dear poetry, who takes away darkness

dear poetry,

what to do with strangers who come into our lives like a new word on the tongue and delicious this glistening, i sounded/ it blew me up/ carved meat of repetition, disrupt the feel of your hands running wild over my skin, when i come to: be inside me. when i come to: here made treacherous. abandoned gaze, i seep auto-narrated into shaming this derelict, weather against me, serum down to rot, mouth sewn shut to eyes held down a penny for each last thought then to cross upon verses. i call this light as a feather my tongue wet to the edge where the scream fell off: what are we exactly in this space between veils, the space of the poem writing itself, Oh Megan, it mutters, all of your life hidden safe to hear voices till this is what you have become. fettered to i want to make a cage big enough to hide the cage i am inside of. whatever you know is words. i can hear the sounds of the dead ringing. i can hear a babble of tongues, a language i fail translating, the din of transmission, i could tell you how exact this one takes: remember how you danced beside me. will you lay down beneath my feet: madness the seraph unfolds. no one's hunger meets yours. no one eats and eats this sacrifice of fill then looks up to see the same story woven into the cloth, an all down the table top where we feasted on what was left.

Dear Poetry, the old brag

Dear Poetry,

for Marthe Reed 
      who I found out an hour after writing this poem had left us earlier in the morning 

on the algorithms that run your life
on the screen shots we fed to discern
on the amount of busy work designed to architect what we call surviving
on the edge of this where I can't even meet
on the teeth marks of blame
on the shame you suckle

if I give you my life
if I give you my wanting never filled
if I give you this trap I keep to cage
I think of what hasn't ever happened
& what has happened
& everything in between

I remember this life and this life
pale of this space as if a word,
as if on the pluck of a word
root me, think much of

and it is an old moon, a rusty car, or a spring in the mattress
or it is the bee box, the dead women, the waterfall in a city
hook in the eye of a gone missing, accident of holy holies,
I am the bomb, I am become the shored missive, I am this water too
a lineage of images hoarded into the sprawl
and it is look: I am crawling out under, it is look: I am crawling

to the lip of the wound
where you promise me light
I am flinging in
who needs poetry
I am not afraid to lose you

when the form is in place, everything with it can be pure feeling – C Kraus

"Because in the end you are really alone, whatever you do..." M. Abramović 

"When we die it ends. Until then we are all tied up." -L Montano

"I'll never understand why I write what I do as I do"  -K. Acker

did i poet every day/ every waking hour/ i wanted to make something that mattered -M.B. 

Dear Chris: 

We get lost. A year ago. 

July 26, 2016 (at my father's house): "silence holds us like a bridge/ i can 't cross/ so i gather my words where they stay/ unspoken/ think i came to writing/ to survive/ from disappearing

July 29, 2016 (breakfast w/ Dick) "what lies between us/ the space we keep safe/ i tell you everything. anything./ what does it matter if you care not/ who i see or what i do" 

August 5, 2016:  "dear love, this was the day you left me/ we went to the beach/ you flew back to Arizona/ we didn't cry or say good bye/ the world turns on/ insignificant gestures/ what makes a thing desirous/ you hid from me all of our time together/ but we mirror/ i hid too" 

I wrote my lover two letters when he went to rehab: 

in one letter i spoke of rain & our love/ a lifetime/ in the next i was saying good bye b/c i wanted to be the one to say good bye first/ seeing how you were the one leaving


It's true: strangers walk into our lives and they rearrange us. They pull us apart and put us together.

I started Basic Programming thinking I would talk about infatuation and desire and obsession. And by the end of the summer, I started Volume II. And I spent my time in deep meditations. I went to Kali and gave her my name. I burned fires and threw everything in. I counted 108 steps down in the underworld where Inanna showed me how to hang my skin on a hook. I laid in meditative sleep healing each part of my body. I chanted and moved energy and learned the names of each aspect of the subtle body. I wrote spells. I dream walked. I stayed in the space between here and there and I waited for each veil to lift. I went to the bottom of grief. I gave up knowing. I stopped taking the medication. I met the Empress who laughed and in a cottage, a trio of women who knew the way to the crystal city. I spoke with the dead. I watched my mind unfold. I became unplugged and panicked. I asked for help to be pulled back to shore. I went too quickly and then I learned the way to go slowly. I read the cards. I watched as it all fell further and further away. My brother reached out and touched me and when he did the entire universe was there, like lifting up the edge of a rug. I went looking and saw beautiful things. That is how I finished the book. I learned to read my programming.

I guess if you go far enough out-- you realize in the coding, it's all ones and zeros. There is no Dick. But there's also no us.

I forgot for awhile that making art was supposed to be fun. I am trying to find my way back, Chris. 

I have been gone a long time looking for something I hid away to protect in this life. I found her. I like how in interview magazine, you said: "I'm really committed to telling the truth in writing. ... I think that's what writing does. It tells the truth about something." 

Art changes us sometimes more than other people. Other people can be the door though, can't they? We walk through and nothing is ever again as we knew it.

And here we are now. in the menstrual hut. a trio of women, with the keys to the crystal city.

Love,

Megan




 


 

 

Yonijas and Inanna: A Project to talk Vulvas for 30 Days

From The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets ed by Barbara G. Walker:

A Hindu myth of the battle of the sexes told of a quarrel between the goddess Parvati (Kali) and the God Mahadeva (Shiva) over their rival claims to the true parenthood of human beings. To decide the question, each proposed to create a race of people without the aid of the other. The God, spirit of the lingam or phallus, created the Lingajas, who were weak and stupid, "dull of intellect, their bodies feeble, their limbs distorted."
However, the Goddess created the Yonijas, spirits of the Yoni or Vulva, who turned out to be excellent specimens: "well-shaped, with sweet aspects and fine complexions." The two races fought a war and the Yonijas won. (1098)

From Inanna Lady of the Largest Heart, Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna by Betty De Shong Meador:

British Anthropologist Chris Knight presents a convincing case for the relationship of women's synchronized bleeding and the "leap" to symbolic culture in the Paleolithic Period..."(Ovarian synchrony) provides the key to an understanding of symbolic culture...Speaking of Aboriginal cultures he says, "The myths allege that ritual power originally belonged to women." (140)

From the "Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi" (from Inanna Queen of Heaven and Earth, Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer, ed by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer

Inanna spoke:
What I tell you
Let the weaver sing into song.
What I tell you,
Let it flow from ear to mouth,
Let it pass from old to young:

My vulva, the horn
The  Boat of Heaven,
Is full of eagerness like the young moon.
My untilled land lies fallow

As for me, Inanna,
Who will plow my vulva?
Who will plow my high field?
Who will plow my wet ground?

As for me, the young woman,
Who will plow my vulva?
Who will station the ox there?
Who will plow my vulva?




From Sumerian tablets dating back to 2000 B.C. to the oldest poet who wrote of the cycles & moods of Inanna: poems, prayers, songs, myths, & art dedicate themselves to the feminine mystery, the yoni spirit, the incantation to the vulva.

But who are the modern Yonijas? Are they singing praise or indulging in yoniphobic traditions paved by patriarchy? How are modern poems to the vulva being sung and what is the language? What is the encoding we enact to sing these songs in a world where vulvas are commodities? where they are traded and owned and where yoni spirits have been caged and bartered?

Where do we see the words: "Plow my vulva" today and in what context? How has the sacred hymn been reclaimed and perverted for another's gaze? How are pussies perceived, branded, marketed? If the pussy is political, isn't it also commercial? Isn't it also economy/ capitalism/ finance/ power/ control/ subversion? Is there a war on Vulvas? Or are we just waking up to a world that has relegated the vulva to less than nothing? Because no one has a war with something or someone that has no power, do they?

And of its cycles and moons, how have we forgotten the power of these changes and condemned our bleeding vaginas to shameful backgrounds, to commercial products to erase the reality, to a shying away from fluid that is not sexual and therefore has no titillating power for man? How have we accepted this version of the myth? Have iPeriod apps taken the place of menstrual huts where women could retreat from the world and meditate on their power? Have bleached vagina plugs (tampons) really signaled a freedom for women so their "bleeding" won't get in the way of their busy lives (mothering and working) ?

For 30 days, I'm going to talk about vulvas. I'm going to write about vulvas and talk about poems about vulvas and art about vulvas and dispiriting or discouraging practices around vulvas.

Because I believe as Luce Irigaray says: "If we keep on speaking the same language together, we're going to reproduce the same history."

Because speaking about vulvas is historic, it links to a past where our earliest myths and songs take shape; and because poets and writers do tread in the space of new language, I want to  spend some time unearthing what they are doing with words.

And I love vulvas. They are beautiful and functional and amazing. And in a perfect world, everyone would carry that in their heart and practice that with their actions.