I will wade into morning like a man crossing rivers in flood time and the water will take what it needs and leave the rest and I will let it. Bones know their own way home.

Dark earth calls. Must answer. Will sink hands deep into loam and clay until worms thread between my fingers like ancient prayers and roots mistake me for their own kind.

Time flows and does not flow and a man can count heartbeats or stars or grains of sand but the counting changes nothing. Still. The measuring matters.

I will build with these hands what needs building and tear down what needs tearing and the dust of it will write stories on my skin that even God must bend low to read. Some words can only be written in sweat and splinters.

Dawn comes. Goes. Comes again. The spinning world asks nothing of us but everything. Must answer anyway.

So I will gather moments like a man gathering firewood before storm season knowing some will burn quick and hot and others will smolder until the coals birth diamonds and either way the gathering matters the carrying matters the weight of it all matters.

Truth is: we are all burning. Truth is: the light we make belongs to no one.

And when the last hour comes hunting like a lean wolf through long grass I will stand upright and empty-handed having spent everything given everything poured it all out like wine like blood like star-stuff until nothing remains but the shape of my giving.

That's the wild and precious part. The spending. The emptying. The holy wastefulness of being.

The Sun asked of its child, what will you do

with your one wild and precious Life?

she moved slowly, around the thought,

another day, another year yawning at the girth.

Oh! to let it all hang, now, but she measured the waist,

Seems all the forms have spread, from the equator belt

Some sort of pull between North and South, perhaps

it is time for a corset and girdle, to hold it in, and

ready myself again for the annual Solar Ball, whence

the other planets line up, to dance amidst the stars...

Rumor has it, maybe it's someone else's turn to carry??

This Arthritis

that we've Caught

in the Family Joints

is Psychosomatic

the Witch Doctor

in Chile told me

for Health

He said, Keith,

Heathcliff, Fred err,

Whatever:

Stop Drinking in

the Diluted Expectation

of Society Conventions!!

Stay inside a Few Nights

a Hundred let's Say

on Your Back

in this Arabesque Twig Hut

with Its Gap Tooth grin

where the Sky and

all Its Bugs

can Finally reach

to Your Innards

unburden Your Skeleton

So you can Walk,

Free with Conviction

a Living Red Line

to Flow from

Bones to Fingers

When You Rise

...has already arrived.

That is what it means to heal.

Rub sugar in my wounds.

It burns me raw, but at least I smell of sweetness this time.

Not rare meat- where a blood hound used to sniff all my despair to the surface.

And what is a surface without an "underneath"?

And I have so much underneath.

I don't need to be extraordinary to be important.

I can just be an ordinary woman.

Deep, blue eyes, a smile with crinkled eyes-

like tissue paper, a prelude to the present underneath.

A mind, wanting ordinary things.

Yes, I don't have to be amazing to be a part of this world.

I can just be be a woman,

with small gifts,

and a brave smile.

I can just be.