Sacred Contracts VII: Darkness

  
Motel 6:  “We’ll leave the light on for you.”   
  
I.   
  
All living are the darkness of their bones;   
Spirits and Specters, hemoglobin in every color   
of defending warrior donning leather’d armor.   
I’ve observed men leaving the women they love, 
the "’light’of their [lives]” shining brightly 
as a beacon for their lonely 2:00 am motel 
trek home from “darkness” they’ve tasted.   
  
I get it. I do.   
  
A light is something trusted to guide you;   
it’s safety, security, warmth; sacred as nursing   
breasts, not a “darkened” experience between   
another woman’s legs because the chance of his   
own love, the “light of his life” being even half-   
dark is simply too great a chance to risk.   
  
(She need not know any of this. She need only   
continue to illuminate his darkened state so   
that he may return home again, debased.)   
  
II.   
  
Darkness. Let me tell you its secret. Darkness   
is the underbelly of a verse, a diaphanous beauty   
The pyramids aligning planets, not the reverse;   
A solstice spell staring you down through the navel   
of Stonehenge, hieroglyphic language on fingertips   
just beyond linguistics. It’s drowning through the gut   
of a poem 1000 feet below sea level. It's rappelling   
down the ballad with a melody too short to prevent     
bruising of muscles and stretchmarks to follow.   
It’s dust flaking from the throat of a well where   
a virgin waters her camel alone. It’s incandescent,   
a limpid ritual of an interpreted crop circle; a familiar   
scent, nag champa oil and the lick of sugar thick   
across the palette. It’s an ingested scream from   
between a lipped valley. Its grit, teeth, and sweat   
caking crevices of knees and elbows; dirt trekked   
necklaces staining clothes from days of climbing   
the sonnet’s structured back before discovering   
water’s frozen origin across your mouth.   
  
It’s exhilaration, a severed envelope of recognition   
tumbling freedom; a native rite of communal passage;     
A Spiritual blood-bond; a coming home not by or   
of light from anyone else but as the light itself.   
  
It’s a liar’s worst nightmare stumbling in the mud   
of 3:00 AM with another woman’s scent on them:   
It’s a Holy Pact – A Sacred Truth forging pure joy.   
It’s not to be hidden but proudly experienced.   
  
III.   
  
Most men’s darkness is a pharaoh who ruled   
women by ruthless law, his tomb cursing   
the desecration of his bed chamber by inscribed     
light upon a stone sarcophagus of stolen gold.       
  
A woman’s darkness isn’t for the faint-of-heart,   
it’s through choice she reveals the ancient code   
to the worthiest of archaeologists who honor   
the unearthed balance of a humble truth.           
  
IV.   
  
The depths of physical desire, “where the skin   
parts” isn’t a dark mystery to be explored   
or conquered upon the back of a lie. It’s a cracked   
wonder, a pomegranate spilling sweet seeds across   
compressed grass above tangled roots of curled bone   
quietly gestating in the softened egg of the moon,   
where a woman’s darkness swallows a man whole.   
  
V.     
  
Until individual men remember this Sacred Contract   
We'll leave the light on so they can find their way back.   

~

April 2015