A poem in four parts

(thanks/quotes: A. Emeze, T. Fleischman, D. Bowie, J. Ragni, J. Rado)

I.

Held in orbit by the linked invisible arms of ghosts

“Waving at the dying god”

 

Riddle: What is absent and present at the same time?

 Ghosts

bleeding into black spirit holes, we fall

gravity gone, gaps in the laws of the universe

sucked past the lacy safety net of invisible linked arms

Lace is lovely because of its gaps,

its patterns that cover and reveal

skin; bruises; scars; all that we must

hide to tempt survival.

Riddle: What of us can skin contain?

Under its wild electromagnetic sense, 

its open wounds, its tortured flesh, its bitterly broken heart,  

an organ, music of breath and blood,

all the things we reproduce including

the seeds of future ghosts that 

uncannily resemble their ancestors

 

* * * * *  

II.

Dear my darling ghost, 

 

Thank you for allowing me to imagine you singing, although it’s hard to hear you unless I am asleep or dead like you. I understand you are trying to protect me, cradle me, using stars to light my nights, shielding me when the moon turns maroon like a bloodthirsty eye, like a violation. 

I understand that you are urging me to save my own life then pull others away from the abyss using just these hands and everything in my head – which I don’t even know how to fathom or categorize – but then you say: use love, and I am scared and sorry because although I know what you mean, I don’t know how to make enough of it to go around, and you laugh and smile and kiss the top of my head and whisper – you know how to make love. Enough to go around and around and around.

 

* * * * *  

 

III.

Space Person

 

Orbiting again, on invisible tracks 

Floating in a most peculiar way

The silent hissing of gods dying, extinguishing the sorrow of sin

By making both moot

 

Everyone here is everything everywhere all at once 

We all hang in the same galaxy, a gallery of ghost souls

Genderless and all gender, tenderness and understanding

Pleasure centers in our astral fingertips coming

to rest upon our blinded third omniscient eyes

We touch each other this way

Continuously

It is what makes orbits spin

Skein upon skein, the making of love

The grounding of electromagnets

Senses extrasensory

Every soul a god, every god a salvation of the self, 

a harmonic convergence of voices

chords of song reverberating 

 

The gods of myth always knew that those who practiced metamorphosis

understood their innate power. 

 

With knowledge of both/all, 

the pain/delight of being/becoming

the ecstasy of transformation.

 

This promise of the whole; the universe’s open, 

undulating embrace,

The weight of fear forever gone.

 

* * * * *  

 

IV.

My Body Is Walking In Space

 

What parts of us are our bodies? What part our minds? Both beyond our control in the dreams of sleep. 

Gods don’t worship bodies. 

The dried dead body of an alleged god, lain upon the tongue in my open, pink, wet, waiting mouth, every childhood Sunday…

Now I anoint my own gods; I decide who or what puts their celestial fingers in my mouth

“Total self awareness the intention”

 

“…bodies can seem like one of the only linear things—age, getting bigger and then smaller, death. 

Another reason to appreciate the transitioning body, which ages backward, every person seeming to become younger, with or without taking hormones.”

 

Bodies abandoned to become again as ghosts, 

Linking arms, touching astral fingertips 

Reaching inside pink fleshless mouths of song

With endless invisible kisses

 

How lovely is this morning, is every morning, every beginning, where the absolute clarity of love surrounds you; everything possible, everything a promise yet unbroken. 

 

A skinless body has no choice but to feel every extra sensory thing. 

Minds want to love bodies, know them completely, understand each sensation, celebrate the corporeal, cradle them as they move toward becoming ghosts.

Filling the universe with all the love they made, 

Arm in invisible arm, going around and around,

Eternally dancing.