How About if I Take A Bear For a Lover

There is a beetle crawling his way up and around the interior of my dome,
making his way six little steps at a time
and I watch him while I paint my nails black
which is the smallest gesture I have to make a crack
big enough for the Wild One to come home.

And while I’m watching that beetle move around upside down
inside the circle of my dome,
like a small (but big to him) inverted world,
I see myself from his perspective and realize I’m doing the same,
climbing the walls that I myself have made,
this entire world, it seems, inside of me that has apparent solidity,
but one little flicker and it shifts and I remember it was all in my mind
and the world is the world and this is just how I’m seeing it this time.

I’ve been looking for poetry for days,
to read the thing I feel I need to say
and I can’t find it anywhere so I’ll guess I’ll write it
and maybe it will touch the part of me who needs something to move through
so I can feel alive.

To express the thing I cannot say, the thing that can’t be said
but comes out in the ways I turn my head
and hold my mouth and paint my nails black and listen to Lana Del Rey
sing Must be the Season of the Witch
and then get inexplicably angry and heat flushes through my body
and I am so gratefully awake in the sensation of it.
Here is something that comes mysteriously up and through
uncomfortable and Wild, the feeling itself proves I’m alive.

I’ve decided the rolling shocks of my life,
the forever initiations to cross a threshold and see what’s on the other side
are not a problem.
I love to die and not die,
I love to learn what it means to let go and let go and still survive.

It used to be a death like this:
“Will you love me like this?”
“How about if I’m not that anymore?”
“What if I truly let myself go?”
It used to be a desperate leap of faith
And now it’s more like “What will happen if I shred this thing, will I be safe?”

”How about if I take a bear for a lover,
decide I am the mother
to every insect, especially bees,
how I fucking long to be the mother of beetles and thin-waisted paper wasps
and especially bees
and if I put my back against the hive or the tree
and sit and hum with them long enough
will my own Wild Self finally and fully come into the light and be free?”
We’ll see.

“What if I throw my phone in the river and sail away
to some new place, some new way,
and just in case you were thinking, in case you had an inkling,
of suggesting a way or place that anyone has every done or been,
I will swallow you whole like Jonah and the whale
and you’ll stay in my belly and pray
for three long nights and three long days
then I’ll spit you out and you won’t make that mistake again.”