This fearful symmetry of fantasy and reality, inner and outer
reveals nothing about the proliferating images
Inside you,
a false sense of imaginary depth
forests, sand, and urban deserts
- your inner topographies.
Abandoned by common sense,
you identify with these
Burnt
images: this is you
- All these books,
eighties movies and television shows,
endless summer days and rainy winter evenings.
This rush of blood,
this blush of pathos
(Shame,
how you can name the tropic on someone else’s chest,
but you know not what any of these giant trees here are called.)
come undone by untimely texts.
when you were sixteen,
when they lured you out,
you fit a fist into your mouth,
palpated around in the dirt felt a tail,
and yanked.
A tiger awaked
flame-resistant because it was fire itself
Tyger Tyger, burning bright
In the forests of my inner night.
It touched the ashes in your throat,
a stroking finger like a matchstick striking.
Materialist mystic,
not done anymore.
I have never seen anything so stubborn
like weeds in the garden.
You lay down, and stretch looking up at the sky.
This is you: this quiet.
Come undone.
How do you tame a wild tongue?
Yes, they burn land
searing squares into your back,
bordering on the right side of pain,
watching swallows fleet and cry,
delighting in the excess of feeling
nothing can dwell in Love, and nothing can touch you except desire.
The most secret name of Love is this touch
Fire, till the rain falls,
there is
a Forest.
you would use your fathers’ binoculars
to look into the garden, attracted by
the darkness appearing behind the foliage,
especially when it was bright green with rain.
Unfurl small blades,
folded tight like secrets too good to keep.
Fuzzy vines shrieking against the sunlight,
growing into tight curls
around the shaft of an idea.
Rolling your eyes far into your own skull,
observe
deeper and darker than the abysses
the water of the Semois river,
this green, strange
underwater world, that seems more in tune.
a hungry teen needs a
soul to taste your secret
a watery night forest, where the wild, the real things were.
Like the rest of us, rough bundles
of rush - blood, thought, oxygen, and adrenaline.
leaping into movement
like a big cat that knows
its fur can hide its intentions.
Undone,
Hadewijch drives her Pontiac Firebird Transcendental âme
into the empty landscape.
Lines in cursive are citations from William Blake, Gloria Anzaldúa, Hadewijch van Antwerpen.
Image: Maruyama Okyo and pupils
Index image: Kris Pint