Thank You

Thank you for the pain you caused me
Thank you for inviting me to spit on your pedestal
Thank you for kicking me in the jaw with your feet of clay
Because you see now that I am free of any illusion of you
I am free of the goddess and I am free of needing to be any god to you

Thank you for being more closed than I am
For holding onto your hurt and letting it fuel your rage
Thank you for your particular repression
Although I can not say I find joy in the fact
That it is destroying you from the inside
First your organs, then your skin, and at last, your soul

Thank you for being unsentimental and for
Closing your eyes to the Mystery all around
Because I see myself, my reflection
In all that you are not
And of course I see it in all that we share
Yet I am cutting loose for the moment
The things I've known we've shared
At the most common and actual level
Because they feel spoiled
Like milk gone sour
Like birds flown South for the winter
Like a baby with the flu
I need to step back and wash
My soul of you

The truth is hard to hear but it is harder to speak
Words are easy to hide behind
But far more difficult to enlist in the service of the Truth
So thank you for giving me the opportunity to
Serve my Master and pray at my altar
To burn my incense and let myself shine
And be open enough to be hurt
Under the wheels of your runaway chariot
With its crazy horses
Tossed aside as a willing casualty
To your callous warpath

If I am guilty of anything in those long few
Months with you
It was in trying to pull you up higher
Than you were comfortable going
It was in grabbing at your wrist
As you flailed wildly in the muck of your irretrievable past
(As all pasts by law are)
When you didn't want to be pulled up and hosed off
And I told you more than once
I told you with all the conviction I had
With near total, destructive, generative conviction
That only when you dove into the lake
And were willing to go down to the bottom
Into the muck, where the fragments of
Rotting wooden boards are whipped by time
And anklebones and jawbones and scattered teeth
Spread out among the flowing weeds
That only then, when you could look
At those Super-8's of your childhood
And those soggy history books of your ancestors
And all those shapeless monsters of myth
That you have made your own story
And fastened to your own ankle
That only then, would you find freedom
And peace
Only then your uneasy frequencies would settle down
And you could love yourself without needing another
I couldn't ask you to trust me though
Because in my offer of understanding the world
The trust was implicit
And I saw it in your eyes,
Everytime you dodged
And met my directness with evasion
And my compassion with scorn
And my truth with your deflection, parry, and strike
I saw it in your eyes that you believed me
And you recognized the skeleton key hanging around my neck
As your own as well

So I write a giant Thank You letter now
Like those planes that trail white puffed words in the sky
Thank you to everyone girl who ever broke my heart
To everyone of you who showed me a little more about living
And showed me a little more about myself
Some have been quite kind in their bombing runs on my soul
And some have been cruel and reckless
Swinging and cutting with no foresight
But to each and every one of you
Thank you for letting me take a chance
Thank you for engaging a part of me
That was enlivened by your presence
Thank you for waking up the Erotic in me
Thank you for helping me to the see the world
In myths and metaphor
Thank you for being so cruel
Or so kind that you should have brought me to tears
And some of you did
You were all beautiful to me in one way or another
Whether it caught my eye or grabbed the attention
Somewhere deep inside
I imagine you all as still beautiful
Still generous, still reckless
And I imagine me
And all the roads I've been down that
Are mapped out on my face
Sitting in a wooden chair
And feeling alright