I’m already packed.
I’m ready to go.
I left this place.
Weeks ago.

I live out of a makeup case.
Use a backpack for a suitcase
I have paired my wardrobe
Down to indestructible accessories.

This time I leave a life line
This time I leave a trace
I got my compass
I found my north
A gentleman’s spirit
And an explorers worth.

I had to connect to both sides to do this.
For I contain both my father and my mother.
Both wanderers in their own way
One in the Navy
One in her life choices.
Both settled after the fray

I lead to follow the footsteps of my forebears
To reconnect with things abandoned long ago.
I don’t know who I am any more.
I lost it along the way.
Every baggage dropped
was a thing forgotten -
A little piece of myself
discarded into dust.

I go to find them.
I hear their call.
Each a treasure
Once a curse
Bags on my back
Hands on my purse.

I clutch my instrument in hand
In all the meanings of the bards of old
I go forth with a clarion voice
And a story needing told.

I embraced Mother Earth.
I can still smell her on my skin.
I can still feel the strength of her bones,
beneath my hands that raked her soil.
Cast in the iron pumping through her like lava
flowing from her molten core.

I danced through her sands
and scaled every mountain peak
and followed the lead of her gentle curves.
The feminine form of the Pacha Mama,
The Gaia, the Demeter, that sacred body.
That well-spring of life,
The true feminine form
That is stronger than I,
welcoming me down
until I am buried.

Two black flowers reach
over graves of parted past
to touch leaf and stem

Their roots feed on buried bones
So their buds can bloom anew

Love sucks like every inaccurate description of a black hole
Where the designer got physics wrong and the dimensions droll
Our singular minds cannot understand the mathematics required
To calculate the blow out of our heart well’s desire.

What dilations of space and time can explain your gravity
As you bend the light toward my eyes and concave a cavity
Shaping uncertain principles and impossible probabilities
Outrunning you breaks constant laws and my capabilities

Reduce me to a singularity’s point
When ego means nothing and the self is disjoint
Stretch my being until the fibers untwine
And give me a parsec’s unit of time

For a looping eternity would not be enough

I want to sleep in the mountains oblivion
Where my dreams can freeze into something stygian
Where the rivers harden and ice forms the buttress
Where they can’t gain purchase on my mountain fortess
And everything’s made quiet by the long attenuation

I want the cessation of thought so complete
That it leaves me breathless and silence so deep
Something like death in the familial way
Where the peace is a gift at the end of the day.
And is lasts just long enough to quietly sleep

No more screaming or sweating or grinding teeth
Just restful hypothermia like falling asleep
My guilts and failures would have no power there
and they’d be the ones gasping for air.
Take me right to that final line and give me some peace.

As the cold closes my eyes and my breathing slows
I’d trade all the frostbitten fingers and toes
I’d go out like a climber who’d lost his way
Even if it meant just one peaceful day.
I’d have climbed my own mountain and gotten away.