The Root of Labia
Libidinal, says the inner dictionary
means
all the instinctual energies that exist beyond this keyboard
and my eyes
doing screen time
Libidinal impulse
Im-pulse / I’m pulse/ I’m outta here
I hike out into the forest
feeling that one thread of consciousness
the running stitch
of my life
flashing
in and in and out
I stand
in a meadow bursting with seeds
I am a meadow bursting with seeds
while
mountains rise up all round me
like mothers holding out blankets
The primary libidinous relationship is to the maternal body
A male genius called Freud said that
Mother.
Other.
M/Other
To the male genius, women are Other
M/Other Nature’s the ultimate Other
She spirals sequins through my pulses
chanting Labidinal...labidinal
I walk into her song
The 10,000 things surround me
Karl Marx said, Humans are desiring machines
producing libidinal materialism
Oh fuck Freud
and fuck Marx too—
I’ve spent too many decades arguing with the Great Genius Man
in my Head
The only question is—
How does life survive
us?
The orange butterfly
sinks her long tongue into the purple thistle head
The one wind blows.
Post-Freudian Ecofeminists say
Men must betray the feminine within themselves
The more different I am than mother, the safer I will be.
Father is the Master of Mother
& Father is the Master of Matter
and nothing female and free can survive it.
Libidinal
from the same root as Labia
the gateway —
We push through the hinge
escape the impoverished patriarchal heart
We’re born through M/Other, born to be Other, born to bear
this misogynistic world of male domination
where ‘pussy’ is the greatest insult a boy
can call another boy
Where rape is the only possible response to lust
Where wilderness is scraped over, processed over,
barcoded over
where it is over
Dead at the feet of the genius men
& their ego-massaging women—
targets
all
Where we are intermittent achievers at best
Hillary, fiercely clashing
but absorbed into The Brotherhood of Suits.
Where women’s work always involves mediating
between nature and culture.
Where it’s all about food and dirt
and food and dirt
and exclusion and harassment and
WE
are not particularly impressed
with self-interested speculation,
exploitation
and technological advancement
for its own sake.
The butterfly fights the wind and her own big wings
to taste the sweetness a moment longer.
Is misogyny and separation from nature as simple and
as terrible as some Freudian negation of the mother?
Because infantile dependency to men is unspeakable
as is the name Patriarchy—
try speaking it in mixed company
Patriarchy
It will upset
everybody.
Judaism projected a transcendent father god who is not here
here are only machines, created by men
His magical uterus
“I’m no pussy”
M/other is only ever
and always
Pussy.
The Greeks split body and mind, subject and object.
every monster in ancient Greece was female.
Greek misogyny revolting
against the feminine in all things
The Goddess of war emerges
fully armed from Zeus’s head
She’s no pussy.
Science—
Detached manipulation
worshipping human mastery over a dead world
furthering man’s emancipation from M/Other Nature.
Religion—
teaching humans that we are separate
better than this butterfly, this sky
‘cause
miserable cultures need a messiah
and an i-phone.
You can trash god, but I’m here to tell you
try trashing Science
and you’ve got a roomful of enemies
a world full of enemies.
Science — it’s just separating and counting
man
and you’re so good at it.
The tragedy of women and nature
counting
for nothing.
Europe’s witch-hunts, paving the way for science and capitalism
biblical commandments, colonial terrors
commanding disenchanted nature
to Her death.
The age of Enlightenment meant
reductionism, dualism, straight lines,
meant Progress
The agonies of industrialization
and you know what—
FUCK ALGEBRA TOO!
Man created laboratory, competing with Labia
She creates life, but he creates death
This is patriarchy!
maximized — synthetic — commodity — production
value-added abstraction
that pierces the body of the one starved world
Her incessant rhythms whispering
libido libido libido…
Does any of this matter to the dew-beaded dragonfly
to the seeded rose hip?
I try to walk it off — e-motion, not e-stuckness.
Peace vibrates like bees in blossoms
like roots never still
The 10,000 things lean in
always and everything
like women
treading waters in our heated blood
in our repetitive domestic servicing
How invisibly we hold life and the world together
Our unacknowledged labor,
Mr. Marx, Mr. Freud, Mr. God
Our science Our religion
unrewarded with a wage, ever and still
under every single institution
The emotional support, the material needs
so poorly understood
by male theorists
who walked straight out
of the only world
into a masculine fantasy of transcendent domination
but
left a hostage behind there––
Here: where being a Mother
is the single greatest predictor of poverty.
Here: where there is no language for us.
You know, even slaves had a language from before
from when they were free
but not women
and surely
not Nature.
And all you’ll see is how angry I am
like
all we see is his utopian dream rising up all round us
call that Life in the real world
trained from birth to see dead roads paved with bullshit
as the real world
All landscapes are his
all language
and the contents of our minds too
created by the force of his ideological machine
denying our libidinal foundation
That original cut from the mother’s body
numbed to the ground
The shame of that first erotic link sealed off with asphalt
Nothing in Herself
like Women
laboring invisibly to free him up for self-actualization
Never a presence.
Never a voice.
A distant
throbbing
in the
pulses.
The butterfly loses her grip on the blossom
Your science is changing the climate.
This dissociation in which we find ourselves
Now, finally
and very late
a language to speak—Environmental Crisis
a revelation
Now
where the bodies of all species are under ineffable institutionalized
attack
Here
At the end of progress
where the future hovers
between industrial disarmament
and
extermination
How
can some benevolent force
like a pair of Mama hands come down
and scoop us up
like an Internal Rapture
not leaving the planet
but reuniting it
Scoop us up
into
the sensual velvet enfoldment
the rapture of Mother Love
And it would hurt
your false identity burnt off, your armor
peeling away bloody
and then you’d be free.
We’d be free...
Life! Life! Life!
Oh Mama
keep holding out that blanket
Mama
Enfold us in your gargantuan safety
so we can let go
Like child soldiers and rescued lab animals
and rape survivors gotta learn to let go
Let that internal rapture
ripple a tsunami
the spectacle of science and violence
cannot absorb.
The mountain rises, grain upon grain and
disappears the same
This circle
swaying like blossoms on stems
like waves on the beach
like the last tiger in a zoo cage
like this green supple mind
this red molten mind
While non-human Others quake and chase
soar, run, and rain
We are one winged windy time bomb
The infinite wind chasing the shifting clouds
in the only sky
panting hot beneath that boss of the sun
this grace of the moon
our cells and time
unwinding
While
the butterfly
vermillion-splashed
perfect against the blue
is tossed again
into This Wild World.
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