you were the one to keep our family together

Imagine 

Skin forged together, engineered and replicated 

And sewn together like 

Patchwork. 

A delicate beauty of embroidered flesh 

A blanket moistened by the oils of shea

Yet strong.

Grafted together by bronze stitching 

Imagine

Being worn like a cloth shawl, 

Washed and hung after muddy winters

Imagine bleaching the tarnished stains 

Left by fires not vanquished 

Yet quelled. 

Imagine 

The images seen and lived within skin like 

This

Skin meant [‘invoked’] for this. 

Ponder for a moment your favorite

Thing, that thing that keeps you safe 

From yourself 

Did it ask for that?

Imagine the melody of its request – 

The harmonic discord 

Ponder living within the stitching 

Of covering.

The churning of cells barred within a helix, 

Coded. Willed. 

Thought into existence to be salve

To be the balm, 

The filling of cracked calluses 

And grooves of dry cuts which 

Never seem to seal 

Which never seem to seam. 

Imagine. 

Choosing this journey is choosing 

to break.

Choosing to remove strip

bare the layers between this here; 

and that now

Choosing to soften hard flesh, to step calloused skin 

on to grit 

Unto broken shells upon the shore

Beckoning 

Baring down gravity’s call, 

tilling footprints of trauma and transmutation

Choosing to step again, to forge 

onward towards the shore 

past the shore 

past what can be seen – 

what can be painted – 

past what glitters to the natural, I. 

past the bundles of air & water – 

dancing about the blue lagoon

Then? what say lays past 

This here

Choosing then, what lays past 

This here

To welcome, to surrender, to bask 

in the brisk slicing my exposed nape 

chilling bumps upon naked breasts 

Choosing? insanity

Choosing to ignore the alerts and alarms of 

Onlookers

Echoes of hows and whys and where are yous 

– to drown does not exist in 

that now 

I, Eyes fixed ahead on this journey

Choosing to fix my eyes 

ahead on this journey

To reach the water’s edge, frothing white 

dances with my toes and pulls me further 

past the riff,

past where salty waters embrace my legs

Here, I choose to let salt 

Pack into open sores 

The ones new and forgotten 

I let the salt dig, warm 

Clot me.

Choosing to surrender my thighs that have 

Grounded my flight in times of fight 

Choosing to release that which has centered me 

In fears pursuit 

Choosing to buckle on my right side 

-air escapes my lungs as the base of my spine cracks

Upwards 

Shattered upwards

Swallowing, being swallowed by truth 

By that which lies 

there now

Bones creak until they 

Crack 

Dominoing unto each other 

Onlookers fixed in horror beholding this here –

insanity?

Searching for the name for this here 

Nameless.

Choosing to be pounded, the pistol and mortar 

Of each wave pounding and grinding 

Bone into dust.

What? Remains of that which lays 

here 

No more breath. 

But lastly sight. 

Fixed ahead gazing above 

The light which kisses me one last time in – 

This here

One last time before I, 

Choose to melt to fuse into that now 

The now the waters tell of before the now the waves echo of 

the future 

I am the belly of creation 

I am the froth 

Blood and bone has taken its seat and its 

bid ado

I am the twirl 

and the collapse 

of every wave I am that which can be carried by the wind

I am Rachel. I am defining what that means everyday… and I don’t ever want to stop. I have no desire to stop. I am excited, fluttered by, tickled by, seduced by, tantalized by, the idea that I will always have more to taste and feel from this lifetime.

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I am a storyteller at heart. On every level, in every realm, it is inextricable of who I am and what my truest essence is. I have expended a lot of energy being shameful, doubtful, and guarded about this nature…

…and now I hold fast to my declaration and continued commitment to walking on love’s path. To being bold, naked, and free. To sharing myself with others while I am in process. I exist to rebel against the commodification of humanness, the packaging and selling of experience, and all that separation manifests into.

Here, my goal is to just be and share. This, I suppose, is one part of my advocacy, one method of liberation – in honor of my ancestors before me, and in gratitude for the lives of those after me. Audre Lorde states in her essay ‘Poetry is Not a Luxury’ ~

“I speak here of poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to cover their desperate wish for imagination without insight. For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”

This is my why, for being open and public. I am actively negotiating and renegotiating my own philosophies, and thereby by our (this world’s) agreed upon systems. I live by and for change, or rather i am committed to continuously confronting, to not running away and to remembering I can create and forge paths that do not exist. And OH MAN, what a ride to get here. And what a ride that kind of commitment embraces.

It’s scary as shit. And I fucking love it. Ha. See you on our way.

PS ~ Most of this will be stream of consciousness unedited gawgusness. Unless i feel otherwise lol. ThankQ for loving it!

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On love’s path I feel it all.