Roman Mosaic “Man know thyself”
For the Dead Parts of You
Time was wearing an eclipse when it told me
This story is too old for most of you
But “poetry is the resurrection of presences”
More than I can speak of here with this medicine chant
And I’ll tell you many things that you’ll soon forget
But I am instructed to speak of my apprenticeship
And soul travel as a medicine person
Don’t stop anywhere at what does he mean
Try explaining yourself to yourself
If it’s easy you have work to do
Enter at the risk of all you know
It’s not easy sustaining the life flow
Through veiled gated borders of other worlds
Never mind those neo shamans
Coloring people with fragile healing charms
There are parasitic dark ones
Who would blot out transformation
Cavities in the impossible teeth of a black metal sky
There would be many things I would come to know
In the intimate nuances of plural reality
The light and dark journey is for us all
To journey home to our true nature
I keep the alliance with the numinous ancestors and genii loci
They keep my speechless heart on the carrying winds
I rose with the vultures from the desert floor
My spirit vessel ruptured by the world
Floating on a blue river between clouds that sharpen the horizon
Silhouetting the old mountain bones saints of death
I heard sad feint guitar threads remembering
Long gone canyons red with my blood
Rattle and howl of ancestors rose in me
With a slight tearing in the beautiful harvest of awareness
Whatever was cultivated from my life was dismembered
Shoulder of my old crow wing falls
As my tree rings stretch across the empty land
A cacophonous kraaa rips the air
I remember raven rearing up
In a twisted wire of smoke
Gravity of dark matter pulling through the throat rattle
Black holes across the continent
Over wrinkled maps of time
Tassels from the long drum of the moon
Uttered in tender shreds of dawn
“Your thinnest tender branches
Have been on the longest journey
For the dead parts of you to wake up”
The sun was wearing a hood
Dusting the ash off its pouch of sighs
Burning shadows made beautiful
In their reflection of you
Amnesiac prayers had lost their necessary relationship
Moon had no motion or sound in its womb
Disguised in her many changing faces
Around the cerulean blue curvature of the earth
I fell apart to see the distance between us
Like storm clouds we separated and joined again
To know the difference of a soft turtle sky
To remember when the sun leaves the moon turns on
I had to learn our primal animal speech again
Stalactite dripping tongue
Releasing soul essence from the soft cave
A scattered herd of feelings rekindle
Fossilized fire shining with its far vision
Eyes of sad diffused light return from the distance within
Turning bee hive bright in the hollow bones and porous image
I am the black mamba fire serpent
A brujo psychopomp who wears silver wolf hair
Horns flaming from the skull in silver shrub
In a quickening story
The bees ride the wolf in me
A soul traveler with honey magic
To carry me through reincarnation
Many days changing my many ways
In these dream running heights
From our shattered world
I can make the corn grow through my chest
Into the coyote darkness with their quiet sickle moon secrets
I am watched from the foothills
As mountain shadows return to sky
Whispers of animals speak of my care full footsteps
Hummingbirds feed on the sugar of these thoughts
I am of the ancient corn people who still feed the sacred
I put the deer mask on to comb the future and the past
Watch cacti skeletons quickening in the stillness
I rattle the old wind bone chimes swaying the evergreens
Following the bend in the wood
Land spirits press into cholla shade and silences
Ancient footpaths buried beneath reveal their stories
A wild nebula beauty of memory grows inside
New leaf and berry language
Nuclear burning centers of massive stars
Lift and break our thought merchants
On the overflowing page of deaths poem
Into blank canvass between human and spirit form
Any moment I can be a ravaged glyph returned to you
A faded hand print still working its way through you
Footsteps of runic tracks through your restless dream
My cooing soft animals scurry over your bones
Under the night shawl of your sighs needs and colliding clouds
My intoned summons disappear into your pulse
This far inland the sea cries in you
You of holy brine of blood and watershed
Mend your soul in my deep green well
I scratch my deer head into the earth
I rattle my shaman stones
In the star shined puddle
Pull you inward into this drowning spell
Fall through this muddy mirror
Always open before your knocking
Knocking on you before you open
With the invisible door ajar
My bear skull watches
The movement of your spirit
I am inside you when you turn your thoughts my way
When you sense the other within
Ripening the berry of the dormant heart
All things bloom when we pay attention
