becoming undone

I was walking and the soil started to swallow my feet in big belching gulps, and I wasn’t scared. My skin welcomed the moisture and the coolness of the earth, allowing and allowing for the mulch to encase bits of my flesh. I tumbled inside of the earth altogether, at last. The smell was quiet, the sounds were wet, and I saw nothing at all with my eyes wide open. I could only allow my tongue to look for me as I opened my mandible wide and led with that wandering slug of a muscle out, shoveling the earth, shoveling me, back into the space inside my cheeks. I tasted decades of time, but nothing was dusty or old. It was buzzing with an aliveness, maybe like tasting a lightning strike straight out of the air after it had disappeared completely. The particles left behind, still alive, and gone all at once. My fingers felt like little tongues too. As did my toes. 

I kept falling, suspended in the earth, as it supported my cascade deeper into roots- which ended up tying me up in a delicate way. Mother spider found herself reincarnated as a tree, her silk spun web extends underground. The roots as spider silk, as roots, as rope, held me with the tenderness of a lover tying shibari knots. Tensioning me carefully into release. 

My stomach softened, my insides I now felt completely. I was my viscera. My organs were pulsing at the same rhythm all together. I was my heart. My liver. My kidneys. They grew to meet my flesh. My fascia, my inside spider web holding everything in place disintegrated and slipped past my permeable boundary of a body to join the roots. I had spun my insides out and was in a cocoon made of me. 

I was slimy on my outside. I hadn’t realized how capacious my insides were. I inhaled particle earth and it was easier than breathing air. My lungs, oh how they sung when that dirt entered through my airway / dirt way. I was breathing for the first time, which made my toes tingle and my shoulders fall away, maybe even off my body. I felt a sway, a lullaby. I was being sung too, tucked into the breast of this earth, our heart beats syncing. She sang to me, rocking me in time. 

I trusted it would never end, and I prayed that to be true, and so it was. I prayed to her, she sang to me for millennia. 

She stretched me to be endless, and sprouted my head up back out into air, my arms sprouted as great, towering trees. I was a mile in each direction, I had always been that way. I had my tree brethren surrounding me, attaching with our umbilical chords into braided wreaths. Our below ground earth lungs breathed symmetrical to our above ground ones. 

The sweet glow of energy being deposited in steady streams into my greenness, digesting it readily, transforming it in gurgling breaths. I want nothing. I need only this. This pulsation. That dependable flow of expansion and contraction. 

My belly button breaths too. A spider nests inside. Dew slides off my foliage, little mirrors and looking glasses that don’t mean to say their sorry when they become tears. I am crying. I think. 

My nostrils flare, there is no salt in my body anymore. I let that evaporate into air, to be mailed back to the ocean. My home away from home address. The one I send my important mail to. I

use leaves as stamps and discarded feathers as letters. I seal them with a kiss. I send them with the wind in my dreams. 

I dream of fear. It colors my vision an uncomfortable purple that muddies everything in its path like a truck barrelling down a highway in the dark, no driver, just a rotten engine churning and spitting up black. I know I must cross the road. I stand, except I haven’t legs, and I crash like ocean chucked on rock. I am bones of a forgotten chicken carcass, still greasy with bits of meat that was too careless to be picked at by those rotting, horribly stenched teeth. A bramble of tumbleweed is intertwined in my hind quarters, and as I look to see that connection, I notice a cigarette butt still stinking of ashes just far enough that I couldn’t reach to light it for a final puff. I want to let one more puff of those beautiful poisons in me. I am scared. I remember. I am supposed to be scared. I find myself distracted and that upsets me more. I see the chicken bone, the tumble weed, the discarded cigarette butt. I am on the other side of the road. This side has a guard rail that’s bent in a reckless and fatal embrace of two quarrelling drunk lovers that have long since turned into dust. Their graves are marked with plastic white crosses and synthetic flowers. I turn to lead. Heavier. So heavy that I get pushed out the top of my body because I can’t bear it. I float above it all now. Truck after truck passes by in no regular rhythm, because everytime my skin tries to dodge the sound of the horn blaring, making my eardrums rattle and numb, even though I long since left my body, the sound a bullet to the ear. Shot. She is planted there, finally feeling fear. I am fine. I float above. I cast a fishing line to my body so I can come back when the trucks are gone.