Earth Begging

In the woods somewhere
sweet swaying songs bear witness
to wounds deep, the worst sort
of gutting, how large the teeth,
and how far I’d seeped and seeped
and seeped completely down in seed
and in a gone-ing, a yawning crypt
held and holding eruptions,
creations’ secret reddest colors
for deeply hewn stutters fluttering
across a canvas as yet unknown
‘til my heart knew
and out I flew into one,
and one and one, (yet still One)
and yet still not knowing the known
and the hiding
from a creature lunging,
a bite’s longest reach
still bleeding,
but an ancient design called,
a bridge eternal healing,
deepest love promising,
then subsiding
‘til the singing resurrection,
a transformation from tomb
to tower to long desperate hours
within hours and hours blending
miracles wending, sending
every inch of me calling,
falling up and all over every spec,
dot, bindu, wreck not wrecking
as the beckoning out
of richest colors wrought whole
and healing a song
to raise the dead,
to know the unknowing
into love flowing
rivers, a heaven on earth begging…

photo/expression by j. ruth kelly, 2017, 2025, all rights reserved

Righteous Rebellion

“The world needs your rebellion and the true song of your exile. In what has been banned from your life, you find a medicine to heal all that has been kept from our world. We must find the place within where things have been muted and give that a voice. Until those things are spoken, no truth can find its way forward. The world needs your unbelonging. It needs your disagreements, your exclusion, your ache to tear the false constructions down, to find the world behind this one.” Toko-Pa Turner

At What Point…

At what point did my love for you end and my need for you to validate my fantasy about myself, about life, about love itself pick up, posing “love” surreal, impossible?

At what point did my desire for you end and my need to be craved, to be proven to again and again that I was desirable, that I could control you and could control just how much you reached me, truly reached me, begin?

At what point did my fantasies distort who you are in my eyes and at what point did those fantasies alienate you from me, me from you and even you from yourself?

At what point did my hopes blind me, then bind me to a hopeless mirage in the desert of a reality nonexistent while you stood there simply being a feast as I starved needlessly?

(How many of us ever get to really see each other, feel and know each other beyond the bullshit we are so convinced is real?)

At what point do any of us know beyond our projections dawning on the pretend horizon of our insecure need to be exceptional, to be anything but as human as the rest of us?

Do we reach the end, the bottom of the trunk so full of all those masks we believe we are and we hope won’t fall off, showing our unwashed beauty?

At what point will I walk permanently naked into the moment and not reach for the nearest defense mechanism to shield me from what it means to be free from the ancient pride hide?

Take me there, to that point.

I weary here of the shields and notions of perfection and the quiet desperation made by so much noisy needing to make a meaning that already thrives and will live beyond my dying…

j. ruth kelly, 2017, all rights reserved, pointillist spiral by j. ruth kelly