Caillie Mutterback
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What Is and what was

3/21/2014

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What once was lost is now found –
this sound
                    of
                        silence.
The air is still and the violence that once
filled this space is replaced instead with
the background fuzz of bumblebee buzz.

My mind is a hive now,
                     alive now,
with the whirring and purring
of each dormant creature stirring.
The animal within, once an alien to me,
so easily set free once aimless complacency was
displaced by the drive to survive.

Now the bird’s melancholic melodies are elegies
To the world that was, love songs to no one.
And it is clear to all those who hear that each year
As the moss overtakes the hospitals and the cement
Cracks with the impact of one hundred tiny shoots rooting
Deeper into the streets, that what was can never be, 
if only because symmetry was dishonest,
rules thrust upon us that said beauty is in the eye of
the beholder only if he has sold more –
Nature may be beneficial but the artificial is perfection, 
our selections proved this.

And even the magpies tell lies to the crows, we know
the truth is rooted in the sand and is as susceptible
as any rumour to be consumed by the Unplanned, 
just when we think we understand,
Life demands change.

Now I've worked the land with hands so calloused
from fighting that I'm more dirt than skin
and I'm beginning to resemble something
more akin to the monsters in horror stories
poured into the mind of the child who
once had the thought to step out of line.

My tongue runs words across teeth that took
toothpaste for granted -
these habits are hard to break,
It takes everything I've got not to stop at each
vacant crosswalk for fear I'd collide with drivers
in vehicles I feel could crush me in their rush to 
their jobs logging hours at computer towers.

The madness was distracting, I’m left
practicing the threshold of resistance.
My existence measured in the distance it takes 
to get subsistence consistently.

Now I'm just a slave to the leaves and to the waves
that crash and smash against every rock thrust in their way.
My arms are scarred from the water carving it's chosen 
lines and eroding time until I too fade into the sea
The way you would fade into me –
Two silver-lined shadows of mercury,
replaced by empty space where you used to be.

Every trace of man erased -
placed deep under the soil to become
some other species’ oil.
And this is the justice I trust is appropriate.
I am Mother Nature's daughter, I fought hard
for the right to stay here without fear of her fury
burying me too.

And a wise woman once said:
“If you like it, put a ring on it”
Well, this tree has twenty
and that’s plenty enough to prove
it is the stuff worth loving.

And by the time it has thirty,
Every inch of my skin will be dirty
And stones will rip my fingertips,
my toes will have slipped over muddy shores,
my clothes torn.
But I want to be naked.
I don’t mean my body.
I don’t need my body.

My mind is lost in fields of poppies,
opiate bones and I am home.
This is where my spirit lies
not inside my head
but between my thighs.


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