stretching bones
today's poems are for those who are learning what having a body means.
Hey comrades.
Thank you, as ever, for being a safe place for art and vulnerability to land.
Having somewhere to spill poems into a couple of times a week is nourishing beyond words.
I hope it’s nourishing for you too. I hope you see yourself here. But, even if you don’t, it’s an honour to have you see me.
Grateful always.
I’m ovulating with the New Moon at the moment. Inside REWILDING, we work with a five-season map of our cycles (and all cycles of Nature), whereby each season has something vital and distinct to teach us about how to divest from the violently oppressive indoctrination of fascist colonial capitalist patriarchy and return to our wild humanity. Within this map, ovulation is how our bodies initiate us into holding high sensation. It’s where we learn how to be with the intensity of being seen, so that we’re able to more effectively take a stand and embody our roles in revolution.
High sensation is still something I’m still learning how to have intimacy with.
I’ve spent most of my life in various attempts to escape the fact that I have a body at all, let alone that it can hold high sensation.
A monthly initiation into holding it with ovulation (or with the Full Moon, for anyone not menstruating right now for any reason), is gruelling but educational.
Just wanted to give you some context going in about where this little collection of poems is coming from today.
Love and need you. Thanks for being here ❤️
If you get a lot from my creative labours and you feel like engaging in some reciprocity, you can do that by becoming a paid subscriber.
For less than the cost of a coffee each fortnight, you will be the reason I’m able to keep writing and creating for you, and for everyone, while still being able to enjoy the benefits of housing and food.
You’ll also get a bunch of cool bonus stuff, like fortnightly breakdowns with each new + full moon, a monthly astrological forecast, all published poetry collections, and a weekly audio ep where I’ll be chatting more in depth about all things recovery from fascist colonial capitalist patriarchy.
THANK YOU for supporting a solo artist and writer in these revolutionary times ❤️ ❤️
hope is a monster.
“Hope”
Say the word, and you think of butterflies
Wings softer than velvet
Fluttering to the beat of racing hearts
Barely touching the ground before they’re off again
You think of a statue of glass
Smaller than your hand
Intricately carved by only the steadiest fingers
Only to be touched oh so gently
Moved oh so slowly
One wrong clench of mindless fingers
And it shatters.
You think of the blink of colour right before dawn
The briefest moment
Caught by only the luckiest few
Gone so fast you barely convince yourself you saw it at all
Sitting in wait while the world turns, too slow
Please, let me catch the next one.
Please, let me know it was real.
You think of the tiniest bud
In the earliest spring
The first flecks of green you’ve seen in months
Too small to hold themselves up
Too delicate to be stepped on.
You’d be wrong, though.
Hope looks nothing like that.
Hope is the roar of an unlocked jaw
Blood and spit flying from sharp teeth
A bellow to put the hairs of the bravest soldier on end.
Hope is ancient roots
Reaching down to the belly of the earth
Stretching for nourishment older and broader than imagining
Our fears are so young, really.
Hope is the clenched muscles in the wiry arms of girls who dared be the first ones with their name to hold their NO with honour
A thousand thousand grandmothers flex with them
Their echoes stretching across the elapsed years
Etching themselves into her young bones
They have ancient strength now.
Hope is the raging fire
Tearing through a forest
It knows that for there to be any creation at all there must be absolute destruction
It consumes everything, relentlessly, ferociously,
Leaving nothing behind
For the sake of coming spring.
Hope is an ocean
The cliff face has no chance
It might be formidable now
Jagged, rough, mighty
But for all its posturing
The inevitable crumble is coming.
Hope is not a delicate thing.
Never fragile, never soft.
Hope is a monstrous beast
Coming to devour the little boy kings
And build the inevitable world
The one that can’t help but come
On the ruins of empires they thought would last forever.
