Feral

who taught my heart to live
outside my body? as if it were
a creature always looking for a home
I am more than a shell but still
it leaps lion-bold after new smiles
frog hopping towards tiny fingers
growing wings at the sight of sunsets

sometimes I have to chase it down
when it's given itself to someone far
away, only the elastic of my veins to
keep me on the trail of the hunt

sometimes it tries to run in every
direction at once, aspiring to crimson
starburst, a carmine firework overhead
I ache, I ache

I had it locked away once, caged so
it could only sniff at the scent of
others passing; rattling my bones and
murmuring in my sleep. I tried to hide
its teeth and claws, its yellow eyes,
the hunger, the hunger. I still carry
the padlock of fear, rusted with resolve
but it does not hold for long

every time the beast escapes me
it feeds, grows. my skeleton grows brittle. when someone hands back
my heart, torn and bruised
strangely sated - it hurts
to squeeze it back
into the cave of my chest

I have to nurse it back to health
together we water the garden
beds of my ribs and watch the
tender shoots of peace curl up
and I rearrange my innards
making room for what we've taken
in, what was learned

but it's restless, this impish heart
and quiet days alone do not sate
it for long. Soon it will be hungry again
nipping at the underside of my skin
thumping     hungry    hungry
find it, find them, find him!

Who taught my heart to live
outside my body, hunting for
the love of anyone
but me?

Still the girl

This week three men wanted me. My year turned on the hinge of their desire.

This is a language I understand. How it begins is how it ends.

My answer, three times.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl on the beach with thighs twelve years too large, flesh bulging against the chicken-wire gaze of her father and uncle? My bicycle dubbed the gate to acceptability, to shrinking those meaty fillets down to a size that might make me invisible to scorn.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl, fifteen with billboard breasts proclaiming the ripeness of my sex to every man that passed. Before I had learned how to open the long library vault of my mouth. How everyone in a foreign country thought I was my father's wife, in that daisy dress made for a church I no longer believed in?

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl in the warehouse, far from home. Seventeen so green, not a colour a person should ever be. His twice-my-age fingers moved like vine tendrils, brushing my waist, tucking in the tag of my shirt. Into my body a tree trunk, like my sapling self had always belonged to him. Curled in my grandmother's shower with shame.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I am still the girl, twenty-one and never kissed. The first time, my teeth were bars and I did not want to unlock them. His kisses tasted like ash and held a key to the library he would never enter.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl twenty and eight, when moan was just a word and pleasure an idea. Whose virginity became a trophy she was tired of carrying, fox-weary of the steeplechase, the sniffing hounds. So threw it to a pale-fleshed creature who did not understand how twinned desire and fear can be.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl whose no turned limp, fell like a body in a waterfall when he pushed and pushed again. Drowned when he said it was my fault. Two years gone and I'm breathing again but the timber of my belly is still waterlogged.

I am not for you.

Don't they know, I'm still the girl with a canyon named father in her chest? With a trickle, a creek called love in that chasm signed man. With a bear in the belly of that canyon. She roars at all the strangers stumbling in. There is no haven in this body, this tree trunk is not home.

I am not for you.

To the men that wanted me this week, and the ones that are waiting for me next week and the ones after that.

You can't fill in my canyons with the soil of your masculinity. There isn't enough of you to make it solid ground again. Didn't anyone teach you how earthquakes work?

When it rains, sometimes the creek floods. Sometimes the canyon is full and love washes the stone ledges clean. There are always traces of earth left behind. Maybe we can plant a garden in the crevices together, grow something that hasn't been here before.

You can't fuck my history out of me, can't rescue me from fires that razed long before you arrived. I have not been waiting safe in a tower for you and your steed. I have not been waiting. I have not been safe.

Forests always grow back after fires.

We can't dance if you are always stepping forward. If you move in the only place I can breathe is away. Don't chase me into the canyon.

I am still the girl that dances on the Sabbath day. Dances at midnight. Twirls in her skirts and howls at the sickle moon.

This is a language I understand. How it begins is how it ends.

If I am for you, remember the girl. Learn her too. I am the bear and the canyon and the flood and still the girl.

When a man tells you...

When a man tells you your mouth was made for his
It's okay to get weak all the way down to your knees, even your toes
You should swoon and let him kiss you more, and again
Just remember your mouth is the cave
and he has not yet met your blind words
Flying out of the darkness to meet the twilight outside

When a man says that your bodies were made to fit
You are allowed to believe him, to measure
the intersections of your limbs. To mould
your yielding flesh to his questing hands
First, make sure he has heard you howl
That he sees the strength in your bones
the vastness of your hungry mind
the crone looking out from your eyes

When a man says that he wants to love you
You can want him to. You can yield
surrender to the roar in your chest
But learn first what keeps your precious
fires burning, and steady. The difference between
"I don't want to lose you" and "I want to keep you"

He believes you are moths to each other's  flame
But yours is the fire of the stars

'Moth and flame' by Dynasthai

The cure for a bad week

via Lessons Learned in Life

In the night, I dreamed of impossible choices

I dreamed that I was getting married to a man I'd never met.  It was arranged by 'Aunt and Uncle', two archetypal characters in the Mauritian clan which is my father's side of the family (there are no such characters in the waking world, to my knowledge).

I was okay with it, with walking down the aisle to commit myself to a stranger, but everyone around me was shocked.  Not so much about the marriage, but that I, of all people, would agree to such a thing for myself.  This surprised me a little, for those that were the most vocally shocked were those that know me least (cousins, aunts, others with unspecified relationships).  The closer members of my family were present but smudged, slightly faded into the background.

The man I was to marry was unremarkable: neither good looking nor unattractive; dark-skinned, perhaps Indian, perhaps part Mauritian; a little overweight (as am I), a bit rounded in the middle; he had a pleasant smile; seemed kind but not excessively so.  To the audience, he expressed his satisfaction with the match: he knew it was a good one because he desired me (i.e. I was attractive to him).  My waking, roaringly-feminist self would be outraged by such a proclamation (as if that were my most important characteristic... of all the things to say at a wedding, to the woman he was to marry... hiss! glare!) My dream self smiled benignly.

The ceremony passed by without incident: the dream meandered into snippets of my new life with my husband.  I felt pleasantly placid; accepting; unperturbed; calm with a faint overlay of disbelief (as I dreamed I still had some awareness that this was completely out of character with my waking self).

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 

My own musings on the dream yielded little by way of meaning.  It wasn't connected to any movies I'd watched, or books read, or conversations.  I mentioned it casually to my mother, dismissed it as just a strange dream.  I still didn't understand it.  As the week went on it sank into my place of forgetting, crowded out by daily life.

Tonight my best friend told me of a dream where she rode on a lion's back.  The lion killed one of her pet rabbits, but she saved the other one.  I consulted my books, searched the internet.  I remembered my own dream suddenly, sought out its meaning while doing the same for hers.

• Am I feeling forced to do something I do not want, reluctantly moving to a new stage of life?  My dream self didn't feel forced.  Perhaps the peculiar calm was born of relief: being relieved of the burden of making such a monumental decision as choosing a life partner.  There's so much to get wrong...
• An unknown man in a woman's dream is a part of her personality which is not recognised.  My  dream self was making an unrecognisable decision to marry a stranger.  That sort of change, the scale of it, is a little terrifying.  What would it take to bring about such a thing in me?  Or is it merely the union of the masculine and feminine aspects of personality?
• Members of the extended family typify the many discernible parts of ourselves. So the discernable parts of me, the known parts, the elements I have nurtured up until now, are shocked by the decisions of my true self?  Do I know myself far less well than I have thought?  
• "To dream of a wedding or marriage can often give an indication as tohow the dreamer feels about relationships".  Then this: weddings reflect how you feel about commitment to other people.  To dream of an arranged marriage means "your approach to commitment needs to be questioned".  Ahh, the sting, the squirm of being forced into honesty with oneself.  I am afraid, vastly, of commitment to a relationship with a man, even if my reasons for it are large and valid and historically accurate.

My contrary dream remains contrary.  I can't settle on one explanation, or even form a constellation of them all.  But some have the flavour of truth, of the beginning of a deep insight I may have not reached in my usual ways.  I can feel the foundations shifting, the knell of change.  Who will I be when the dust settles?