Peeking From Behind the Trees

Peeking from behind the trees
Backs to the land of real magic
Where languages between species and lines between worlds 
blur
Where dreams and imagination are inseparable from what we
see. 

They told us it would be hard when we stepped from the naked grass
Into the shoes whose soulless rubber soles
Protect us from the poison our people have spilled

You'd think it was an accident.

Yet wedged between me and home
is a sensory mile of a middle finger
I cry at the thought of it

That with each footstep 
I could be blowing kisses to the land 
But coming back means sacrificing such an enticing love affair
So that I may look similar enough 
To do my work in the world

Oh! The horror at what is lost in a soulless sole 
Because it is not just my butterfly feet and crow claws
That are lost

Oh! The horror, for what is lost
When we sterilize our skin in dead water
In place of the holy baptism of live water
that tumbles and sings down mountains
Pulled and rocked to sleep and life
By grandmother moon herself
What an honor!
What a horror.
To step out from behind the trees
Into clothes that are too tight 
So that I cannot see my own nipples
Responding to the tickling wind
The cold and sunshine
So tight that I cannot feel the desperate hunger of mosquitos
That beg for blood

Because now my blood is burning too hot to feed an insect.

Too hot to stay behind the trees
Too hot to bathe in creeks icy from the snowmelt
Too hot to gaze timelessly at the games played
Between flower and bee, doe and stag.
In these clothes, I am so hungry
For the land that speaks to me
Where days without food are nothing 
Compared to years without soul
or the millions of lives lived through the window of someone else's car
where we sacrifice connection to people 
For connection to wifi
Trade social support systems 
For social networks
Trade soul
For rubber

where we trade mud between our toes
For tar in every crack
Even the crack between our eyelids that are sealed shut
After sleeping for so long that Prince Charming may try his best 
But this one needs stronger medicine
Butterfly kisses to the earth are not potent enough anymore

So grow your own medicine.

Grow your claws, teeth, beaks and talons
Grow your thorns and stingers
Shoot your arrows
Roar

Wake up! Wake up!
Run through the patch of brambles barefooted
Jump into the icy lake naked
Let the bugs bite

Cry, dammit!
Dissolve the cement that seals your eyes
Flush out the sand that was dumped there
By those who didn't realize
that they weren’t sprinkling fairy dust in a nursery rhyme anymore

Cry, dammit!
Cry until your eyes fall out of your head
So that your body deflates and falls onto the floor
Like a limp balloon
So soul can fly out
Blinking and stretching
And reaping havoc upon the house

Cry, dammit!
So that your tears can be pulled by the moon, too.
Pulled from your beautiful face
And into the fertile soil that has been waiting its whole life
For the gift of your grief.
To water the seeds of your new life, a new world
where I don't have to hide behind trees
where you don't have to hide behind screens
where you don't have to wish you could be like a bird 
or the wild girl who scares you witless.

Because you can be one too

So stop wishing!
Don't look longingly for another moment
You think it is flattering
But it is offense 
To the wild essence that wishes to be freed from your body, too.
The twisting, meandering terrifying and beautiful
elegantly messy and free
that moves through landscapes of taboo and pleasure and pain
Let
Her
Out
Now 

Let her eat you from the inside
Feasting on all that died within you long ago
Because we know but a single grain of sand
On a planet of beaches

Stop fighting her, please, I beg you.
Stop plugging holes with your poor choices
Like bubble gum in the crack of a dam

Don't kill the weeds
Be the weeds

Be the bird who flies into the house uninvited
Causing a ruckus
Building a nest in your mothers hair
Filling it with spit and twigs.
And maybe if you lay eggs 
She will care to keep her head steady enough 
To watch the seedlings hatch