Sarah Pizer-Bush
“Ritual”
Response
The New Elements Cloak
By Darice Jones
Inspiration piece
I kept bending.
You were on a bender
Drinking my light like it was Facundo Paraiso and coke
I mistook the drool, the lean, and the gaze
For feelings that could fuel
Really you were looking at a reel
From 1994 that your soul projected like a movie
Onto my chest
It was a horror film really
That you hadn’t found the stop button for
Pain in full color, dark room, surround sound ugliness
Your words were enticing
Your dance an invitation
Your eyes an illusion
Your presence a phantom always in motion
My words were enticing
My dance an invitation
My eyes a window
My presence empathic, at risk,
a danger to myself as I plugged into you
Almost crashing, after soaring past the cliff
changed me for good
It wasn’t just my injuries
It was realizing how tangled my thoughts could become with another’s
Like electrical cords plopped into the same box
Like vocals booming from 100 different speakers on that one main street in the East Bay
I could not tell my playlist apart, let alone my own voice
It took a while to remember the shades & dimensions of my own soul’s story
I had to create an entire new world, so that I could call out to myself
Then listen close for the echo of my voice in the near empty valley
See the reflected light on the glass that part of me held in my hand
Travel by any means across the terrain to finally find me
I wept and rejoiced all at once at the sight of myself
I thought I was lost
I thought I was lost
I folded the new world around both the seeker and the recovered
Water, and fire, and earth, and fresh air
And I vowed to stay with me whatever came next
By Darice M. Jones
Covered in ether, In the Year of Wangari Maathai ©2022
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