Monday 7 October 2013

meanderings on self. or "i will not be what you expect"

i am what? i am who? i am a house, a temple, a wolf, a lamb. i value my skin for the living map that it is. each scar a mumified story and memory. i question whether this skin, this body really is mine. or whether i am other. it prompts recollections of train journeys and walks through patchwork fields where, in a time long ago, someone once drew an invisible line and built walls to divide the green into what's mine and what's yours. symbolic of our territorial nature when in fact it's all one and the distinctions we make are of our own creation. i want to write this in a spiral, eventually arriving at the point which is everything, but for now it's only circles. i wonder, does my mouth spill my boreal beginnings, or did i burst into being elsewhere? even before my mother was growing inside of her mother? regardless, i am in no doubt that the collision of worlds was involved. i am my parent's inheritance. i am a fragment of the whole. and growing. i am fire and stone. apparently composed of three quarters water and able to think thoughts. i am the female embodiment of the skin bone blood able to be explained away scientifically, shot through with a root of light. each vertebrae a rung on Jacob's ladder. my voice is quiet, my mind is not. the planets circle my waist. i pluck arrows from my chest and run my lips over the shape of each name carved there. memorising. savouring. do not take for granted the soft edges, they harbour lightning... 

6 comments:

Richard Goode said...

Your capacity to capture philosophical thought so beautifully and succinctly in poetic-prose is amazing.
I love how boundaries - real & imagined, natural & contrived, body & spirit, physical & metaphysical - flow through this echoing the spirals of which you dream.
I once met someone shot through with a root of light - the memory makes me smile.

ellom said...

Brilliant. Pure . . . brilliant.

alvaro barcala said...

Your words are an spiral map that starts in a house and ends in your heart. A beating geography. Each beat is an epiphany.

Kim said...

Very meaningful today to me. Love your mind!

nadine paduart said...

so i have nanci from the previous post peppering this a-one.
i wonder whether you are married now?
all the best.
n♥

theunicornman said...

warmth of birthday suits you conquer me still