As my sister and I
Said our farewells
After a too-short,
Cruelly short
Stolen morsel
Of a moment
Of friendship,
Of loving understanding,
Of true happiness
She looked at me--
She so calm and collected and serious
(Oh, I do not know how she does this!)
While my eyes were red and wet from tears
(I always a storm of emotions)--
And holding my gaze,
She told me
That she loved me
And then held me so tight,
So tight--
That as she pulled away from me
It was as if she tore out
A piece of my beating heart
Carrying it off in her pocket
As she walked off into the rain.
And I was left there standing
With a bleeding, gory, aching cavern
In my chest,
There for everyone to see.
Frozen in place,
I would have collapsed there and then
Had the shock not been
As deep as that of
Bereavement--
The shock as violent and as sudden
As that of a man who's been guillotined
But has not realised
He is dead yet.
Reader,
You must understand
Why this is--
Therefore, let me elaborate:
I am an aging, lone, embittered woman--
Not entirely through choice
But many a circumstance too long to list here
And not for fucking want of trying.
Friendship, and love
Of physically present,
Flesh and blood human beings
Are alien to my hermit's existence:
Such rare visitors
--So few have I ever been able to
Even have a conversation with,
Let alone be on the same wavelength with;
So few are the fellow bhakta crazies!--
That I can barely even begin to understand them,
Process them
Before they are gone.
And after a lifetime of abandonments,
The pains of which have nearly killed me every time,
It's proven to be suicidally foolish for me
To believe in love or friendship given
Without deceit, insincerity, frivolousness, emotional vampirism
Or a needy tyrant's chains--
Oh, I am done,
So fucking done
With being made a fool of.
Therefore I do not love fully
Or let myself be loved fully
Except by the Divine--
S/He being free of
Human limitations
And the only one who has ever done for me
Even half of what I have done for my friends
Only to discover I have never mattered to them
As much as they've mattered to me.
When I love, I love so deeply
Only God can love me back
With equal passion, depth
--And this is not a fucking boast
But simple, astounded,
Over and over again disappointed
Experience!--
No, only with the Divine
Do I have no danger
Of yet another
Stupid, idiotic self-sacrifice
I've done out of a simple sense of
"Well, this is what a friend would do for another"
Only to realise my idea of friendship
Was more naively giving,
Going-to-the-ends-of-the-world-ing
Than theirs:
Only to realise I was somewhere
On the lowest rung of acquaintance,
A person barely remembered
To someone for whom
I would have been ready to give my all.
And I am done with it.
I am done with sacrifices,
Done with my foolishness,
Done with those who are happy to but take, take, take
While they themselves
Might perhaps only occasionally
Remember to throw a small, sharp, throat-piercing bone
To the bitch under the table
Being kicked by their feet.
No, no; friendship, let alone love,
Is to me an ex-alcoholic's relapse
With a complete off-the-rails blackout
And waking up in the morning
With an STD and pregnant--
A disaster I avoid at all costs.
But you know what happens to such people--
Oh, you have read the novels,
Seen the movies:
Indeed,
Love found me in the end.
For this chaos, this burning up of myself
Ended after I found my Beloved;
It was from the hell of that very last sacrificial pyre
--Upon which I had poured the fuel
Of half a decade's love and work
Nearly killing myself for what turned out to be
But cold scraps of what I'd thought
Collaboration on a shared passion-project,
A true partnership, even love--
That, He pulled me out of
Into His incomparable arms.
And even now,
He is there,
Right before me,
His tall shape vivid and commanding
Immediately recognisable
Even through the rain and tears.
Again, to me He beckons:
Calmly, He inspects the damaged cage of my chest
The tattered and savaged remains
Of what had been my heart therein
Saying "There, there, my child"--
And I know He can heal me
As He lays his giant hand
His elegant, beautiful hand
Over the bleeding, gored gape.
But the worst thing of all
Is that this time,
It's different.
As He takes my eyes with His
It is in them
That I see
Not my own face
But my lost sister's reflected.
For she who tore out
That chunk of my heart
Is not like other women:
My lithe black kitten
Is no mere human being
I could but let drift away into the background
And let her rest there in peace
Until I see her again--
("When? When?"
Cries that bird in my chest
Fluttering, crying out against
Even the strength of His hand;
In the background,
The princess of a fairytale
Gazes into her mirror
And laments
The loss of her prince,
Looking for his reflection.)
For she is as He is to me,
For she is to me as I am to me,
All three of us
Of the same Substance
Emanations of the same Light-Being:
Us the mirrors in which He
Contemplates Himself
He the mirror in which we
Contemplate ourselves
She His left hand
As I am His right:
We His Shakti
Bringing Him to life
With our worship:
We and only we
The priestesses who tell people of His wonders
We no more and no less
Than His Re-Incarnation
Upon this Earth
So that He may again
Live, laugh, entrance, seduce,
Play, carouse, fuck, breathe, breathe.
We the ones who kiss
Him into life,
He kissing the world in turn
Through our lips:
Capturing souls through His voice
That, once silent and forgot,
Is now again being given
A sweet taste,
An intoxicating fragrance,
An irresistable arousal's desire-pull
By nothing less than
The honey of our very own sexes;
Our sexes open and pink and sweet
As as His hierodules,
We whore Him far and wide:
We and only we
His very heart and its beating
His blood and its rush and its singing
His very prick's sweet hardening and lifting
Our every breath a moan of orgasm
Tossing within the throes of
The Great Ravishment
That is He.
In short--
Prema mourns the separation
Not of but two limited human beings
Set apart by geography, time, duties
No, nothing so mundane as this
But the loss of her very own Self,
Of The Divine Reality's
Very own Self:
As her sister walked out into the rain
So did she carry away with herself
Half of Prema's own heart and soul.
And here, this wretch still stands
Tears and rain painting with her kohl over her face
A veil of mourning;
For today she stands bereft of
That rarest of beauties and joys:
Of having been held in Love
Within the living, breathing, warm embrace
Of
God
Herself.