When the stories I tell can change me, I tell them over again

There are three kinds of memory I’d provocatively tell myself if I knew which self to provoke and the provocative part isn’t what they are so much as who they make me There are the personal memories of course like that one of an early crawl with small fingers tugging at shaggy browns as they make for the Siamese who lies purring grays a world away Or another hand much bigger but less sure The temptation this time is maybe hers sitting close but distant and yet it’s more likely mine and where my hand wants to lie and how it wants me to keep it there forever I have to tell it its forever is longer than mine These memories are an always too slippery to hold and I've always let them go where they will There are also cultural memories the kind with lives and lessons they’ve unkindly kept in books but their lessons don’t live within the bindings clapped down with dust to lessen them They escape with each crack and they tiptoe their stories inside me Their stories that root and rise an idyllic garden leafing lush greens with one forbidden tree I’ve bitten its fruit and it's opened my eyes I’ve re-opened them often and what I see changes and I see in these changes there’s a third kind It’s kept deeper Deeper still Too deep to read or know well It’s written within each cell and it tells the same tales with a different head This head much hairier peeks between dense branches at reds suddenly grown sharper and it peeks for me A snake that can’t be so easily hid.

Parthenogenesis

The good book and many less good read mankind was made in god’s own image and though the atheists think it’s the imaginary reverse what if it’s that the universe and all its matter what if it’s that all those things before we mattered in our smattering of light what if it’s that all that was and is was plucked round and red into being by one unknowably knowing consciousness tempted by the empty black to fill it with the white noise of chattering possibility and what if it set those first simple blocky shapes it plucked those blobby forms it picked to form themselves into ever more complicated shifts inventing themselves flappy fins and gills then wobbly legs and lungs a caring heart and brain again and again toward a more subtle somewhen else when someone else more knowing stands up and falls down fruited by the tree of life to see we have our farther’s sensitive eyes and can look past walking lifetimes to find the now knowable blueprint tucked in a twisty pocket of ribs and it’s also here we’ll find ourselves red-faced according to the plan laid out for those first formless shapes somewhere else as someones else not trapped but free inside a magical black box filled by the emptiness come back and a poisonous white flask of one possibility silently collapsing into an informing consciousness.

There’s a where ravens are taken (the rebirth of POW)

My myth-maker’s made
a sunny place-setting
and he sets it politely there
where I sit not wearing boots.

With black squawks he came
from out-there not smitten,
and he tells me tall riddles of let
blood’s sleepy seeping home.

“You’ll notice many
cut-cross paths can get you there
to the next where, if you know
what’s not here you’re not getting.

“It’s there, where and when
you’ll come in, approximately,
to uncover hurt never.
Ever met cures before.”

He stays there beside
and with unwary wings pushes
twice-worn boots where my feet
were yet, unprepared to go.

---

This poem was abstracted from a context you're unlikely to decipher. As part of the renewal of the Poetry On Wednesday (POW) prompts, Rallentanda posted a passage from a book (see it here). We all make our own myths, but I like mine to be more in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm, Bullwinkle and Dr. Seuss.

Weightlessness

You could put it down
as youthful folly, or spit out
the hackneyed line about
pride and what goeth after.

It's true, I over-reached,
wanting to limitless kiss
the sun's crisp lips.

I did hold her glowing cheeks
firmly in my palms
for one exquisite breath.

Can you, rocking there
in your comfy prison,
say the same?

There comes a time to sit
astride clouds and burn off
the waxy buildup of childish things.

The weightlessness before
the plunge feels
like it will never end,
but, I can tell you, it does.

---

This week's Poetry on Wednesday Prompt is a guessing game of "Who am I?" I took a few liberties with the subject of this poem, but he still should be easily discernible.

Two Souls: Gathering

I finally was able to complete the next installment of my cycle Two Souls, Twin Lives (a title I may eventually change).

IX. Gathering
By Francis Scudellari

Two legs find horizons
cracked-wide, the hours
of likened now made unlike
when, heavy cloaked
in thickets' hair-cloth prickling,
she-he slip out
into lusty gatherings
of clutched sticks fixed
with sharpened stones, prancing
down hooted trails
painted fresh by scents, singing
of sun-drenched tang,
slain muscle torn from bone

Prompted: My song to fire

This Is My Song To Fire
By Francis Scudellari

This is my song to fire
imagined gods, tipping the balance
of an eight-pointed star;
spirited tongues that orange-blue dance

lost stories of ancient's
mother whose land-distending belly
gave violent blood birth,
spitting forth choleric streams to crawl.

Molten fingers capped by
cruel mouths, gurgle cryptic paths down
humped and wooded back, till
reaching the lip of a plunging slope,

their fierce heads droop, roiling
limpid pools to release snake-coiled steam
and entreat ill-favors
from a jealous, flood-fathering moon.

This is my song to douse
fancied demons, speeding the tumble
of an eight pointed star;
frenzied frolics to blur waking myths.

---

This poem was written in response to Read Write Prompt #90 at Read Write Poem. The challenge was to take inspiration from a photo of a street performer balancing a metal frame tipped with eight flames (click the prompt link above to see it).