Beginnings

Forty Years Ago

~ M. A Morris ~ 8 Comments
personal image of sunrise in Ruidoso, New Mexico

For forty years,
We walked days through,
Asking strangers known, “How are you?””
Without really wanting to know.
Our answers in kind,
A litany of fines
And greats and couldn’t be betters.
All the while,
Parts are chipped away.
Our edges rough
Like antique china tea cups.
It is thus
Life becomes measured out
In phrases,
And we speak of it
In stages and ages
Of what is next for us.
Told to be grateful for what I have,
I never mourned the losing
Of what was wanted once
Now forgotten,
Or regretted,
Or never attained
In the first place.
Until forty years have flipped
Through the fingers
Like the pages of a dusty book
With yellow crinkled pages
Written in faded ink,
An anthology of years,
For each of us.

On this southwest horizon,
We meet once again, and
We watch sunrise and sunset.
Our heads bent toward each other
As if in prayer.
Our hair a tangle of silver and white
In the winds of New Mexico.
Only time will tell
What comes of this
Tangle of loneliness and longing.

Wings

~ M. A Morris ~ 6 Comments

A wish to follow the sun
And always know its light
Was a childhood dream.
I never wanted to know night.

Terrors happened without light,
So began my craving
For warmth and light.

The natural world and its order
Cannot satisfy such cravings.
One must learn to live without light.
An adult adjustment, a drooping in the spine
Of spirit, a caving inward happens
When childhood cravings must give way
To the knife sharp edge of the adult
World order, how one learns to avoid
The blade of reality, curl inward.

Others hammered out cages
That seemed to fit for me.
Told me to shut up and be happy.
Each wire in the cage a reason
For my unhappiness
With which the one who wielded
The hammer had nothing to do so it was claimed
Or
Each wire a welded bond of a reason
Why I should be happy
If I shut up and smiled
A pretty smile
and wept tears of happiness
Upon my fiery, welding savior.

For years, I kept silent.
Silence made for a peaceful cage,
So I had learned.

Then it happened.
My silence gathered round me,
Head to toe,
Wrapping me in darkness and warmth.
At first, panic.
Nothing good ever happened in darkness.
But I felt them start to form.
Slowly, painfully.
So painfully.
A pain I had never felt before,
Starting in my mouth,
Traveling down my throat,
Seeping out either side of my spine
Between my shoulder blades.
Giving birth had been less painful
Than this, as if new bone and tissue
Formed and moved and settled in.

After a few years,
the chrysalis of silence split open.
I spoke as my new sprouted wings dried,
“You were the wires of the cage meant
To keep me from the warmth I crave,
Meant to keep me from the stirrings of my blood.
Meant to keep me from the sun.”

I am caged no longer now.
I migrate with the sun
And all things those with cages
Sought to keep me from,
Things that stir the blood,
Things that feed on
The warmth of the sun
Are mine to alight upon.

Darkness and Flame

~ M. A Morris ~ Leave a comment
one of my own images

Let me walk into the darkest sunrise,
Then let me crawl into the brightest sunset.
Fading into each as all my weaknesses,
All my wrongs, all my sins, all my flaws
Boil to the surface, burn,
Turning black and crusting over me.

Let me emerge,
Then from the cracking, heaping ash,
Surely not as perfect,
But as something better,
Like iron tempered into steel.

Yet if emerging
As a thing tempered
I cannot be,
Let me be content to simply fade
Into darkness and flame,
Consumed by each in turn
Until nothing remained
And I become
The darkness and the flame.

Modern Prometheus becomes The Little Stranger

~ M. A Morris ~ Leave a comment

Originally posted on Braveandrecklessblog.com

 So now we know,
 You told me I wasn’t,
 But I was—
 Your creation.
  
 Said you loved me
 Just the way I was—
 But was it true?
  
 Yes, I was perfect
 Just the way I was—
 You said,
 But you didn’t care for:
 My curly hair,
 My dresses,
 My high heels,
 My red lipstick.
  
 So, I became a cut out,
 Of the rest of my parts
 With the parts you inserted,
 A sewn together woman.
 Then electrified and brought back
 To life by a love you claimed
 Was for the true me.
  
 Now the parts you inserted
 Die away, shriveling at the lack
 Of your electricity.
 I stumble,
 A stiff-legged walk to your door,
 Shuck this graying shit and warm myself
 By the fire I create to burn
 These rigor mortised parts.
 Thus, I become something more akin
 To myself once again—
 That little stranger
 With curly hair,
 Wearing dresses,
 High heels,
 And signature whore red—
 I become
 My little one.
  
  

Creation

~ M. A Morris ~ Leave a comment

child.jpg

I carved you
from the stone of me
chiseled out your edges,
inside and out,
freed you from the depths
of my abyss,
while my ears
felt the sting
of the hammer pounding,
my bones felt the crunch
of the chisel chipping,
my skin felt the ripping slice
of stone shards flying
tearing through all
flesh and bone of me
until
there was you
sculpted better than
the worth of me
cast off from you
I absorb in finality
what it is
in the truth of God
and pray.

Coldness of the Days

~ M. A Morris ~ Leave a comment

The coldness of the days between
Measured by degrees
Equaled by the miles
Separating desires
One from the other
With the freezing of the hours
Marking time and distance
Comes the ache of body and heart
Between the leaving and reuniting
To wake in a landscape filled with you
And the world I see within your blue eyes
Rather than a barren bed
Would warm and soothe
The ache of body and heart