I'm sharing two poems that are in a deep conversation. 'Wild in the Wound' explores the fractured state that comes before a great change. 'Wilderness Skills' is the action that follows. One is wound, the other is work . I invite you to experience them in that order.
Wild in the Wound
(a prequel)
Hold me in a morphine drip on an electric fence Hold me in the gap between coping and fixing Hold me in the divide between breathing and living Just hold me. These scars found me through angels and boredom. Vapor. and first memories crooked teeth unbroken strings of experience splatters on bed sheets splatters in bedpans fresh cuts fresh cut flowers unopened boxes of white linen gauze the taste of metal filling his mouth. We reached further in, under neon lights in settled houses. Abandoning language for shine, our blessings blew right through human curtains. Eating through the salacious air hanging in temples and table flips ministerial money counters shaped our evangelizing vapors into brand frontiers in the marketplace of dreams. We exchanged our anvil songs for yellowing veneers of curiosity, manufactured for those believed to be not trustworthy with their own estimations. Frustrated fruit flies. Vapor. Blessings can stagger unprepared travelers. Survivors of plagues wear this in sweat mendacious smiles and longing looks dropped on rainbow streets near the dark side of dawn. Laid across a nation, in quilt stitches rushed resolutions and rapacious goodbyes our love-language metabolized wilderness. Learning, as we did in early skin, that love is a wilderness skill. When stillness sets in (again) we cry. Survivors of plagues feel guilty in remembering some(times) but Whitman and exuberance are, for the moment, our dependable deepness. Where is there to go inside vapor? Where forever roads loop back to find stardust again in the rock-born heart of a dying star. Seems funny. How much we need rock to hold skin together, so their courage can still walk beside us. In winks and grins across page turns, we slip through, (sideways) to where the Hill of Tara bends in staurolite tears. Vexed spirits who yet walked steady through it all, in sojourn to assumed revelation.
Wildnerness Skills
Part I: Direction Don’t wait for revelation when you reach the frontier. Desire is truth here. Crossing frontiers is a fierce decision made in extreme honesty. Pavement to gravel gravel to earth earth to desire (that holding of a star). In wilderness far off places are not silent but yesterday’s eyes will hear only noise. To find your traveling ground, don’t wait for revelation. Part II: Unburdening Back in settled houses old stories often betrayed sunlight without consequence. They won’t survive here. Giving things away is how you become large enough, light enough, clever enough, to let go of those small names. Those small names only weigh you down here. Part III: Loss of Language Honest mirrors crack open when the wound of light hits. Some(how). is of no use in mirrors. Some(body). needles sense-making in secrets. Like old lovers, outlines are there, but with each passing day, harder the memory comes to animate meaning. Loss of language hits hard, when it reveals what is abandoned for shine. Part IV: Acquisition of Vocation It's a raw meat moment cradled in a notorious garden, when hearing the first calling of your original name. All that heaviness you carried here? Now broken by columns of dark sky torn by dynamite fusion in deteriorating imagination bones. The stripped-off skin of a generation becomes a Turing Test for the soul in a garden’s wildness Vocation is hand. Navigation is glove. Part V: Homecoming Flicking off shallows, a runaway angel navigates paradise with a conjuring memory distilling ruckus in last moment bottles where vapor stomachs touch the spine hot fiery steps beyond coherence reveal consequence in wilderness hold me
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Theo Edmonds, Culture Futurist® & Founder, Creativity America | Bridging Creative Industries and Brain Science with Future of Work & Wondervation®
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