I am.

A "poem"

Photo by Sergey Vinogradov on Unsplash

Authors note,

This poem gets very dark and graphic and will be hard to read.

But the words used here do not scratch the surface of the destruction and pain that they describe, nor the surface of my rage at what humans have done to our own home and our own Mother.

Read it or don’t.

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I am.

These are two words which transcend themselves.

Two words in which a million poems of shining brilliance could be written

And still,

The surface of meaning would not be scratched.

For trying to capture the state of Being,

With words invented to represent the eternal,

Is like trying to capture wind with a closed fist.

To know this,

Is to know oneself.

To know this,

Is to dance with the infinite as she dances through us.

And become part of the movement of ourselves.

To not fear one’s own nature.

Some remember.

But all of us know.

I am.

I am new and I am ancient.

I am movement

And I am the words we use to try to describe that movement.

I am the lips and breathe and saliva and vibration of a thousand cries rippling through the air,

and the silence they are answered with.

I am stillness.

The stillness within which stirs the birth of Creation.

For the space held by one

Invites the presence of the other.

I am the Blood of River

And the Spirit of Dream.

I am the swirling whirlpool where they meet and diverge.

Yes, my Friend.

I am you

And you are me.

And at the same time,

I am the eyes created only so that they may see you,

To be sure that you are over there,

And I am indeed over here.

I am the space between us that pretends to be empty.

I am the illusion that the space separates us.

I am the relief that we may hold each other,

And the grief that we may lose each other.

For I am the drops of wine poured in celebration of a thousand new Loves,

And I am the Sands of the hourglasses to which our Blood is forever bound.

I am the Home we leave to embark on our adventures,

The one we think we will never again see;

Only to wake up there

And remember it all.

Oh, so clearly

How could we have forgotten?

Forgotten our own face?

I am the promise we make to ourselves

That this time we surely will not forget,

And I am the blissful ignorance that comes when we once again forget.

I am the wonder that is born from that ignorance,

And the dread that wonder sometimes leads to.

I am the dancing Jester of change.

And each mask she wears so terribly well.

I am and I am and I am again.

I am the first shakes come to the steadiest of hands.

I am the first mistake in the most solid of plans.

I am the tendon in an overworked wrist

Threatening to snap

I am the bending guitar strings

And the voice which meets those vibrations in the air.

I am the ancient Tree who was killed to make the guitar

And I was making music before I was cut down.

I am the Woman whose womb protected me before I had skin

I am the man whose seed swam the farthest

I am now a tired and angry man with missing teeth

And rasping lungs

An angry man

who hates his own kind.

a man

whose greatest fear

is not death.

Oh, no.

Whose greatest fear,

Is that death,

will not free him.

Is that he will once again be born into this time of monsters.

With clear enough eyes to see what it is they are doing

to feel what they are doing

and feel powerless

while he watches

his own kind

rape their mother.

His mother.

and oh,

how it hurts

It agonizes

I am

That pain

I am the land which gets drilled and blasted and burned and poisoned

I am the oil which should have never been taken from the depths of Earth

I am the Coal who belonged in the Cliffside,

and the Mountain who did not consent.

I am the River who is crying from pipelines being forced into me

and my tears are now laced with tar.

I am the ancient Water who gave birth to you

And I cry while I am forced through these evil machines

I am the Beaver who swims through that water

Whose bloodline connects me to this home since before time was measured and called “time”

And now there are chemicals of warfare in my Blood

I am the graves of those who once honored me

Over which strip-malls now stand.

I am the Buffalo

Who once roamed free

And I am his kin

Now born into slavery.

I am no longer viewed as important

I am no longer viewed as Life

I am called “it”

And I am laughed at when my insides are smeared on pavement.

Pavement where there once was soft Earth

Soft Earth in which my feet knew how to roam.

And now

There are heartless machines

Flying every which way

Where I used to live.

And I am unable to get back to my babies

But I must try

Because they will die without me.

I do not make it across

And I am scraped off the road

And my body is thrown in the landfill

Where there once stood

a Waterfall.

But there is Waterfall no more.

I am the bird whose feathers are torn from my skin while I am still alive

By laughing demons

My Feathers are then put in sleeping bags

So you can be warm

while you

“Connect with Nature.”

I am the Dolphin and Turtle who gets trapped in your nets

My fins and arms get torn off by the plastic

and thought and sense is drown

By the ceaseless screams of my brothers and sisters.

And you show me no mercy when I am dumped onto your ships

Instead

I am murdered without honor or grace or intention or truth or acknowledgment.

I am the Bear whose foot was cut off by the cold metal teeth

Of a trap

That was put in my own home.

And I died in the woods

after bleeding out for eighteen hours.

And now my head is stuffed with chemicals and mounted above the fireplace

Of someone who

Calls themselves evolved and civilized.

I am the soil.

The soil who grows everything you need to survive

The soil

Who is teaming with the life of everyone who has ever fallen in the Forest,

The soil who makes sure you live on forever

In the endless flow of Creation.

And now

I am being poisoned

I am being poisoned so you can grow your poison food so you can poison your own kind.

I am the Mountain who you decapitated to mine the phosphate to make that poison

I am the ground who you burned and then buried the radioactive ore inside

A vault

That you guarantee

Will last one hundred years

Before leaking.

I guess you don’t mind if your Grandchildren drink death.

It will no longer be

“your problem.”

And now I feel the vaults cracking

Walls crumbling

And the Stream running through this land,

Changing.

I am the Fish and Crow and Elk and Willow who need that stream to survive.

The stream in which no one may now drink.

I am

A being

who wishes,

With everything I have,

To leave these monsters behind.

And forget what they have done to my Home

I am

A man

who fears my own hands.

for the blood in which they are stained has permeated through generations

and I cannot wash it

for the river is now poisoned.

I am

A memory

Of a time before

Before the poison

A time before we were so lost

And so confused

A time

When we didn’t feel entitled to answers

Because there was nothing we needed to know

That we couldn’t

feel.

A time when we knew

That we cannot know

what we cannot feel.

A time when we knew

That answers gained by way of senseless bloodshed and defilement of Nature

Are answers lost.

A time before we traumatized our Mother

And called it progress.

A time before

Everyone on Earth was born carrying that trauma.

A time before

This desecration

Became malignant.

For I am that time as I am this time

And I will be what follows

But for now

I am the screams you refuse to hear

I am the blood spilled

I am those who died without honor or respect

Those forgotten

Those shamed

Those desecrated

Those devalued

and degraded

And disgraced

You will find no resolution here

To make one up would be a lie.

For the war rages on

Right now.

You may close blinds and lock doors and turn up the television

But your heart knows what you won’t let your eyes see.

And still,

Despite shut eyes and closed minds and distracted lips and weak stomachs,

I am.

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Wow.

That was hard to read.

I think I might need to go throw up now.

Yeah, no shit.

I didn’t start this “poem” with the intention of it turning out like that, but at a certain point it began flowing from my fingertips so freely it’s almost as if I wasn’t the one writing it.

There is an important message here.

The fact that no one wants to read this does not change the fact that our society is built on these things. And that we perpetuate these things with almost everything we do, even though most of us do not desire to.

A species which needs to blind itself to its own ways is a species lost.

In my opinion, Balance is;

Seeing the effects of everything that you do in-front of you, and being a part of it. When we are able to see the effects of our actions, and they are happening on a scale that we are connected to and can understand, symbiosis naturally occurs.

The way our “civilization” is structured, we do not see the effects of anything that we do, because they are buried in the convoluted, insane, and control-driven systems of modern capitalism.

It is one of the core principles of my philosophy that we are made with the inherent equiptment to feel what is going on in our environment, almost as if it was happening to our own body, and react to it accordingly. We are designed to be intrinsically connected to the Earth and to each other. I believe that the life which springs from one’s environment is quite literally an extension of the environment itself, and vice-versa. Just as the child who grows in their Mothers womb is an extension, and product of, their mother and father.

We are this Water and we are this Land.

We are the eyes and ears and nerves of this Earth come to life, come to experience ourselves.

In other words, I think we are supposed to feel what is happening to the Earth and take it as personally as if it were happening to our own Mother.

Because, after all, it is.

And I think that, although there are a lot of human-made and greed-driven forces to keep us numb, we can still feel it. We just don’t always know what it is that we are feeling.

I plan to do a more in-depth piece on my thoughts surrounding this matter soon but for now I will say,

Change starts with acknowledging what we are doing wrong.

And for humanity, that is damn near everything.

If we can face it, our own actions, maybe we can move forward and re-discover ourselves and our real home.

Thank you for reading.

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