May I come home now?

May I walk out into

the ringing symphony of twilight choruses

May I sit with you for a lifetime?

May I touch the soil

under my fingertips

I feel you growing, growing, growing

I taste the resonsance

of sweet wind folding down the hillside

a cloud of scented dreams

rising from the flowerheads

I peer you in the sunshine

and hear you in the moonlined darkness

On the back of my eyelids I see you neverending

green and green and green as the light intended

In my nightmares

you are always ending

only ending

when I am without you

I am sick with closeness

Can I come home now?

Your bewinged,

finned and fractaled,

breathing,

feathered,

beating

Your becoming shaped

by sunlight, water, gravity

I can come home now

to your wild (re)calling

as you wonder

scattering blue

green as the light intended

tectonically sighing

Where is your creation?

Coming home now

home now

home

Cracked open

on the holey, salt-washed rock

someone is getting a meal

while someone is losing a life.

In the brush

an explosion of feather marks

in space and time

a carnivorous event

and somewhere in the shadow stalks

the only one who left

not in the tender arms of death.

the carnivore is holy

for she does not delegate

when life ends

in her teeth,

in her beak,

before her eyes

she knows

the flesh is hers to keep.

The chicken wrapped in plastic

at the grocery store

so far removed

from its nourishment-giving death

deserves an altar of my cutting board

a crown of herbs

my voice, my breath

because how dare I take the gift

when I wasn’t present

for the death.

I hex you

to be full of wonder.

I curse you

with curiosity that knows no bounds.

Do not strive to be holy

how boring?!

Aspire instead to be the mucky treasure that grows on river rocks

teeming with life

and slippery when stepped on.

I dare you

to reach into your pulsing longing

then weave it through with all your fears

and watch

the new bewinged beast

flutter to life.

Be as wholesome as heartache

howling your grief from the stratosphere.

Speak to the snakes

in many different tongues

for they are full of wisdom.

Grow your grief into enormous flowers

that eat people

and spit out savages.

In fact, may you yourself

never be the least bit civilized again.

Go forth now

heartful, beautiful disaster.

The cosmos as my witness,

I hex you.