Sacred Contracts VII: Darkness

 
Motel 6:  “We’ll leave the light on for you.”  
 
I.  
 
All living are the darkness of their bones;  
Spirits and Specters, hemoglobin in every color  
of defending warrior donning leather’d armor.  
I’ve observed men leaving the women they love,
the "’light’of their [lives]” shining brightly
as a beacon for their lonely 2:00 am motel
trek home from “darkness” they’ve tasted.  
 
I get it. I do.  
 
A light is something trusted to guide you;  
it’s safety, security, warmth; sacred as nursing  
breasts, not a “darkened” experience between  
another woman’s legs because the chance of his  
own love, the “light of his life” being even half-  
dark is simply too great a chance to risk.  
 
(She need not know any of this. She need only  
continue to illuminate his darkened state so  
that he may return home again, debased.)  
 
II.  
 
Darkness. Let me tell you its secret. Darkness  
is the underbelly of a verse, a diaphanous beauty  
The pyramids aligning planets, not the reverse;  
A solstice spell staring you down through the navel  
of Stonehenge, hieroglyphic language on fingertips  
just beyond linguistics. It’s drowning through the gut  
of a poem 1000 feet below sea level. It's rappelling  
down the ballad with a melody too short to prevent    
bruising of muscles and stretchmarks to follow.  
It’s dust flaking from the throat of a well where  
a virgin waters her camel alone. It’s incandescent,  
a limpid ritual of an interpreted crop circle; a familiar  
scent, nag champa oil and the lick of sugar thick  
across the palette. It’s an ingested scream from  
between a lipped valley. Its grit, teeth, and sweat  
caking crevices of knees and elbows; dirt trekked  
necklaces staining clothes from days of climbing  
the sonnet’s structured back before discovering  
water’s frozen origin across your mouth.  
 
It’s exhilaration, a severed envelope of recognition  
tumbling freedom; a native rite of communal passage;    
A Spiritual blood-bond; a coming home not by or  
of light from anyone else but as the light itself.  
 
It’s a liar’s worst nightmare stumbling in the mud  
of 3:00 AM with another woman’s scent on them:  
It’s a Holy Pact – A Sacred Truth forging pure joy.  
It’s not to be hidden but proudly experienced.  
 
III.  
 
Most men’s darkness is a pharaoh who ruled  
women by ruthless law, his tomb cursing  
the desecration of his bed chamber by inscribed    
light upon a stone sarcophagus of stolen gold.      
 
A woman’s darkness isn’t for the faint-of-heart,  
it’s through choice she reveals the ancient code  
to the worthiest of archaeologists who honor  
the unearthed balance of a humble truth.          
 
IV.  
 
The depths of physical desire, “where the skin  
parts” isn’t a dark mystery to be explored  
or conquered upon the back of a lie. It’s a cracked  
wonder, a pomegranate spilling sweet seeds across  
compressed grass above tangled roots of curled bone  
quietly gestating in the softened egg of the moon,  
where a woman’s darkness swallows a man whole.  
 
V.    
 
Until individual men remember this Sacred Contract  
We'll leave the light on so they can find their way back.  
~