We are the real women, the hoes, the shamans, the healers, and the hunters. The women who didn’t unplug, go acoustic, keep it quiet. We are the women you hear when we don’t open our mouths. We ooze, we drip, we seethe. More than anything, we create. We know life is art, and art is an infinitely more profound way to approach living than abiding by the doctrines of thou shalt and thou shalt not.
Try this on:
Get into that body.
Feel the juices, both blood and electrical.
Let them course and flow.
Be that kind of woman.
The one who is sarcastic in a PC world, who fights like a sailor, chucks equanimity, travels the keys of the piano, and breaks open the gates of propriety for other women.
Not like the ones who say, “I can’t participate in your party because I might lose face or standing (with god or man).” Or lose out on the few opportunities available for women.
Be the kind of woman who can hold her own and hold another but cannot, will not, hold her tongue (although she might sharpen it with wit).
Be the kind of woman who storms the gates on pretense and performance, the BS feminine materialism that would perform all things compassionate, all things ethical, and all things kind.
Because the great collective woman’s ego would rather pretend than see nakedly who we really are
And roll over the man-made ideas
To restore and redefine not according to man but according to the rewilding that Mother Nature returns to when we no longer rape and pillage her creative soils.
Or worse, manicure and control them.
Choernobyl thrives in the absence of humans with our endless meddling and attempts to tame.
Be a shrew.
Be lusty and sexy. Insubordinate and ungovernable.
Take off the straight jacket the establishment gave you to keep you in place.
Purge it out, baby.
The diagnoses and the numbing pills,
The somatic healing you need from ingesting the toxic ideas you took in about your body
Here’s your anointment, here’s your crown.
You know
You know not as a swimmer knows the water but as water knows itself.
Do you hear me? Do you understand?
You are the healing waters
You are the baptismal waters
You are the fountain of youth
You are a geyser of indefatigable, inexhaustible, creative force
You are sick and searching, old and tired, stuck and starving;
That’s what happens when the toxins are poured into what is here to heal the world.
The force—woman—synonymous with
Creativity,
Sex, and
Completeness
Is you.
But you cannot see yourself without an accurate mirror, and they are all funhouse mirrors, distortions of your nobility that leave you trying to be adequate, deserving, and good when you are the definer of good, the refiner of the profane, and the owner of the house you’ve been kicked out of.
But some of you have been returned,
Rather than delivered,
like big game animals leaving the zoo
Undomesticated
Savage
Rewilded
Tamed by nature, not by man.
Woman, incarcerated or not,
Is in prison,
decorating her cell as best she can to accommodate the man she has made her warden.
Black woman, with the fury of she who knows, pours out of her blouse into the streets, the elixir that defines the beauty white women emulate (like Elvis did) with what they can control—appetites and calorie counters
Guide us, lead us out of this narrow passage of Mitzrayam that lies between a woman’s tight hips,
Free the speech
Free the love
Free the nipple.
Let us find the lust of our functions
The pride of our nature
The wrath of the mother seeing her planet destroyed
The most insatiable hunger of the artist to create, to know, to see for herself.
These weapons have been used against us
Let us use them to prosper
Durga and Joan of Arc, Kali and Angela Davis, Anaïs Nin and Pussy Riot
Women who were anything but well-behaved
Who put their necks on the line
The sword in their hands
And rode, ride-or-die, with the few,
The others,
Who would rather die than live lifelessly.
Be a bring-it-on-woman
eat their insults for breakfast
that you might correct them.
Because a timid, good woman
held on the leash of propriety
remains a pet of the state.
By any means necessary and with tools forged in our cells
cut away the delusion
subdue the greed
stamp out the hostility.
That is the inevitable undeviating result of a world absent of her sex and creativity.
What would switch on the light in this,
The Dark Era?
I can tell you this.
It won’t be your church girl mindfulness and proper speech that gets us out of here—no matter what you tell yourself.
When the world is sick, good is not good.
Good women become the accomplice in eradicating the creative force that is woman.
Your body, your body, your body
is the instrument on which
the freedom song or the death knell will be played.
Your ownership of your sexual emancipation
is what will turn it from spirituals or signal songs to jubilee.
We answer to one authority—that is karma.
And how differently cloaked it is from man-made morality, manufactured ethics, man’s dogma, and the institutions employed to hold in place what would exclude color to the heir beige, genius from their academy, anything different from their norms,
women from their man’s world.
No, we are not the meek, the milquetoast, the passively acquiescent, or the higher-road women. We are not the white tower women who avoid the trenches and the wrath hiding behind a right and wrong—a remove designed for us but not by us. We are not “above” that. We’ve descended the tower and traded our composure and precepts for the passionate real.
We aren’t good women,
We are real women.
Dirty, rough, gritty, slutty, tricky, and wry, with swagger and banter,
We can’t stay clean for long; we have work to do
But we do clean up nicely.
Only what we clean is the world of delusions, the emperor with the bad suit.
We aim to provoke the sleepers.
Invoke the creatives
And evoke freedom from every corner, every experience, the way a musician evokes music from every string.
Our aim: Get out of suffering the causes of suffering and get others out of suffering.
The truth: The source of suffering is the unexpressed.
The way: Step onto the path of human flourishing with the renegades and the outcasts. Make it the way and invite a few friends.
The method: Melt yourself down and arise according to the need of the times—from revolutionary to whore, white Tara of peace, or the wrath that could burn down the master’s house.
The caveat: If it’s not playful and funny, or if you’re not laughing your way to bankruptcy or chuckling on your own soapbox, it’s not the real we are looking for.
We are the reverent/irreverent,
The profane/profound,
The Madonna/whore.
We walk the line between and invite others to what lies in the in-between
Our thighs
The cracks where the light gets in
The lines.
This is the road to freedom.
For those who contain the multitudes,
There’s just one thing—
There is no ground.
Will you fly with us?