loving and hating the One.
We come to this beautiful place,
And in fearing, ever so much, to leave it,
We carve our names into her bones.
In a small-minded attempt to find permanency, if not legacy,
in the stolen carbon halls of record.
Doing so much fucking harm
by forcibly proving ourselves good.
Pioneering in our assault, we take great privilege.
With such helpfulness that robs a winter of her fall.
Like bison robbed of migration, he bees himself to ice,
Alcatrazed to his tiny island, bearing dead sea salt for the brine.
Brutality to the self is thereby brutal to wilderness.
And he hides like a tired hammer under lesser skirts.
For the need to prove good damages equally, my love,
as the will to destroy.
I love you. But none of that seems to matter today.
The day is hollow and the moon hangs low.
A long night is coming and I miss my wolf’s howl.
And I cannot seem to find me when I cannot find Her.
And I cannot seem to recognize my own voice singing
if her canyons are not here to grab at the vowels.
There are no echoes emanating
on the wail of my medicine songs today.
They are falling limp
into the dirt like dropped kites.
Because all the people they are for
have lost themselves to time;
and thicket of mind.
In the weeds and in the woods.
And I am here,
in the salted desert,
feeling and facing it all.
And in even the tiny crook of her elbow,
or hidden cave behind ear,
I stumble upon the Tao.
Only when we need her great medicine, do we intervene a vein.
And so I call to her errant waters to hear this fluid prayer:
Bring back the Wolf. And I will remember that I am Her.
Your doubt is the ink that writes this life closed.
An inferior sunset he asks for.
Because it would be easier never to have loved Her.
She is the hard way and the wild way.
That splits him at his equator to swirl his rabbit brain.
Something not as brilliant so as not to arise suspicion,
nor reclamation, nor human need for change.
‘Just keep it dim and punctual,’ he says.
And we will all press on and press through.
He loves me from a distance,
Like a bay bridge scope upon ghirardelli shores.
He loves with hands tucked safely into pockets.
From a red-book echo and with calculated restraint.
To the world it would seem stillborn.
To him, it both lives and decays.
He gives no credit and no claim to it.
He both lets it whither and whimpers for it still.
Only the man who holds true to his compass
can ever really say my name.
For you cannot say that you love her
until you can whisper it into her ear.
You must love her in a way that earns wordlessness,
and awe, and is thereby, true.
I am the compass.
I am the reunion.
I am the One.
Revolution does not begin with a march or a shout.
It begins with an intercostal constricting against a rib;
as the most quiet of whispers from deep bone;
as the tiniest primordial No.
It only takes but one.
Yes, a singular but dedicated No;
guided ever so subtly
by One Defiant Rib.
Trapped like the finned in too tiny of tanks.
Limiting the view through our certainty.
And the need to name it all as One Truth.
We lock away what we love behind scratched glass.
Asking forgiveness only when trapped in stale waters.
One person a time up the kiva ladder.
From the earth’s belly, we are forever, and we are flamed.
