Because it is so dark so sudden, because it is rain, because it is colder, because it is a series of significant not yets in the middle of a storm of last gasps, because it is more here than there, more now than ever, we wake up feeling called to enter the ceremony, we go to sleep entering the ceremony, we have been called. There is another moon coming, the one that happens after the ancestors are fed, after the thanksgiving that opens up this season happens (it happened, our thanksgiving happened) ((*already distracted, already a side note, this ceremony is composed of margins, of in-betweens, of hybrid identities performing here and there, in writing and in speech, in codes messages in between pauses, those moments where we can't quite remember what we were about to say; the ancestors gave the sign of yes, nodding vigorously shaking graveyard dust from their chins, emphatic nodding, but with the idea that this yes is all light because it's too much light and there's not enough darkness yet, but it will come, the hidden things will come, and everything will change when we become aware that there are hidden things--and these clouds, this sudden dark, the messages that get lost because we assume they must be meant for someone else, the missing letter that would make us mean what we meant to mean))....
Because it happened, because they were fed, because it is rain, we enter into the room, and the room has a name, and the room is a place that is not what it was before we started decorating it to become this other place that we all remember, we enter the room and there is darkness at the very beginning, and there will be darkness for a very long time, because we don't know where we are yet, because we have to remember, and that takes time. The room takes its shape, it gives us its smell, and we smell like the room, because this is where we were born, and this is where we enact those things we are meant to do while in these bodies on this ground. My dead were not born here, far from here, I am not from here, I am from somewhere else, is what my blood tells me.
You may be from here, your dead may be from here, but before that, and before that, and before that, somewhere else, and perhaps we knew each other there before that even. Because of this, and because it is rain, and because I know these things, I know all this and more, I am not, I am no longer, I am not able to play, I don't want to find the thing in you that is like Marilyn Monroe, I don't want to inhabit that thing that is like the movie star with the shaved head and the muscles, because the ones who inhabit those things never get to live there for very long, once born as other in the other's eyes, there is no escape, and no tricks of language can help us find our ways out, because of that, because of that very that, I don't want to play, I can't play, but the undertows of the situation keep sucking me in.
And when I come to, when I come back, I am made real, in my own flesh again, once I've taken off those trappings of my gendered body, the t-shirt that's too small and the jeans that hang beneath the pelvic bones and the big black boots that entitle me to the cement and roads that I learn every day, I have ideas, I have a hundred ideas to go with the ones we've already spoken, and none of them are entirely speakable. For obvious reasons.
This is an enchantment, and this is a ceremony, there are more things at work than just the clothes we wear, but the clothes help us to present the alternative identity that might make us more readable when the light is too dim. There are movie stars and idols dancing in our heads, and we recreate them as best we can, poses that are seductive and ridiculous at the same time, but before that, before that, before that even, there is the dance between the thunder and the lightning, perhaps we met there, perhaps that is where I recognize you from, and perhaps we are still that, thunder and lightning for each other, cold rain on hot earth, and the endless eternal longing of the ocean for the land, eternal shifts of waves that sing of not yet, not this not yet, not just yet, and it could play out for another hundred lifetimes, and we still wouldn't know a particle of the longing that the ocean has for the land, but the taste we do know is almost enough to build a ceremony on.
But here we are, this is the ceremony, this is the dance, this is the tango that possesses our feet when we are much too tired for any more dancing. I will not create myself with words, and I will not try to create you with words, my words will only want to capture you, and I don't trust them, and perhaps you shouldn't either. I trust the gypsy clicks that move my hands after the children have all gone to bed, I trust the desire to travel the earth, the earth is a body that we want to know from the inside out, I trust in those things that move me out of bed before I can speak myself into myself, before the endless lists of what's next, which shirt to wear, and which pair of underwear will paint how I live below the waist, what I might be able to do with my face to make it look more authoritative, I trust those things that hide in the cells beneath the skin, I trust the hunger of the skin, I trust the goddesses that brought me here, to this empty space, no longer so empty, no longer the space it used to be when the light was too strong, I trust the rhythms of the blood, this blood right here under my skin, I trust the ancient pulse of this new blood, I trust the age of the blood that runs through our veins.
Because it happened, because they were fed, because it is rain, we enter into the room, and the room has a name, and the room is a place that is not what it was before we started decorating it to become this other place that we all remember, we enter the room and there is darkness at the very beginning, and there will be darkness for a very long time, because we don't know where we are yet, because we have to remember, and that takes time. The room takes its shape, it gives us its smell, and we smell like the room, because this is where we were born, and this is where we enact those things we are meant to do while in these bodies on this ground. My dead were not born here, far from here, I am not from here, I am from somewhere else, is what my blood tells me.
You may be from here, your dead may be from here, but before that, and before that, and before that, somewhere else, and perhaps we knew each other there before that even. Because of this, and because it is rain, and because I know these things, I know all this and more, I am not, I am no longer, I am not able to play, I don't want to find the thing in you that is like Marilyn Monroe, I don't want to inhabit that thing that is like the movie star with the shaved head and the muscles, because the ones who inhabit those things never get to live there for very long, once born as other in the other's eyes, there is no escape, and no tricks of language can help us find our ways out, because of that, because of that very that, I don't want to play, I can't play, but the undertows of the situation keep sucking me in.
And when I come to, when I come back, I am made real, in my own flesh again, once I've taken off those trappings of my gendered body, the t-shirt that's too small and the jeans that hang beneath the pelvic bones and the big black boots that entitle me to the cement and roads that I learn every day, I have ideas, I have a hundred ideas to go with the ones we've already spoken, and none of them are entirely speakable. For obvious reasons.
This is an enchantment, and this is a ceremony, there are more things at work than just the clothes we wear, but the clothes help us to present the alternative identity that might make us more readable when the light is too dim. There are movie stars and idols dancing in our heads, and we recreate them as best we can, poses that are seductive and ridiculous at the same time, but before that, before that, before that even, there is the dance between the thunder and the lightning, perhaps we met there, perhaps that is where I recognize you from, and perhaps we are still that, thunder and lightning for each other, cold rain on hot earth, and the endless eternal longing of the ocean for the land, eternal shifts of waves that sing of not yet, not this not yet, not just yet, and it could play out for another hundred lifetimes, and we still wouldn't know a particle of the longing that the ocean has for the land, but the taste we do know is almost enough to build a ceremony on.
But here we are, this is the ceremony, this is the dance, this is the tango that possesses our feet when we are much too tired for any more dancing. I will not create myself with words, and I will not try to create you with words, my words will only want to capture you, and I don't trust them, and perhaps you shouldn't either. I trust the gypsy clicks that move my hands after the children have all gone to bed, I trust the desire to travel the earth, the earth is a body that we want to know from the inside out, I trust in those things that move me out of bed before I can speak myself into myself, before the endless lists of what's next, which shirt to wear, and which pair of underwear will paint how I live below the waist, what I might be able to do with my face to make it look more authoritative, I trust those things that hide in the cells beneath the skin, I trust the hunger of the skin, I trust the goddesses that brought me here, to this empty space, no longer so empty, no longer the space it used to be when the light was too strong, I trust the rhythms of the blood, this blood right here under my skin, I trust the ancient pulse of this new blood, I trust the age of the blood that runs through our veins.
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