Lining my eyes with charcoal and the scorch of tears, I can’t escape the immovable truth that whatever your twisted secrets, you are the one who makes me glow.
The human mask ruptures by its own flawed design and I am reminded that the flesh was created to crumble; for our own protection, we are not shatterproof. I am as fragile as I am supple, I am the fading trace of whispered delusions, echoing through the dead of nights hanging from trees, their slender roots planted firmly in the sky. The cracks in the vessel of my soft skin are beginning to show. I do not cover them. I do not fill them in. I am coming apart; I am lost. I am without a single answer of any kind. I know not where I have been, how it is I have come to be here, where I will emerge again, or if.
I am muted and surrendered to the rising flood waters of my own weakness. My hesitant steps are taken in timid stumbles, but mostly not at all. I am still, motionless, patient, obedient, rebellious, as the windows of every castle we ever built come crashing in.
Becoming the sound of the explosion itself, I watch for the light, the way it catches, the way it reflects.
What right have I even to be here in this obscene manner, in the way my gray animal eyes flash in the headlights, grow angry, distressed, and combative in their hunger? Who am I in my shivering thoughtlessness, in my primal confusion, in my wide and defiant uselessness?
I search the halls of ancient cities buried under the ash of a thousand graves upon ten thousand years with a heavy heart and burdened mind for a thing I cannot grasp. My soul makes its truest offerings of itself in the shelter of this darkness. Shadowy figures are at play, the way my exotic spirit dances in the flames of the fires she feeds mercilessly within. My satin hands touch themselves to my throat and I am ecstatic for the mystery I am suspended within.
Consumed to the core with liberation and unworthiness, I am a dewy web of prismatic shine at the center of your calculated chaos.
I am alone, defenseless, in this ruined room with trembling walls; stripped bare of arrogance, pretense, and facade. Here I am tested, made to look upon my own frustrating limits; I tug with my teeth at the threads of a thick cascade of drenching compassion for a woman on the precipice of life and death, staring out into the Great Abyss.
Here I am made ready. Here I am destroyed and rebuilt as I confess that I do not know the way, I do not have the answers, I would not know how to open my mouth if not for Love’s insatiable desire to burn me with Her beautiful, healing grace.
From the depths of this blind wilderness, I am grateful. I am richer for the shadows, for that which is hidden must have its way with me.
In my nakedness I am the ritual. In my emptiness I am the gift.
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Allison Marie Conway 