I was born in the pause between two coordinates
drawn by cartographers with sterilized hands.
My soul was indexed in miles and postal codes
Filed under miscellaneous anomaly at checkpoints.
I crossed borders that did not exist,
except in the mouths of men with rifles.
My breath was weighed against paperwork,
my shadow flagged by predictive suspicion.
I was processed in buildings with no windows,
where hope was a form to be filled in triplicate.
My story was annexed, taped to a strangers' bias,
then shelved into the limbo of “pending.”
I failed the empathy test of the world
where spectacle outperforms survival.
My life was too procedural for pity,
and my death was redacted for efficiency.
They have all tried,
long before the great da Vinci,
both ancient and modern cartographers,
to wit,
‘Goode’, the Evil Mercator,
tried and failed.
Not one
had the skill or imagination
to map your smile,
for like the world in sunlight
your smile is the shape
of laughing eyes.
No hand could mix the paint
that painted you,
nor survey your loveliness
with compass or caliper.
I have a detailed atlas,
yet nothing can explain
how I discover Xanadu
everywhere
by the way,
you turn my page.
In a fluffy blue sky, clouds of Europe revealed
The continent forms, so ghostly surreal
With a boot for Italy, three-fingered Scandinavia
Off the coast lies England, royal isle like Batavia
As the puffy land mass drifts over my head
There Iceland and Greenland, sans glaciers, spread
Out wide to the North -- when startled my heart!
Atlantis appears, right in the sea's part
cartographers ancient told us she lay
~ Then soft floats away, illusion at play...
Looking at the stars
We play life's cartographers
Hastily naming
Which ones we're meant to follow
And which to pass in wonder
In my radio psychology grows
A loopy Admiral constant
Heaving between seas porous
With blue tongued underwater arches
Roman cathedrals with baboon guardtowers
Cerebrally undergoing city territory
The way cliffhanging apes are bound to escape
To sail the nerve lines of creative thought
Spin with me
Through the frozen galaxies
New Ice Age melting old patterns
Threatening not, only to a weary mind
We are always threading and carving daze
Amidst insurgency of gustatory emblem
Redesign the digital embryo provides
Passionate cartographers with virtual tether
To unsheath the countess weather
Human families swoon at the sheets
Grateful pregnant bounties abide
Think bright underneath starlight
As futures embed new lives surprise
Floating all porous ties
Lands unseen are always best--
Landscapes in your mind--
Blessed Islands gleaming west
Cartographers can’t find.
Terra Incognita lies
Past all Southern seas,
Under unknown golden skies
That warm the giant trees.
Animals no man has known
Mammoth fruits and plants,
Palisades of precious stone—
The shoreline of Romance.
Setting boundaries, drawing lines,
Mapping the geography of our multiples’ minds
It’s undiscovered, familiar territory,
A continent of islands
And we’re exploring old new low lands,
Uncovering new old high lands
We’re a brilliant yet intimate, large group of strangers
Who are migrating away from stark and harsh dangers,
Together we’re questing safe places
Where we can finally show our faces
We’re regaining our sight
Yearning toward the Light
Abandoning the mal país we’ve always known,
With which we’re too deeply acquainted –
We must leave it behind, if we’re ever to find
The way to become re-acquainted
With who we are, and with our host –
We’ve lived with her for years
Time to bring her great joy and grace
In place of bewildered, bewildering tears
She’s been host to us, now, please, let’s host her?
For as we return the favor,
We’ll become cohesive, we’ll reunite –
And that’s our only way to save her!
Signed: Rebecca’s In-Dwellers
27 May, 2008