I miss you.
I miss you as the dancer without song, spun in a room of silence.
I miss you as the hermit without retreat, exposed and without solace.
I miss you as the captured without captive, unchained but forever haunted.
I miss you as the player without drum, hands in search of familiar substance.
I miss you as the gardener without rain, tear-filled eyes beseeching sky.
I miss you as the turnip without ground, plucked and slaughtered for the water that boils.
I miss you as the treasure without gold, disillusioned by the nakedness of finding.
I miss you as the barber without scissors, staring at an empty chair.
I miss you as the window without pane, hollowed and broken on the inside.
I miss you as the crow without mate, crying black soul in isolation.
I miss you as the plate without meal, serving nothing but streaked reflection.
I miss you as the tea without water, left in form without tangible purpose.
I miss you as the hunter without prey, circling in darkened sky for fill.
I miss you as the willow without leaf, dying without that sun that feeds.
I miss you as the words without page, thoughts lost in the swell of time.
I miss you as the climber without rock, left down in the valley of longing.
I miss you as the child without train, abandoned before journey begins.
I miss you as the woman without fingers, grasping with invisible ghosts.
I miss you as the blanket without babe, sweetness stolen.
I miss you as the knife without blade, cutting through nothing.
I miss you as the clock without hands, turning for no one.
I miss you as the star without night, shining without a holding space.
I miss you.
In all forms, in all shapes, in all ways, I miss you.
I miss you as the diary without key, locked away in secrets meant for you.
~ Samantha Craft, February 2013
poetry
317: Ember Hand
You found me in this river, swimming.
You found me in this ocean, the sea before the sea.
A virgin I watched, as waters lapped above me, the pool enriching the substance of my heat.
Misery was captured in the bubbles, foam perched beyond the horizon, distance haunting and calling me free.
I came, as one often comes, for dinner of delight; my appetite wrapped in folded crimson napkin; my supper less for cause than for circumstance.
For I wanted to dance, and with you I wished to breathe.
I came from the depths of the blue, no more familiar to this land than the sturgeon to the vine of the trees.
How I dug my feet in the sand, like a summer day that first kisses your forehead.
I moved, a child to this world, in a way I both recognized and denied, an innocence so refined.
I watched for you, a symphony to my senses, ripping apart my insides so that they fluttered out a butterfly of sorts, dancing about your grave stone and singing to the heaven’s lords.
I turned and danced merrily, your shadow still beneath, your image laid down in the earth’s grumblings.
You were vision.
You were sensuality.
You were the purpose for which I left my castle of the sea and stepped upon the land, less naked than guised in the wonderment of unfamiliar.
I shivered from the bounty before me, all decorated in the drapes of uncertainty, and I wished, with my delicate heart, to find you where you rested, a man of my waiting.
I whispered into the shells I carried: “Hello, my sweet beneath me. Hello, my land of man. Hello, my angel dreaming. Hello, my ember hand.”
And I twirled in the dress of satin white, knitted and laced, sewn with the grandest of merriment, the child I be.
In my youth I would dream you into existence and just be; you as my soldier true returned from where it was you went; me, your diamond carved for scarlet string draped around your nape.
And I would rest there, in my vision, my skin upon your skin, sparkling as if we’d both been kissed by father sun.
I’d rest and feel the beat from that of one I’d wished upon. A star wrapped into the golden skin of you. How you shined so brightly but dimmed enough to soothe me to the place of shore-light’s lullaby; woven to sleep by your gentle grace.
My gentle man you were, as I sat along the side of your shadow buried, embraced by the near presence of the name of you. So calm your ways, so free and without the weight of what this world does bring.
I harbored you there, inside of me, not once, not twice, but for eternity, in this mingled embrace.
Kiss me I dreamed you to say, and knew that the fire that grew was not a demon birthed but the essential purpose of my being.
For twin sparked twin and ember came, again and again, like the fire that shows his last light before dying to the night sky.
Take me, I sang, and you did.
I held you there inside my dream, my lips smeared with the grace of where you’d touched, my hunting seized, my search swallowed, my destiny claimed and staked where the hold once be.
No longer empty, I clung on to the hope of return.
No longer forlorn and broken, I edged my own self up around my edges and found one where two once stood.
For you had gone, and in your leaving left me half again, not less, but more in my making.
And still I sit here, the waters below me, my breath breathing, my will willing you forward.
But I find you not, this angel you be; I find you not, for forever is before me no more, only the ocean of endless tomorrow in which you exist not; neither ripped away from past or brought forward to future, in the cyclic cycle of new dawn after new dawn.
You are a wavering memory, wiped clean before tasted, swept out of the eyes before entering, and I am left wondering if you ever came or I wished it so to be.
Samantha Craft, February 2013
311: Cometh to Me
What is this pull you have on me, this light, this love?
If it be love then why does it pull me under and into myself, into the places I dare not go?
If it be love then why are there whispers of danger and want and this tumultuous need?
Are you not in essence a highlighter upon my soul, gliding up and down, without touching, and pouring your paint upon me, until I glisten in flaw and uncertainty?
Can you not see my every crevice as you probe without probing and move without moving, entering me without entrance?
I see you there, inside of me, watching, speaking of my ways. I see you there pointing, excavating, moving, and withdrawing. You take without taking, your pursed lips open and filled with what was once my shadow. You suck up this substance I carry, removing without effort.
And I freely give, though I quake and tremble, attempting to hide the part of me you find.
How can I be, how can I stand, how can I breathe, without you entering and devouring my form?
For since I first set eyes upon you, you found my window, your door, the way into the places I so diligently hid and wiped clean. And yet you linger there, this ghost hovering above my edges.
To touch, you not dare. To make your presence known is not goal. For you will not declare your coming. You will not admit you linger inside of me. You will not venture where your own spirit dwells.
I have been your habitat for ages, your dwelling place, your hovel, your home. I am like the sun to you, the river that carries fish, the pond that spins cycle upon cycle of life.
Yes, as I am your child; though you be my shadow, my existence, my longing, my love; the string of my heart you pull, some master to me, some unspoken controller of my wishes’ dreams.
For in the deepest slumbering of my spirit you find me, though invisible you remain, stirring me and moving me to cause, clinging to me without touch, jostling me without motion, tracing your fingers around my echo.
I call out to you with each coming hour, my seconds not enough time to hold you; for you come and go beyond the reasoning of measurement. You are separate but you have taken me, and in the taking I am neither whole nor complete, but missing more than ever before.
You are the first step, the first move in the first square of a game of kings and queens. I am this pawn, chiseled of marble and set upon the trail and left, just left in stillness to ponder.
And how I long to move myself, but still remain a prisoner to your whim, a whim I know not and see not.
My ground you have shifted, my mind you have rumbled, but tis my heart that you have taken, seized and left me to stare upon the endless moves that never come.
Had you not entered, had you not seen me, had you not found me, had you not grasped me, I would still be. I would still be me and not some wonderer searching for your very fingers. I would not be this lost ghost less person than invisibility.
But you did come into me, you did enter, and now the spirit in me cries out for more, for home, for destiny’s light, and yet you come not. You do not return. And I remain captive in this game of living, homeless, and more forsaken in self than in form.
For I am suffering in the madness of awakening, suffering at the source, where the snake springs eternal from my being, edging through like flame to fire.
I am rising, caravanning up inside self, this shapeless self, and aspiring to find you, to reach what feeds and starves all at once. The dichotomy a serpent phantom doubled.
I am this whisper, this dream, this mystery of yours, and you are not soldier that comes to rescue, but rather droplets of honey that seize my aura and slide around the outside of where the unreachable dances.
And here I am watching, my soul crying, my ache yearning, my insides turned out, exposed, tarnished, and layered with what can only be a love of ages untouched.
Am I not dying, am I not yet dead, death himself, so moved and crushed and open and free all in one pull of your tethered ways? Am I not tug boat reversed, mountain stream moving upward, cornerstone unmoved but revealing the caverns below?
Am I not mystery rubbed out, dried where I was once wet, pierced where I was once marked with a name I know not? Am I the falcon with beak plucked and removed and voice of angel replaced where cawing and nonsense once lived? Am I this bird plucked of feathers by a brilliance so undefinable that I ache for the worms of the earth beyond?
Feed me I scream with a voice that I do not know. Feed me I scream from the depth of my womb from the ache of my loins, shivering in the places you have awakened.
And yet I remain here, still, this virgin to your ways, whilst you remain the ever watcher, knowing I am here, but coming not to the rescue.
Shall I beg of you to leave then, or call upon you more? Shall I beg of you to take me or crawl upon my knees to the boundaries you proclaim upon me? Trapped I am left, between this world and next, branded by your beauty, untrained for this world, and unworthy for next.
What shall I do Lord, but to bleed out to you, to stone my own self to death, so that my leaking, my red, my mark shall shine out to you, so you will come again and carry me home.
306: Seams, I Am
Who am I, this mystery before me, both below and outward, both inside and beneath reason?
Who am I, this single dancer in a circus line of creatures mistaken as self, whilst all about this singular is nowhere?
Who am I, this bewildered child screaming out of the darkness, whilst light is everywhere, immersing my doubt in the seeded-bed of nutriment.
Am I but my shadow, the edges of me formed by the objective angle, by the instrumental being of sun at play with madness?
Am I but marionette set to strings or the more: this twisted master puppeteer snarling and snapping from up above, laughing at the ownership of chance?
Am I the singer tethered inside shell, severed voice blocked and thusly returned by thine own harbored walls?
Am I this rice, this grain, this planted web, tangled beneath the soil of enrichment, begging within a beating substance to escape the depths from where breath labors?
Am I a blinded legless one, slithering through the streets of reason, slipping through skin in regeneration, hoping passerby will collect the shed of what’s been?
Am I the monk with cymbals, clanging-metal-smile-creator, discontented-sorrow-seeker placating the rebel masses, born into appeasement?
Am I the voice without time, the rhythm without cause, the ocean without water, the mountain without foundation? Am I merely floating in a nonsensical nonexistence, wading and wavering through that which is naught and cannot be found?
Am I dropped here, a foreigner, with all the ripened senses plucked out of me, so I may spend eternity searching for the one I once was?
Helpless at my very seams, I am.
The most of all not mended, not fixed, not finished, left to wander with the stuffing jumping outside into teasing freedom, my insides deserting captain, torn empty, this incomplete form.
I am this.
I am this universal measure in incompletion, steadying myself on untrained legs in an untrained world. Jumping through hoops that neither exist or appear, but manage to bruise the very essence from where I gather semblance and substance and order.
Hollowed I am, in the shape of the corner of the mind, bleached by the external force of unknown, blanched and then blanketed in a knowing of unknowing, taught of the presence of presence, and moment within moment, but then tortured by the possibilities that endlessly speak of nowhere.
I am this vulture starved of the carrion, starved of the self, starved of what would be me inside the mirror, if image appeared. And yet I am meant to be in some way here, as if here was evermore spoken.
And thusly I clamber and shake, my own boots too big for the climbing, my own answers too heavy to be held in the limited chambers of thought’s engine.
And I trumpet, one part bleeding out to the other parts, to prove a lingering hypothesis of ever expansion. Until the weariness speaks louder than the want. Until release beckons like the child’s grave that speaks out to broken mother. Unbendable matters beckoning forth from somewhere bleak but lacking bleakness, formed of unspoken words and erased images that never were.
Here is where the artist’s invisible and imagined heart is purged, here in the incremental sewing of the energetic threads of the absence of self.
Here I exist: as the pudding poured out from the sharpening of nothing.
~~~
Samantha Craft, January 2013
299: The New Day
I’ve decided
I’ve decided that you deserve more
More than what I am offering
With my clinging and self-doubt
You are not the key to my self-worth
So I shall work on being less dependent
On you
I am ready to pull away some
I think
I want our friendship to be nurturing
And I am tired of being so needy
I understand what is happening
I am self-harming
Through you
I build you up into someone you are not
So you can disappointment
Or rather
So I can think you are disappointing
For then I experience a rawness inside
A Terrible Ache
That reaches into the heart of me
It is only then
With the coming ache
That I feel alive
Without this intense angst
I feel numb
For no one can fill my depths
With the love I need
And thusly I am left hollow
And alone
In desperation and with desire
I grasp on to Love’s cousin
Pain
And pour him into me
I use
My addictive substance
Over and over
To exist
Because I feel alien
In this world
In both form and experience
I have been using
Using you
To feel real
Using
To wake up
My sleeping soul
I am sorry
For clinging
For aching
For suffering
Through you
But I still choose you
I choose you again and again
Only this time
You are chosen
For your beauty alone
For your light that shines through
The darkness in me
And opens my eyes
To the new day of us
~ Samantha Craft, January 2013
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