POEM FOR THE AGES

And so, as we enter T minus 120 days and counting, I feel it fitting to regurgitate a passage, a note to self, penned in response to her original application, rejigged for an early submission; spat out by the males, sucked in by the females; my statement of origin and the of intent.

I know it’s a bit floral for some, but it might make a fitting epigraph. Or epitaph.

I’ve been in hiding for a million years, filtered into the wet dreams of men who are raised by she-bears only to have their women barefoot pregnant in the kitchen with golden chains around their hearts and dreams.

I unfurl my unsavory sundowners at the Shabbes table just as you start wondering why only daddies and rabbis are commanded to the mitzvoth. And why mommies must walk behind trailing taboos in their menstrual wake.

I lurk in the rubbings on corners of tables when you first find the sweet spot where pleasure bares its forbidden embrace and leads you into tortured temptation delivering you from the power and the glory.

I disappear in crowds of conformity staking my claim in the spaces between the truths, hiding from the bullying of boys who would twist my tresses into their tormented mainstream cult.

I have roamed the aching psyche of women for eons, infiltrating lavatories and boardrooms in equal measure, luring men to their petit morts, like Circe, like Siren, like Judith, like Life.

Why do I lurk; why do I not show myself? Because too much exposure to the light may put me in charge, may enfeeble my femaleness, may boomerang me back into darkness.

I live where light thinks not to go. I am the aurora borealis when the solar winds meet the magnetic power of the earth.

I am Shekinah who shape shifts into Shabbat in my white satin challah cover, that sense of silence that belies and underlies the Smalltalk.

I am a treasure house of comfort and peace offering sanctuary to the gogetterism that consumes my kind as they discover their power, seducing hither and thither.

I slip a seductive echo into your coffee cocktail, morph into anything you want me to be, I am easily startled and will disappear if threatened.

I make friends with Artemis in in the glades with young virgin animals. I lie at the pillow talk of politicians and their teenage concubines.

I fight with the python and disappear underground emerging in the scent of guru Prasad served in buckets in temples that worship monkeys and elephant.

I am the music.

I will not be stilled.