new name

I long to live in a land where the language is not my own.  

Where I find myself back at birth, 

searching for words to express my heart’s personal truth.  

I am an expatriate from the adult I have let myself become…

an adult I choose to leave behind.

I’ll become the foreign land around me, digging my soul 

into the virgin soil…or more likely I am the virgin, 

digging into love and life growing out of the same 

ground as the prickly flowers that have been calling 

to me from the background of my so-called nightmares.

I am talking to strangers…to God…and a wild lonely 

creature with scales and wings that crawls onto my 

chest and breathes a new world that tingles and 

dreams in and around my lips and tongue, letting 

me taste a future that may even be my own.

Looking around me I see a desert filled with 

the ghosts of passions that are just waiting 

for me to say the word that will let them be 

born into this ugly world where they long 

to feel the pain…but maybe they will also feel 

the thrill of “we shall overcome”.

Looking around me I am overcome with nothing…

and by nothing I mean that from this day I crawl 

forward into my new land with no name, 

only tattooed with a path that fell before me 

to attain peace in my spirit.

I will learn the new language in my new land, 

where soon I may be given a new name 

that is not so new.  It has been branded on me 

since valleys slept in native manifestations 

of vision quests where the future was as clear as 

mountaintops dusted with clean crisp snow, and 

rivers flowed forward; never dreaming, always moving. 

And moving, always moving, I will reach the majesty 

of a waterfall, where behind I will find my true name 

carved on the wall of an ancient cave…and echoed 

in a whisper through drops of water, a word 

I have never heard, 

in a language 

born of destiny.