There was a tidy dance, in the tidy mind of a tidy person on a tidy hill.
Even the wind seemed tidy in accordance with such containment.
Always cleaning up after itself at every turn the tidy dance was quite magnetic.
Something small and immensely violent was contained within the tidy dance.
Some kind of wild bondage to brutal fantasies existed there. But always latent, inside the tidy dance.
It brooded with a desire to be released, which it always held back from.
By one moment.
One word unsaid, one comfort offered, one touch made.
There was joy in the control of the tidy dance.
A pleasure was once again found within the displeasure of not letting go.
And so within limitation, a poet was awakened.
It was the prayer of the monk and the nun, of all the enlightened ones. The ones who burn themselves in protest, the ones who fight in the mountains only to be imprisoned for years before maybe becoming a leader of the country or dying unknown or healing with their hands, thoughts and embraces like so many women. Whose shadows found their ways to the tattoos of lotuses, of fire dancing on a wall at night. Stories untold. Silence.
Within stillness and discipline a river washed over a dam and brought hurt to its resolve. Inside the hand of shackles weapons rode into oceans shattered. All was buried and recovered in one moment. Brought to justice and expressed.
And if I were to imagine the extravagance of this dance, it crawled into my eyeballs to make love to my synapses but only after eating everything from my refrigerator/brain. Which of course does not belong to me, as nothing really does.
And he turned to me…
Its the subtle moments that say the most, all the rest is theatrics as we know. Decoration for the ecstasy of all stripped down to a small moment in which he rests his hand gently upon my shoulder to console me at a sad moment, tears dripping onto my clothes, or shortly after intense intimacy, or flashes a small smile like all the rays from planets unknown, allows a look to access a complex moment and find relief there, or bumps into me as we walk along a canal duck gazing because he is walking too close to me.
And inside this tidy dance, we find activism.
'I love your energy' he says.
Walking the largest bridge in NZ in a Hikoi/march for Maori against …. we find a dizzying height of unity, waters thrashing below. A union, a joy in feeling that something is being fought for that is right, sacredly walked for, amidst thousands of small dances inside minds limitless, awakened are the poets of active love.
Love for humanity.
A mountain beheld.
Honour shielded.
Within the tidiness, was a small something wanting to let go of it all.
All the protests, the need for it all.
But it didn't know how.
It was now locked into alignment with its own synapses. Pervading that which is inseparable. And even the violence of the past, the tribes against tribes, slaves and cannibalism, genocide, fires and extinction of the largest bird, the colonisation and devastation of culture and land, the power play and guns used as trade and hierarchy itself against itself because each is its own tribe and against itself like cancer the body turning against itself… somehow it remembered harmony through all the years of injustice. Which finds its way through many forms, many roads to the same destination. Blood mixing with blood, stories into stories.
The gates opened.
Lips met, flags burnt, banners blazoned, feet walked, a head rested on a chest of a lover. To hear its heart beat wild. The fight for this love is a tidy dance, brutal because love hurts, like this protest over land and culture, to whom do we belong? Nothing belongs, we belong in this space. All. But the dance between all was undeniably beautiful and contained its own chaos reduced. Like a conceptual art piece. A penis stuck through a wall, exhibited as a Taiwanese artist stood in a wall in Berlin and allowed the audience to see his facial responses on a screen and listened on headphones to his sighs as people teased his erect or soft penis. A small controlled dance of intimacy on a wall, through a wall, transmitted as fragmented, the senses disrupted.
Through a wall.
Through a wall.
He does what he pleases.
She does what she pleases.
The invitation is there and there are no rules.
Within limitations we find our greatest potential, it sounds like something visceral, a cricket chirping on a breezy New Zealand summer evening shortly after twilight on a hill in the long grass.
The most relaxed and beautiful of experiences. A comfort everyone should know, a peace twisting inside all possibility and simplicity. That we are cared for.
A tidy wild dance of hope.
Seeing the expression, connection and freedom of the all within a small moment, a touch of a finger, an air particle and all collapsing into itself without it being cancerous, as we find ease and joy among bodies merging as a wave of protest or lovers in the grass.
'Been racing girl? All over the world in those big cities?' said a Maori tattooist warrior placing his hand against my forehead. 'You need to slow down, I'll give you a green stone'. I didn't ask him for anything and he gave so much. He reminded me of my own brother, tough but so soft, happy to listen and talk to me feeling akin, ‘We are the same' he says, telling me so many stories of how he should be dead, how he owes life back, how he faced a lot of death, time in gangs, and how love saved him. I felt the same. 'This bitch' he said turning to his wife who was laughing at him. 'You go back out there and get him' he said to me, 'go get him'.
I had his blessing.
For the small tidy dance of unity between all things.
On a hill in my home land. With only wind connecting us from afar.
