Hunger and Longing

"Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment." Rumi

This morning, I begin this process of slow revelation. I carve out my name here, reveal the first to you of what it is like to make this slow climb out of such and deep and sifting hole. The walls of my escape are brittle, they crumble with my grasping and oh how the sand of everything in my life that has been crushed by that heavy wave of grief burns the raw skin of my palms. Such longing cannot be what the Buddhists call detachment, what the monks sit hours for on the banks of the Tongle Sap river at dusk, but it rises in me like a yeast that has met the inevitable warm moist breath of God. There is no stopping it except ( and these are the things we can't admit to) the sullen things we ingest to numb the rising, the fatty animal flesh of our despair.
All night, my stomach heaves under the weight of a body that has been burried alive beneath the weight of that unrepentant grief, of what I have unwittingly imbibed, the tiny buttered chatchkes that I cling to in my sleep, that I grasp in my swollen fingers like an orphaned child. Mine, I say, Mine! But what I am holding to is a fairytale that was read to me over and over again on a dark night, and what I thought was to be the prize was a poisoined fruit that has gnawed like a rancid seed in the belly of my heart all my life. I followed the wrong path in the darkness, went strait to the witches house as though I were her only begotten child, wove my secrets into the threads of the wicked queen's shawl. Oh to be yourself when the whole world is the chef that says you are Mexico, America's bitch who lies always underneath and you are only the illegal worker who stands on the treacherous border between the cold line and the twelve burner stove. All night I feel his words, and remember how all the while the children were coloring on the wooden table just steps from that kitchen door, while the backs of reptiles and the bellies of birds buckled to their broken crayons, while the parents were harvesting mussels from the saffron rice there was a war going on in the kitchen that could not be spoken of. And I, the general that sends orders in silence aross the lines for Penne Alfredo with blackened shrimp and asks again and again for thick loaves of crusty bread, am in collusion with this, with the black moles on the citrus huddled in the freezers dark tomb, with the canker of knowing.