The Mercurial Muser’s Manifesto

Another day, another nightmare about the world staying exactly as we know it. Chin up baby-girl, it ain't all blues-a-plenty. Today could be the day you convert your husband to Marxism, and before long you'll be reading Rosa Luxemburg together on the sofa by a swollen fireplace and every morning you’ll swim naked in the hyaline lake and as the day retreats you’ll write manifestos on your lover’s body underneath a blood-soaked moon while he plays with the caramel tendrils of your hair and earnestly asks you about your hopes and fears and suddenly your eyes will gleam again even when you're dubbed a misandrist because you finally remember what you look like beneath the gaud and gossamer and you'll invert and reframe the fragmented distortions of yourself that you've only ever viewed through the cracked lens of the male gaze just to reify time and time again with perfected pirouettes and you won't have to appease them by slathering on any greasepaint to cover up your beauty marks or to disguise your scars as if to hide who you are and you won’t become overstrung when they constantly fawn over you because God forbid you don’t hit the notes right and you'll shatter the illusion that you'd make a good ingenue because you’ve never been helpless you only just acted the part you were cast in and most of the time they wanted a manic pixie dream girl and they never really knew the real you nor even wanted to because of your tendency to rewrite the script to suit your mood and scream seditious soliloquies as soon as the stage lights fade out but now you’ll never have to pretend that you don't know the things you already know even though a ‘nice girl’ understands that it's always better to act interested than to be interesting and you'll sell off all your shares in whatever night-soiled hellscape we've created here as the billionaire boys’ club stands high atop a mountain of skulls and your children will understand your passions and your phobias alike so when the hourglass is running dry you’ll already be packed and ready to fly even though you can't see your wings yet and you’ll never be made fallow or expected to produce a masterpiece on a machine operating with rusted gears and when you're moribund and ready to release yourself of all your worldly attachments you will have already convinced your babies that you should be returned to the Earth and spread as soil that feeds the worms and nourishes the trees instead of holding some mistaken belief that you'll be happier in a bird-covered silver jar on a dusty shelf overlooking a mass-produced art print and trendy silken house plants and they won't be waiting for you to die just so they can inherit more than your petulant mouth with its distaste for packaged goods that suspiciously never expire and they’ll fondly recall your aversion to artificial Christmas trees because you hate that they're scentless and spiders don’t crawl out from the pines and they'll remember why you said you felt a sense of deep malaise when you visited the Palace of Versailles because greed comes in gilded form and if you lived back then you'd be storming the gates and they'll get wistful about your disdain for all the lithospheric interactions that left you wanting more because they could never touch the core and end up lost in the minutiae between the ceaseless doomscrolling and the unremitting to-do lists that never seem to matter anyway and maybe one day your son and daughters will finally figure out what this incarnation is about and that’s the point of having babies because God knows it's not to make you happy or even to make you proud, it's to grow them from seed to sapling and let them experience this Earth as humanly as possible so they can fervently march forward to be absorbed into expansive beams of light and to explore darkened corridors and to stretch their pliant limbs outwards through every passageway in-between and to dive in the caverns of a drowning heart and to cut through the immured ceilings of the mind and maybe one day they'll know why the oak tree bends but doesn’t break and why the trunk becomes inosculated instead of standing alone and then when their skin sacks fall away they'll understand you were just trying to get them closer to their own knowing while still trying to seek your own if only to find that which calls your soul home…

with every hard won breath, with every stumbled step, with every tangled web, on and on and on she goes…

July 6 - Soft white underbelly

sometimes I live

in the past participle state

of what was

And I feel the rigidity of grief and loss

calcifying my bones

until they are brittle

and liable to break

the longing for a return

to sacred days

and the pain of knowing

the days will never come again

vulcanizing my skin

acclimating me

to all future weather conditions

no matter how tumultuous

or unexpected

I've spent so long

telling myself that a scintilla of doubt

is better than an abundance of hope

that self-abnegation

is better than self-interest

and I forgot how to

let things flow

to let things go

I drown out the good

with mental monologues

about how the world isn't safe

and I talk to the little girl

who worried that her brother

would not come home

and tell her that one day he won't

and you saw that coming, darling

you can predict everything

you can control fates

if only you'd stepped in

and other terrible lies of the mind

when the truth of it is

you can't stop rivers from flowing

or change the way the wind is blowing

you can't stop fires from burning

you can't stop the world from turning

but you should never let

the broken world turn you

so be at the ready

be a little harder girl

and yet I yearn for softness

for my insides to be sinuous

pulsating with a life force

that connects to every part

of the bodymind

the tender parts readily exposed

I don't like my razor tongue

that cuts in retaliation

before the words are lost

and I am weary of the vast selection

of masks I wear

to pretend and perform away my pain

and I am bleeding from

the sharp edges I create

with nowhere to go but off

I like to meet my monsters

under the light of the glaring sun

I like to soothe them

and remind them their work is done

I tell them they're no longer allowed

to stay, to slay, to lie in wait

in the shadows of my mind

I don't want to be exiled from

the beauty and the pain

of the disappearing present

or spend my life talking to ghosts

of the irreclaimable past

I want to stay connected

to all that is growing and changing

I want to wonder,

what if something good happens?

what if it all works out?

I want to feel the earth beneath my feet

instead of dancing on air

for fear that at any moment

the bottom will drop out

I want my soft white underbelly

to be force of strength

an unencumbered gift

a source of light

a birthplace of oneness

a reminder that I am

resilient and alive

July 5 - See into the trees. Find the girl while you can.

I wander through dense brush

and set lush forests ablaze

to find hidden realms inside myself

and leap from crumbling pedestals

to illuminate lessons learned and reified.

Every iteration of every girl,

for there have been many

in so short a time.

34. The botched year.

35. The year of humility.

36. The era of growth and self-discovery,

of quiet lulls and contentment

and peace...

maybe peace.

No hustling.

Just being.

Just living.

Just seeing.

Just breathing.