The blood floods in and flushes all my plans — foiled attempt at going just beyond myself — instead I am moored within myself, deep inside the borders of this body, reduced to the pulsing of a womb offering her tale of woe to the earth — what could have been, what was, then wasn’t — and we’ll never quite know how the story goes — we’ll put a spin on it in time, we’ll remember things that were never said and forget who was there — but every moon we’ll run to dark rivers — dip our hands in and raise the cups to our lips to taste the love-making of life and death — we’ll know what the women could not tell us, and some months we’ll know what we cannot tell the men — we’ll know the voluptuous grief of the feminine — the glorious burden of bringing life and death to the shores of human consciousness, even though some will refuse look, and some will arrive to pray only when there’s nowhere left — but we womb-keepers will fasten the hopes that tether our mortal flesh to these tides — as we must, to be truly incarnate — we know the cycles of time like no other, we know that death comes for us sure as the night does — we know that life in its brutal, beautiful totality is for beholding, nothing less — this afternoon, he came and left, he came and left —from my prayerful fingers our codes of life dripped as our minds melted under the weight of them but this creature, this creature with paper skin and hollow limbs, was bereft — bereft and betrayed not because he strayed but because of the things that were not said — this is all we have left — all that will take us through the muck and the mire of our traumas and past lives — the truth, the truth, the truth is all there is — all of them, all our parts, here to take their place on high and nothing left behind — sing a song inside your body so he knows the sound of divine love.