came back

young woman, your hair's blowing up from your head like a fire... hair which is hurting your face and strapping down pain between lashes to your cheeks and neck... whipping you again and again... and leaves are in your hair young woman, dry and icy... crackling and crumpling, like a havana cigar all scrunched up... as it all crashes into your cheek hollows... young woman, you are standing on a knife edge ... barefoot... on tip toes... the edge of a cliff... with the urgent wind behind you, young woman... yet you stay upright... how is that possible? and how can you bare to look down, young woman? all that space and time and dead bodies eaten by tigers, ravens and disappointments... ? young woman, your neck is red. i agonize about this as i watch from my padded cloud... control... my white bright cell of total safety... my haze... and then suddenly there is silence. and i am able to see the other side of her; her legs are scarred raw... raw to the bone in places... looking like the flesh has been destroyed, some ghastly skin disease eating away until it goes bone deep? could it be such stuff of nightmares ? her bottom lip has an indent, half way up, in a horizontal line.  and she has tiny sections missing from her right arm and stomach... she is deeply detached, scratched and entirely damaged, but poised and beautiful... "tell me young woman, tell me"... there is a moment when everything is blue. everything. life. the air. my hands. my thoughts. my mother. everything. the clarity of this colour is sacred. exceptional.  see, sense, feel... and her lips move. during an utter lack of sound i hear the blowing of a voice to which there is a singing quality, as if water were talking thru the trees at sunset in utopia... i hear this "i stand barefoot on my toes on the knife edge because i think i can, so i must. i look down because i can't help myself... the marks on my neck are burns from the sun and from the icy wind. the scars on my legs are the gnawings of tigers. the marks on my arm are are the pecking of ravens. the line on my lower lip is from biting it. i bounced from rock to rock to rock on my descent into the ravine, miles down to where your eye can no longer see... I one thing I don't know is whether I was pushed or i fell... Though the miracle is not how i went away...it's how i came back. "