Mother Moon

The stabbing ache in my bones swells to unbearable degrees

I drag into the 3 am night, stepping onto the lawn stinging wet with autumn's dew

I lay my body down in a staggering cadence, a sickening nausea rolls steadily through my gut, and wretched tiredness pours out of me like an angry, bloated river

Eyes close and I embrace the heavy outline of my shape in the matted, damp lawn, wondering for the thousandth time if freedom exists outside this cage of pain

At long last, with nothing left to give over to the earth, my eyes flutter open to look for the aliens I'd prayed would come and take me away

No flashing lights on a saucer ship, just distant, blurry star diamonds living lifetimes away with stories of their own

My rotting bones are shocked again, expanding with urgency, rocked with remembering

Only the cool grass offers coddling grace, wrapping around my sad, human skin, sickened in ways no medicine will assuage

Eyes roll back in my head as I ride out colossal waves of misery...again... and this torment morphs slowly into

Wild, maniacal sounds crashing out of my mouth, flying towards the bright heavenly orb hanging heavily from invisible sky strings

My howls convey a fevered prayer;

Mother Moon! Can you hear me?

I beg you-- hold me! You who have watched over my childhood steps, my bold and my broken steps --

Mother Moon, Moon Mother!

Write down my breathing, my cries, my story! Place my sorrow and my successes and my yearning in your light beams and toss them throughout terrestrial time and space

I cannot hold them anymore, I've grown so weary

May you throw the sound of my mortality into the cold vacuum of space as you tug on earthly waters and gather me into the mythology of time....

Mother Moon! Mother Moon! Are you listening?

Lift me from this body of dust, blend me into your milky ocean bosom, and drink me into the warmth of your cosmography!

Mother Moon! AAAooooooo!

And with this final roar of release, I am suddenly, shockingly clutched- pulled high- high- breathlessly higher into the sharp, black sky. Like watching my house grow smaller as I gaze out the back of a moving car window, I see the outline of me still pressing the grass below. The air grows colder, yet all I feel is the warmth of alabaster light

Folding around me

Entirely

While my suffering lies still.... somewhere far, far away..... in a wet bed of sodden darkness.