Once, a beautiful man began referring to me as Frida.
We met on the land, southeast of San Diego,
where festivals and workshops transgressed and where
Native American sweat lodges still stand.
It was the Grand Mother's land
and a first that I found
intoxicating.
Once back within the bustling city, I purchased a book of Frida's found journals
(en espanol, no less),
and I spent months painting homages to her style
on palmbark.
I even claimed my own Diego, passionately
crying and feeling torn up inside
by his continued rejection.
The choice, though, was too much to bear -
after having once suffered through such a fate.
So I turned on my flat footed heel and finally
walked out that open door.
Once, a bald headed monk would read to me
Rumi as we laid on a dirt dusted driveway
in recently washed work clothes and as Arcturus
flashed its nightly display overhead.
Still, I crawl into the books and words,
the poems and stanzas of a time now past.
Over eight hundred years of spinning divinity
reaches my eyes, washing over me. Absolving my human
soul as I sit perched in grandmother Magnolia and once again
above a bustling city scape. Once, I penned my own
short ditties, my own odes to my beloved. Once,
I channeled the spirit of a whirling dervish now past.
"In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.
You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,
but sometimes I do,
and that light becomes this art."
Once all the dust has settled, however.
Once I have sat long enough.
Once I have cried my river of tears
and torn my vulnerable heart open.
Once I lay bare my virtues and my longings.
Maybe then, you and I will both begin to see
Carita.
