Transmutation: (day 3 of 100 -- Poetry Challenge)
Transmutation
I wear bangles
silver mostly
I remember nights when the air seemed charged
electric
You circling round
You, always there with a goofy smirk
and a cigarette
stinky and beautiful
all slicked hair
and pooling eyes
3 are never enough
I like the clanking of
four or more
There are nights if I’m still
shadow black & short breaths
where I can see you wafting
ether spirals, ectoplasmic
when I
hear your low and soft timbre
on the wind
chiming
Old metalwork &
finely carved bone
cinnabar red
ivory white
It doesn’t hurt any longer
I’m in another life
with new trees
and animals
they do not know of you
your scent or
the way you move
your smoldering nature
or the way in which
you changed me
bangles like chain links
remembrances
reminders
ruminations
ringing, clanking, rattling,
each a circle for a year
of your absence
anchoring
weighing
linking the present
to the you
back there
Electric air
All pieces are newly crafted and posted shortly after in adherence to the rules of the challenge. All the photos are mine unless otherwise stated.
Entry for Day 3 of 100 Days of Poetry Challenge by @d-pend.
Join the Steemit School here: https://discord.gg/cQFyzRV organized by @dobartim on Discord.
Bangles, like chains that we put on ourselves. Turning a means of being diminished, to means of enhancement. Turning something that would keep us closed, to something we use to project strength. Women are meant to be seen and not heard? Then turn jewelry meant to be seen, into one's own percussion set, announcing their coming and going.
It's interesting how in Left Ventricle, dealing with the same memory, with the same phantom of your past, that you are the apparition, yet here it is roles reversed, with you being real, and the memory surrounding you, half-real, half-forgotten.
And yet, he's bound to you. Bound to you by your own hand. Clasped to you, jingling as you move, tinkling as you pace through life. Past experiences are bound to you, bangles you've donned. And they are the patina that adorns you. They are the lives that echo through you as you speak, and sway.
"Back there / electric air." I really liked that bit.
But is the ghost ever absent? Because it isn't. A loop. Like a bangle.
I was never raised by anyone that indoctrinated me into the "Seen and not heard" crap, thankfully. I come from lines on both sides that have fostered empowered women, I am the product of such free-thinking, wild, out-of-control, sexual, strong, intelligent Women, that I myself feel tame when I look back to those Ladies. The energy is potent in me and I yield to no one as a Pavlovian bred dog.
I be WILD
and Rebellious
I be Loud
and Potent
Untamed,
FREE (as a soul can be)!
I am only bound by my heart. I set him free years ago -- In fact I left as I always do. These bangle chains are cast circles of remembrance, of beauty, of melancholy as a natural reverent quality, they are dust and I bone turning to dust, just like everyone else.
Scott does not hold me back. His memory warms me, makes me smile, and reminds me how much I can learn when I push out of my comfort zone... do things that seem scary and unwise. It was passion on such a deep level that the chains that link me back to him, year by year, link by link are Holy, Holy, Holy, and can be taken off at any time should they start to cut the skin.
My Scott, the one I knew is a ghost, yes, as I am from that life so long ago... but not one trapped in a loop, looping round unto itself... it’s a helix, moving along a continuum.
Love your thought provoking comment here, you got me on a bit of a rant (in a goodly productive way). :) Thank you, dear Guy.
I know you love you some good rant. And it's always nice to hear passion rising in you, rather than only see it through your work.
I think it can be intriguing to look at art and its messages, even if not necessarily true. Isn't that close to what you believe in, of letting the art speak? But art is light, and light casts shadows. As much as it reveals, it can obscure. And it can reveal what is not real, while obscuring what is.
Letting the penumbra seep in. Almost and never-reals.
<3
mmmmmm... love this piece... powerful and emotive... lifetimes come and go... some connections stretch across many of them.. the strong ones I feel will last for eternity and more.
Great to find you here as part of this challenge too... I will be sure to check out more of your entries :)
Keep up the amazing work!
With Love
Hart Floe Poet
<3
Thank you, dear.
I too and thrilled to have met you (on my way to read your latest after I catch up here).
I have always had such a sense of time far beyond this Nowness we experience. I feel rather light and not bound by the things that seem to want to hold me down as I once was. In all things I look for the pressure, where is the real Gold being formed through my challenges and how am I choosing to respond, process. I feel that we have nothing to lose in life, except the intangible transcendence of self through hardships -- so many look too, or gauge so much upon "happiness" and "successes" in the outer world and yet that is all so fleeting and drug-like…. the haze, the haze of it all.
Stand from within the fire and Rise in rebellion of it!
;)
Very, very nice. I particularly love the effect obtained in the second half the poem. Not to worry the whole poem is wonderful. Put I often where bangles to and so I know the lovely falling and clinging sound they create ... you did this with your words.
ps ... check out d-pends feed ... wink wink.
Oh my, Thank you kindly. <3
I enjoyed your use of the bangles as the medium through which you showcased the relationship of the narrator here, @mamadini.
The mindfulness and awareness brought on through the weight of the bands and their metronomic clinks against the shackling of the memories linked from the past through their links (very clever on your part, by the by) to the present.
All very cleverly done, thank you for sharing Niish.
Funny, I was just over at your blog and cleaver was a word I used for your latest. hehe. ;)
Thank you... Memory is a funny thing, and so full of gems once we let the blood flow. ::bows::
I loved how you switched the subject back in and forth. It really brought a flashback feel to the images of the poem. Nice work, mamadini.
Thank you, dear Moe. I love a braid and for some reason my xhusband is front and center in my mind of late, which is interesting and of coure fruitful. ;)
Circles and rings, cords and strings, chained and linked together, bound to one another.
chain, chain, chain, child!
Of human Bondage (30's film comes to mind).
I'm watching Halloween Madea :D
hahaha, I'm jelly.. I love Madea.