on entering: the nunnery

I feel wrung out, into a puddle of thunder.
I said that one night, in another daze of experience, so full on flavor that I have forgotten every one. The feeling of that stone floor on each foot. Hearing the man with the white beard call out in ecstacy while we galloped in valleys of sonic ecstacy. The Grand Canyon yawning before me and my utter boredom, just trusting my eyes' perception, that I could take every timid horizon mountain between my fingers.
I thought "Call magic!" was the answer, and it's true, magic will visit you. It will rap its knuckles on your front window and offer your special sugars invented bees. Magic works, but it is a dagger more than a scapel, so never think you can do your fate a surgery. Even the caresses magic has made for me end up as stabs, big punctures into time and monuments on my memory.
Except singing. When I use the magic for singing, I abuse it and the rewards are spirit luxury. I will force it from me, I will call to all supressed priestesses in my ancestry, I will force every grasp and thrust out of pores and armpits, I will not open my eyes for 25 minutes and I just give bare and liquify and play dangerous games because when you invite that kind of state on your body, it becomes just wicked. After a show, I felt jittery and diabetic, I would hide, suddenly I could not even laugh because my emotions were depleted and I was a zombie. I could only smoke a cigarette and kind of speak in a foreign accent and maybe walk down the street and talk to a bum or find something secret. Maybe our tour went so well because I have some of the USA best marijuana and we all like that, except Danny who is just naturally. A police dog sniffed us in Louisiana, and I effortlessly conducted the exchange in magic, in communications of small currents far above the man grunts and crude body language. It was 2 pm, I was having hummus and carrot, it was an unexpected apprehension. The cop said, "What kind of music?" and I said, "Experimental?" Whoops. "Roots music!" The dog was efficient, a narc. He put his paws on the sill of the driver window, I was in the passenger side. I looked him long in the eye and my toe wrapped around the plant in my slipper.
You can't get a Motel 6 in Louisiana because all of the displaced live there, pacing in parking lots and walking to gas stations.
You can find an Icleandic wool poncho in Albeqerque for $2 and a shoplifted bathing suit and overpriced Mexican food in a glorified adobe alley.
You can put your cheek to a tree so old that it fell down but did not smash the well or practice space of the farmhouse where the kids and cats live. Atlanta.
In my most desperate act as an American, I collapsed at a rest stop in Wyoming. It was the morning, beginning of a 38 hour drive. We were the only people there except for a minivan with Republican party vomit all over it. It was especially vile. I was wearing a wool poncho, a Peruvian rainbow hat, Lenny Kravitz sunglasses and slippers with jeans. Unexpectedly, boldly, I ran out of the van and boxed my own poncho and joyously saluted the sun until I collapsed to the ground and the van carefully reversed and merged back on. I was paranoid about cops the rest of the day.
Grandmothers stroking my head at Arby's in Iowa and at the South Dakota diner, and looking into my eyes. Truck stop bathrooms, motel bathrooms, other people's bathrooms, bar bathrooms, art space bathrooms, no privacy for religion!
I am a nun building a portable convent.
The answer is easy: more freedom, be more free, energy is infinite! But to strive for that personally is lonely. I am not holy, I have only seen glimpses of pure liberty, and even that sight dilutes into a hallucination in my memory. But the taste of freedom I have is bittersweet; who else will really meet me there? I see the human traffic; there is metaphysical coagulation. This is no small talk. I feel serious about it, it is the essence of my longing, but that is the source of a really splendid hunger. But sometimes, get me right, most times I want to laugh and hug and dance and just talk with my mouth. My head gets heavy.