wolf horse half moon

this is the morning when wild horses come calling,
come calling through busting fences, come calling through re-arranging random objects,
this thing that was once here is no longer, and that thing that was once held is now lost,
they come frantically moving hearts through chests that can move civilizations,
making small things into enormous troubles, they are come to call things into
question to make more trouble, this is the morning when they stomp too close
to the wolves that get in their way, wolves too tired to move quickly on a morning
that is too cold for words. this is the morning when their brands all show
alliances that don't connect to each other, and never will, brought to the heat of
white metal, and they don't fetishize the smell of their own skin burning, this is
the morning when taboos and totems are placed on opposite sides of the beam
and there is no balance. it's a day when a moon starts off slow, a sliver of a
conversation that gets lost in a dream outside a courtroom, this is a wild heart that's
been caught swimming in its own bloodstream, unable to separate the blood
that marks wounds or the blood that runs from the familial river, this is the
morning when a wild horse gets caught in time and struck silent, considering alliances
by the faint light of the moon, unable to make sense of the sound of the blood rushing
through the ears. these wolves that gather, waiting for the moon to grow,
mark their territories with the smells that please them the most, circling the young and
making space for a new collection of objects that have secret power. this tooth is
the one that came off on me when you had your face buried in my neck, this
is the nail that was left in my back after a night that turned too quickly into a morning,
this is the carbon that fell off my skin after that fire. i'm becoming someone
something else, on a cold morning, i hope it's you, but all i can see is the heat
of my own breath, and the bones of a hundred generations of ancestors come calling,
calling horses on one side of the mirror or another, but it's too early in the day, or
too late in the month, to decide what belongs where, what needs to be shed for the
spring, or what new lives might decide to stay.

poli-trance

the divide between the mind and body, that makes it possible for us to go to war, comes to a crossroads over the course of a week, over and over again, over the course of a week, and bleeds into another week, and comes to the edges of a forest or a desert, no one knows because the road's not talking (can't, no mouth), and not even the dogs are giving hints...but the hour between day and night, the wolves wake up, and they always say, this is what i want what i really really want, but the shadows of hands obscure the words until the words make no more sense, and the touch of a hand on a hand causes the flesh to cry like it was woken up from a long dream, and there's nothing to suggest this isn't true...and her eyes grow softer behind the spectacles of a speaking subject representing polygonal identities, speaking arguments that play like a tango, and dreams that play like complex social mathematics...but this is not a love poem...and her eyes grow wise under the moon, half wolf, half irish folk singer, laying bare the weight and witness of nights spent alone when the lightning in the blood sends pain to unsuspecting places in the body, and there is war, and there is love, and there is war and love...but this is not a love poem...and her eyes growl with fire under the spell of a yellow candle, spelling words with small fingers under hands that won't try to bend her weight, and not waiting to bend anything but the river, which does these things on her own, and this is when the wolf is louder than the human, and the notion of becoming animal falls at the feet of a hundred french intellectuals, waiting on the floor at her feet, so many feet, and so many tracks from boots on the bed, but only one hunger, only one hunger, that succumbs to the whispers from the river who's kept possibility hiding in her banks...no one can speak when they have left the human world and entered into the animal realm, and so half-possessed, there is no better time than to plan a difficult freedom that is not an escape from this...his jealous bones buried where even the dogs can't reach, to be dug up later as a reminder of another time, when institutions mattered...now mothers matter, bodies matter, and light is the matter that passes between one tongue to another, constructing texts underneath a moon, and even this moon won't dare to speak for the road, it unravels like fingers and find the stories on the tongues of lovers who want to remember...again, not a love poem...and they are so shellshocked by the holes in the day, when the phantoms of the past or the future come in like stuttering tracks on a glitching video, urgent and indecipherable messages that would make anyone anxious, but pulled by the same spirit who comes to say, "this is what sweetness tastes like, and this is the only way to make you remember..."...he wants to write her poems, about how the smooth hands belie the talking bellies, about how this is more complicated than it seemed, about how the puzzles of the moon are like puzzles out of borges, and the same tango music is still playing in the background, and about how this plays like the answer to a thousand dormant charms, come to full power in a year haunted by 11s, about how the idea of twins is never far from the same hands and the same stomachs, but his wolf tongue is too tangled up by the jewels in his mouth...and it rests here, somewhere on this bank, under a moonless sky, the sand covered with the scripts of a thousand possible identities, where fear of water and fear of dehyrdration bounce around like nervous birds, until words are no longer necessary, and the river wakes them up to sing what sounds like impossible words for a love poem written just for them.

favorite movies

this one, this dream of a movie, where all the characters are capable of chameleon-like feats, and trained in the tactics of transgression, making small revolutions in the air, hands circling around stories like rings around the moon, and no one represents a force they have not contended with personally, burned and branded by the fires of a thousand desires, and every moment another flight in another direction...a travel movie that takes place on the road, which, if it had a mouth, would start singing sweet songs in the middle of these thunderstorms...this movie, like any film, is tracking movements in time, complicated narrations intersecting with social realism and exploding into the library at the edges of revolution...this movie is a dream of a movie, beginning with a revolution, the theme songs written on the insides of the collars, too close to the heart to be heard by anyone but the spirits at the bottom of the sea...

heartbreak and identity in winter

This is a dream about London (last week was Italy, revolutions in love and art, and sunny people): I'm getting ready to go buy pints of ale and french cigarettes (oh, but I don't drink, and am quitting smoking these days, so this is kind of an anitthesis to the Italy dream where no one smoked because we didn't want to, because it was a love and art revolution, and we needed to work on our stylish motorcycles, and there was no time, just like in real life), but before I can leave to go out drinking (I don't drink), I get something in my room, and there's this woman I used to know, sitting on my bed, and she's facing away from me, combing her long, black (and curly, yes, it was you) hair. I was happy to see her at 3 in the morning, but she was not so happy to see me. She tells me that she has a new boy and doesn't care how I am, and I tell her that I didn't invite her to comb her hair on my bed at 3 in the morning, and why does everyone tell me she has a new boy, this is just too much, I was trying to be affable.

This was not the heartbreak, though, because something about her was very Oshun-y, with the comb and that sweet way she has of telling me that I'm still in love (with who? this is a complicated question, and not even 8 1/2 projects will answer, but Kassandra knows) and wrong about everything (thank u, Yalorde, one day I will appreciate all this, but not at 3 in the morning), and a way of waking me up way before the light, which it is, and I am, and this is a day, one where things will come to be revealed. Some jobs, some news about jobs, a lot of writing, and some more news.

Something about her was also very not Oshun-y, and very Banshee-y, and this is how she spent the day visiting me. It's a perfect beginning of a day when Death comes calling, or looming, around the men in my family, and in not so subtle ways...some of the destruction is self-imposed, the way some men have of calling their survival into question by testing it, because they want to stay uncommitted to their love with the world (for the record, I love you and I adore you, and I will never leave you, but I know one day you will leave me, that's worth the price of the heartbreak). I would rather be torn up about a new love or an old love or a possibly maybe, than to watch the men I've learned from fall to pieces, but we all have our own ways of falling to pieces.

I was put back together at the side of the river more than once, and I will do it again, but never with the same people, because you are always a different river, and you find new ways of charming me...and at the end of a long stay in a cafe, I find a long, thick black hair in my helmet, I don't know whose it is, but I have suspicions, or rather, wishes, & so I wrap the hair in my gum and swallow it, even if Ana Mendieta is the only one who understands my longing for home, or what home means to me.

Good night, I'm going to Spain, and I don't care what you had for breakfast (oh, but I really do...u know me, I always will...)

3rd part/restricted manifesto

More structures:
Structure of meditation:
- clarifying
- exertion of muscle, breath body bone, and more clarifying
- then release into the dream/vision (flood)
- drowning
- and then an answer

(she says, "i never got over you, and you'll never get over me, and the only way to resolve this is to turn on each other, move through each other until there is nothing left, until we are like tigers running around the tree and spinning into butter," and i say "we tried that and it didn't work, we still live to fight again another day, and i carry this list of precious things, but i don't know what it's for" and someone else interrupts, but this year we all decide not to ask for advice about anything except work, so they cannot speak in this place)
((if they were smart, they might say, "this is a call that was answered, but you forgot the words, because you forgot to make them up as you went along, and that's the only way to win the sweetness from the river, reckless invention and a larger capacity for tenderness, prepare for war and cultivate the capacity for innovation..."))
(((and leave a message)))
(((like in, dont invoke if there's no message)))

(-I couldn't love you until you broke in a thousand pieces, and there are those I do not recognize, but this one, for this one, I would do anything-)

Kassandra has to wander.

We get so far from the ancestral home that not even the stars can recognize who we are (and when someone tells us that the constellations have changed, we might believe them).

I was told to give up the search for the Grail and get lost in the Art, and to make my work the arrow and the target. When I set out, I didn't get to the point where I couldn't see the shore before I remembered that the search was also the art. But by that point, I was far enough away to see that what haunted me had three faces: one was madness, delight, destruction; one was caught between the flat image and the one between two pieces of cloth; one was able to change faces nine times at the edges of the water, unable to decide between the cemetery and the sea.

The face I couldn't see was the one that was always just on the verge of disappearing, black and cafe c/crema, and just enough red to make things dangerous, always just on the edges of the next wave, so I went off looking for that one, while taking the other three with me, tied to my back and sometimes hooked into the skin, and somewhere in this the work started to take shape. An ancestral tree with twisted roots, or a mermaid who insists on her right to change her face with the moon.

And then it struck me that these moons were not there to take me further away from her, but were always bringing me closer. I was entranced by all the faces, and deeply in love, and she said, "then start chasing me, now that you recognize me."

The moment I walked into the future, everything changed, but it took months before I could believe it.

This did not look like happiness.

This did not feel like happiness.

Not how I expected.

But it did look and feel like a dream where magic was not just a possibility, but a law. And I was eating and sleeping, tasting the food and remembering my dreams, and this was better than happiness. & the unbearable heat on the road had been cooled, and movement was easy. I would have everything I wanted when I needed it, and the moments began to fall into an order that was charmingly chronological. She was not who I wanted her to be, and she was not who I wanted to think her to be, she was this, and this is the one I was thinking of, and that was all, and it would probably change again, and for the moment that was all right.

In this dream, we cannot control what the others do, and because magic guides us, we know better than to try. And the rest falls into place from there, subject to the same laws of gravity that make the moon the best light for the dark.