1. |
Map
03:42
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following the clues,
on this modern-day quest.
a new way of putting our faith to the test.
following my heart,
to find a part,
in this epic play of life reset.
It’s not quite like back in the day.
No apparent dragon,
in need of a good slay.
its time we lay
our notions aside.
the lie:
an economy built on slavery.
the journey:
to set each other,
and ourselves
free.
I recognize it starts with me.
I can’t just walk on concrete,
to reach the mountain cave.
I’ve learned dragons are my allies,
and all my friends are witches.
And ending oppression
has become an inside job.
Rainbows rarely end on flat ground,
or start without a storm,
so I climb
swim
fly
to seek my pot of gold,
which is not green;
and once found,
can never be sold.
Following the clues,
on this modern-day quest,
is a new way of listening.
A different kind of treasured chest
awaiting.
The map,
is not always tattered yellow paper.
Sometimes it's a specter of sacred geometry,
or a
diagram of our diaphragms.
How to breathe through our bodies,
how to heal with our hands.
The little birdie still tells us where to go,
how to flow,
but now they're 5 foot 4,
in platform boots and day glow fur.
and the guardian of the threshold,
is checking ID’s.
and the dragons we can see,
are painted on our tapestries
or tattooed on our bodies.
but still,
but still,
We are in the magic land.
and we must know,
when to wield our swords,
when to sweep our salves,
when to humble ourselves
in the holy places.
We must understand the measure:
we
are the treasure
we seek,
if we are ever going to find it,
ask why it was hidden in the first place.
This race with a new pace
can only lead us away from
or back to
home.
And our folly as we hide from
or chase
what could only ever be inside us.
following
following
following…
it’s the quest that defines us.
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2. |
Lexicon
02:48
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This body.
This body.
This Body.
This body of knowledge.
This body of wisdom.
Self-bright prism
made of everything we have ever loved.
Mystery encoded in flesh and bone.
Bound like bread into the great Baker’s oven,
stewed in the alchemist’s brew,
made of me, made of you,
going back to the first Mother.
Every cell holding the key to its own freedom,
unlocked by the body’s own wisdom:
The song of my grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother’s people,
lost to mind
in the hulls of ships and the cracks of whips;
the magic of our sacred blood,
lost in spun cotton and cheap tranquilizers;
the knowingness of our intrinsic interconnectedness
lost to missionary’s book and soldier’s blade;
all re-membered,
always known
in the bodies we finally call home.
I call this body home.
I ask in the language beyond words
for the truth beyond wounds.
The rewoven stories
and unwinding muscles
all offer the same benediction:
we have always been holy,
wholly, holey, holy.
Always been home.
We need only listen
to our bodies of wisdom.
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3. |
Spectrum
04:05
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I am not my skin.
But that is what you see.
This self-same covering
delineates the edges
of acceptable, appropriate, separating wrong from right.
I am not this skin but its blackness is the first impression I give.
At first glance, I am cast into the realm of dark things.
A player in the polarity war.
Despite education, compassion, creativity,
or any other marker of human worth
I will forever be
below, separate, untouchable
in the eyes of those who measure by the color spectrum.
Think yourself immune?
Believe you are beyond the reaches of racism?
Beyond petty differentiations of color and skin?
What do you think when you hear the word "white?"
“black?”
light, dark,
clean, dirty,
good, bad?
Who always wins in this race against?
If we want to end racism we must look at the filters clouding our vision
and the ways we contribute to division.
Stop blaming or playing victim.
Turn our fingers inward, downward,
reach our hands into mounds of fresh black earth.
Feel its moist coolness merge with our pores.
Drink in the fecund smells.
Let bugs traverse our flesh as the soft loam crumbles back to the ground,
and remember the richness of dark things.
Let beet stains stay on our cutting boards.
Let our children's knees carry the tale-tell brown of worthwhile exploration.
Notice every time we wince at the idea of the dark.
How we hide from our own unseen parts.
Question everything concerning the nature of good and evil
and how closely those ideas are tied to black and white.
Then look at my dark skin.
See the color, don't pretend
we are anything other than we are,
observe its smooth texture and tone
the way it hugs muscle and bone.
How it both is, and is not me.
and then tell me what you see.
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4. |
Teacher
05:31
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When the time is right
I shall teach about writing poetry.
But when I bother to weave the words to impart this art,
it will not be through the conventions of form.
Any fool can pick up an old tome
and learn the tools that make this language roll off the tongue.
Rhythm and rhyme,
alliteration and metaphor may be dying devices,
but enough people know of their power
to keep them out of the grave.
No, when I strive to leave a legacy of fisherpeople
(not just those who have been given fish),
it will be by imploring them to see.
To see everything,
to look at the marrow of life
as a scientist studies cells.
I will charge them to feel,
to feel,
to feel everything,
to have their hearts broken
until there is only heart dust left,
like the sparkling debris of exploded stars;
and let the flour of their shattered hearts
be kneaded by the great Baker
into the bread they will use to feed their readers.
I will invite my little poetlings
to give away their most precious belongings,
travel to a place where they do not speak the language,
and listen to all the ways people convey love
in words they do not understand.
I will remind them that they are not, can never be, in charge of their gifts
they cannot demand that words come,
though they can pray.
I will warn them that if they choose the path of the poet,
if they dare to look at their own geniuses,
they may find themselves on their knees
calling for the Muse to return,
or leave them alone, in season.
Actually, I probably won't tell them that part,
the madness of passion is a cost
best discovered in one's own time.
But I will tell them
that the deepest pain of the poet is not the receiving of visions
that take one’s breath away,
nor the intensity of feelings that seem impossible for one body to bear,
the challenge of being sensitive beyond comprehension or safety.
No, the hardest part is that they will always fail.
We always fail,
because our medium is imperfect.
This is a losing battle.
Poets are oarspeople using wooden sieves to scoop water out of leaking vessels,
determined to reach a shore we cannot yet see, as our ships sink beneath us.
Attempting to capture the ineffable beauty of life
with a tool that is inherently flawed.
The true madness of the poet is knowing we can never convey all that we feel.
We can never quite get it right
in this language made for conquering and counting sheep,
for giving directions and maintaining war.
So, I will teach young poets in training
to run wildly in any direction,
as long as it takes them away from convention, pretension, and competition.
To rip the armor off their hearts and the projections off their eyes.
To follow beauty to its lair.
I will make them put on their walking shoes
(be sure they are comfortable,
next to a smooth pen
a fine pair of walking shoes is a poet's best friend)
and drag them out into the crisp autumn air.
Have them describe the particular qualities of the afternoon sunlight in early November
as it softly warms their red cheeks.
I will hold them still,
to watch a single golden leaf make its final swirling wind-dance
from branch to earth.
I will tell them: “writing poetry, making any true art, is like that, that leaf floating there.
You must surrender to the currents of life,
let the winds have their way with you.
You must know your task is impossible,
and that it will take your life as much as it gives you purpose.
But all you can do is work with the materials you have,
and enjoy the dance
as you freefall.”
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5. |
Golden
04:12
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A place where tears and laughter are one.
Where orgasms are formed and babies born.
Where music lives before it has a drum
or flute through which to be played.
Where all emotions abide
free of differentiation
and a deft player,
also known as a fully alive human,
can tune into any frequency
in the orchestra of feeling.
You bring me here.
Your breath,
warm on my neck in the golden morning,
the dew of my yearning.
How can one person
feel so many things at once?
The paradox of love is its confusing contradictions.
The concoction of our love,
a heady brew;
sometimes heavy,
sometimes the softest cream and honey
inviting a divine drunkenness
where nothing is solid, none of what I have known now certain.
And everything that lies below
is brought to the surface.
Where I am dizzyingly drawn
to the space between.
Not here, not there.
Spacious, yet bonded.
Formed of the distillation, the burning away of dross
until there is only us.
Where there are no definitions,
no conscription of emotions into easily identified vowels and syllables.
The home of sense, where lives all of our laughter and all of our tears,
and the hope and fear of years ago and to come,
and yet also only this one,
full, holographic moment.
I breathe slowly when you hold me
so that I can melt into the space between breaths
as I open into the formless endless galaxies
in the space between our bodies.
Pressed flesh to flesh
and pulse to pulse
where we come together beyond histories and wishstories,
One with the Mystery, crying and giggling at the same time.
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6. |
Unblossomed
06:11
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The path to presence.
Different, every time.
Time as a spiral, not a line.
The true way never looks the same
Because open eyes are always changing.
Wisdom is born of the quiet spring,
the fertile darkness that lives below our knowing,
that begets our awakening,
and opens to our remembering.
Ancestral light, the substance of our wings
though they look like muscle and bone;
and, however caged, some part of us still remembers
these wild hearts where meant to sing us home.
Resting in the breath at the beginning of creation.
the precious petals still spiraled over center.
trusting in the lightless journey of incubation
and the wisdom of growth’s unfolding; beyond fear.
I have grown accustomed to being excellent at everything I do.
A forgetting that evolution is ongoing,
and we have ever-shifting knowings
of what is true.
Wanting the promised satisfaction of completion,
without accepting the necessity of uncertainty;
the fragmentation required for deeper integration.
The interdependence inherent in real power.
We revere the fully-bloomed flower,
adore its scent and beckoning openness.
But the mountaintop is only one moment of the trail.
The fragrance of forgiveness may draw us towards freedom,
but darkened woods and bottomless chasms
elicit many a vital despairing wail.
Pilgrim, there is no one road to follow,
the road is made by walking
over stone and bone,
is made by breathing
beyond everything you’ve ever known,
and home is an ever-shifting experience.
You may taste the sweet nectar for a moment
but then the flower dies,
and you’d best discover the beauty in compost.
This path is understood for only an instant
sunlight caught in the hand through a prism
a rainbow bridge to absolute nowness.
This path is found in the effusive glee
of a child’s first spinning dance in a summer meadow,
in the feel of my lover’s lips upon my brow,
in the silence between every sound.
The path is different every time,
because it leads to a place that can never be known,
and only in the seeking
can we ever be found.
Baby birds, bits of primordial viscousness
sticking to their uncoordinated wings,
do not judge themselves for their undeveloped ability to sing.
Roses do not believe they will only be worthy of love when their petals unfurl.
And lion cubs roar with abandon, regardless of their obvious harmlessness.
Embrace unblossomedness.
How can you expect to be at your destination when you are still on the road?
Why collapse your life into someone else’s mold?
What if you stopped demanding perfection,
allowing life its own form of completion?
Put down the sledgehammer of should,
shaming the sap out of your soul.
Put down the chisel and awl,
and rest in ever-curious awe
at the beauty of your becoming:
the unplannable inevitability of your timeless blossoming.
The path to presence.
Different, every time.
Time as a spiral, not a line.
The true way never looks the same
Because open eyes are always changing.
Pilgrim, there is no one road to follow,
the road is made by walking
over stone and bone,
is made by breathing
beyond everything you’ve ever known,
and home is an ever-shifting experience.
The path is different every time,
because it leads to a place that can never be known,
and only in the seeking
can we ever be found.
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7. |
Love Let Her
04:39
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You are a poem.
A composition,
an exposition of the Revelry,
a piece of the Mystery,
revealed
in each flick of hair
in each turn of phrase.
Just as no Sun can reach every leaf on the tree,
so can no one
illumine
all your crevices and curves,
but each question
brings me closer to the truth
I see in you
feel in you,
it whispers out in your undertone.
I extrapolate
as we penetrate
the Darkness
with our Voices,
the places where we meet
become
Event Horizons.
“Divinity” means “sees no division,”
this life a revision,
of our history,
our hierarchy,
our pedagogy.
I ask and you only say:
"more color, please."
You are a poem.
Created anew each time I turn the page, take the stage,
say “yes” to the Mystery
and not the assumption
with just enough gumption to know when to tell me
"no, not yet, we'll play more when we're ready."
This heady
presumption
of falling in love
is nothing
compared to the constant discombobulation
of a life lived in exploration.
- this theory, this question, this veil-lifting exercise:
Now that we are learning who we are,
and who is with us,
and what the world needs of us,
what do we do with our power?
Let me be your composition.
Tear down each of my constructs.
Let each of my limits be a word, in no particular order, threading past to future.
Each of my glances a clue,
each of my prayers a step closer to the mystery of you.
You
You
You are the poem.
A play of spiral and form and swirl and shadow
and color and light.
Asking that we grow each time we listen to you,
demanding that we pay attention
because we only get to hear you once.
In this
magic
now.
You say
"We are just flowers unfolding,"
and I wonder
how do I reach your stamen
without corrupting the petals?
I am no bee.
My poetry
is too coarse,
too obvious.
I want all the life.
All at once.
To dissolve in your ocean.
To be so overwhelmed
by a single ecstatic breath of your atmosphere
that I lose all illusion of separation,
and become a million stars
in your sky.
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Niema Lightseed Portland, Oregon
Niema Lightseed is a poet and priestess of the new paradigm dedicated to transforming oppression through art, embodiment
education, linguistic analysis, and ritual.
Her poetry evokes the transformative power of art and reveals the beauty at the marrow of life.
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