“Duty is heavy as a mountain, death is light as a feather.”
— Robert Jordan
Shadow Karma
” …Why does it always rain on me?
Is it because I lied when I was seventeen?”
~ Travis
I know you are close
when I smell smoke
Red wine
Sandalwood
Sex.
Oh the trouble I got us into
You’d never know
To look at me -
It’s a problem
of Karma.
Shadows Live Close
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
~ daniel pinchbeck, 2012
We live, coapt
Skin to skin frisson -
Counting scars, sins
And summer freckles.
We speak dead languages
With candid tongues -
Echoes in empty corridors
Secrets no one hears.
We hunger
For each others’ place -
Our bones ache
From collective mistakes.
I the handcuff
She the key -
I, the blood bled
She, the air breathed.
Orphaned
Splintered
We share shadows.
Shadows Talk Back
“Beneath the social mask we wear every day, we have a hidden shadow side: an impulsive, wounded, sad, or isolated part that we generally try to ignore.“
~ Connie Zweig, Steve Wolf, Romancing the Shadow
I like, you romanticize me
(although you’re full of shit)
I mean really!
Your transgressions,
Embroidered into my skin;
I, fair filigreed with cicatrices,
Crimson, amethyst, faded to silver.
I’ve been accused
More than once
Of self-harming.
I, of course, tell them
“I didn’t do it …
It was my Shadow“
Shadow Wears Red
The shadow life occurs when writers, painters, dancers, mothers, seekers, mystics, students or journeywomen stop writing, painting, dancing, mothering, looking, peering, learning, practicing…“
~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With The Wolves
Of our Devil’s bargain;
Jealous, jealous!
Your music,
your voice,
your power -
your red gloves
confident upon the life
not chosen.
What have you to envy, Shadow girl?
What bargain shall we strike?
How is it, I negotiate for a life
that is already my own?
Shadow Girl
“Compliance causes a shocking realization:
To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others,
and yet, to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.“
~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With The Wolves [p81]
I begin to suspect
you have the best of me.
I am your disarticulation
alive, less than well
the one, on the wrong
side of your looking glass.
I am the Sin Eater, the fetch
who swallows your regrets;
fruit rotting in my belly
that never touched my lips.
Mine the exile, my life
your spectral evidence.
Dark Double
“The person we choose to be, … automatically creates a dark double — the person we choose not to be.”
~ Thomas Moore, The Care of the Soul
You come, you go -
a peripheral sort.
This oiliness of character,
doesn’t inspire trust,
and, your feral eyes
discompose.
Once, over a glass of wine, you shared
a sliver of the life you live
when you aren’t haunting me.
You wear red, you sing, you write,
sleep naked, live alone,
have a cat
and are still loving a lover
whose name I don’t mention.
You imprint the room
with the scent of regret;
your skin is slick with
this natural pheromone
that draws me in -
hungering for shadows.
Aftermath
“Heart ‘Repair Kit’ — Stem Cells Regenerate Broken Heart”
Headline, Science Daily News
~ * ~
These skin-to-skin interludes
Are cardiac first aid.
Stem cell touches that
Ignite an intimate, intricate
Chemical choreography -
Other people construe as
Forgiveness.
Everything and no-thing
Has changed.
The striated muscles
We call hearts –
Are mending.
It’s a common miracle.
It is not a love poem.
Silence
“Deeply I go down into myself. My god is Dark and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Divine
The sound is off.
Darling, we are mute as
Love under glass,
Quiet as complicity,
Aphonic as wingless bees.
Your hands only -
Fffflutter. Sttttutter.
An agitated affection
An eight fingered,
Opposable-thumbed tic -
Abbreviated. Punctuated.
Death throes. I suspect.
I blink -
Ergo I cannot divine.
In all respects,
This is the truth.
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