Poetry from Nova Martin – America's favorite transwoman feminist lesbian druidess poet
She’s coming.
The full moon is coming.
In the forest is a vast multitude
of love and beingness.
And so I smoke my cigarette
under the trees
to give them extra carbon
because she’s coming,
the full moon is coming.
God, here she comes.
Yes, she is coming.
I love you Mother Earth.
I’m going through
my first lesbian breakup.
And I am standing on
you right now
looking up at a billion stars.
And I know I’m an Earthling.
Resolutely tender and mortal.
Vulnerable to the Universe’s
dispositions.
I will love you
always.
My forests and my wizards
lead me in my days.
The living network
and the Dead.
My days are bound before
the sunshine’s chords,
the spirit clouds,
the respirations of oaks.
The calls, the draws,
herald my fate,
their listenings and their vibrations,
become my tongue,
my way, my steps forward.
My heart is like the forest’s roots
and my breath is the endless vapor
of the unliving,
their expanse across all time,
it shapes and fills my
now-woman body,
and rings my now-woman soul.
These curves
do the work
they were meant to do
… thanks to their conception
from the woods,
the lichens,
and the moss
as my ghost loves
hummed on.
And the Woman of The Woods said,
“Thank you for teaching me
the language of the woods,
its stillness,
in these carved autumn nights.
Thank you for time,
now
and however anciently forever.
It’s just right there,
it and the world of forms.
Oh goodness,
thank you for breaking space travel,
death, celebrities, and Instagram.
God, thanks for these realizations,
… or rather, I should say; reckonings.
To be reduced, humbled, then filled
with light.
All that go solo cannot be solo.
All that be collectively can only be one.
No beings,
but beingness, only beingness are we.
Speak in that tongue.
Come, let me kiss your lips.
Let me kiss your tussen bark.”
Can we born and birth ourselves?
Something in our body did.
Something deep within us.
In our core.
Our origin. Our beginning.
The hours here after our before.
One end of the universe
to the other end.
Right there in our forehead
and our skin
walking within panties or boxers,
walking with the beasts in the fields,
people in the cities,
trees in forests.
Walking by those elder elms
a whisper known to life
the turn of death, the turn of birth
known to self,
a self that does not begin nor end.
The moss on stone.
The mushroom of the kingdom dead.
Estuaries of darkness,
tributaries of light
in every genome and atomic particle,
programmed and programming
space and non-space alike.
Throw your Stone Age religions
of laws and fear out the window,
the Great Rightening of Civilization
is here.
The dawn of humanity’s childhood
is ending.
The cedars and the oaks
have known,
known for so long.
Or else,
how could they lose limbs and
still live?
How could they mold and rot,
bear both the dead
and the living
and still be,
still continue to live?
The Great Rightening of Civilization
is here.
The trees will lead the planet
hence.
The brown druid
went into the green oak forest
and came out the white druidess.
The brown druid
spent time listening to the slow
beats of the trees,
kissing their mossen bark
to his lips,
and talking out loud to them
in the clear language of the
common tongue
until enough of the miracles the
trees did do came true
and that endless ancient light
cracked through
into the brown druid,
turning the he into she…
and thus walked out
the white druidess from the
good and ageless woods.
This was in the 7th year before
the Great Rightening of Civilization.
What if we could take our
video games
off with our gender?
What does that mean?
What if we could
take our gender off?
Going into
the markets of
market capitalism
that
needs labels and names
for everything
partitioned, divided, sold, and
discarded cheaply
underneath
the solar star sun.
What if the sun
demanded itself destruction
for all underneath it
that has underwhelmed
it?
What are these movings
of waves
and energy?
What is this
end to
the binary peoples
and
their binary civilizations?
Why did they
form their civilizations to be binary
when the sun
and all underneath it
are gradients,
scalar principles,
infinite stepping?
Transistors made here
can perform
stepping sequences,
but the people here cannot,
they cannot do this
mentally, nor emotionally.
So they will
die
and they will
destroy their planet.
The woods will ruin a lesser man.
They’re evil.
Teeming with creatures.
Teeming with whispers.
The woods carry cold,
hold onto cold,
but prosper insects in summer.
They’re everywhere;
the scorpions,
ticks,
centipedes.
You can’t lay down or relax
in the neverending mess of
leaves, dust, twigs, and pebbles.
Though the arms of the trees
bring you the moon.
Their dead warm your house,
build your pubs and tables.
Their leaves give you breath.
The woods are obstacles and evil to men.
They need to be destroyed
for new neighborhoods to be built.
Comfortable and romantic to women.
There for vacations and fires.
They are scary and alluring to children.
Home to wizards, witches, and faeries.
I live in a house on a hill, surrounded by tens of acres of thick woods. Mostly gnarled old oak trees, with an occasional pine, and some brambly trees like mulberry. The oak trees are interesting in their variability. Some are old, falling apart and decaying right before your eyes. Some are strong, sound, beaming, sociable and communal. Others, just years old, beginning their development and pining for the sky and moonlight. The woods are at once alluring, magical, enveloping, consuming, scary, and populated with a trillion spirits and life forms. They have the power to get into your psyche and expand your perspective on life, time, and existence, but also unsettle your deepest fears. I always feel I have been given something when I go into the woods and come back out. In a sense — the woods are psychedelic.
And yet many men (those of the testosterone sex) approach the woods as something to conquer, remove, and use for utility. I find this unfortunate, and something that comes from places of fear, insecurity, immaturity, and insignificance… nearly all evil and destruction of the testosterone male derives out of his struggle with insignificance. It originates in the importance, the stress, the need to perform his biological “duties” and the fear of those failures. Though his deepest fragility resides in his perceived reality of cosmic insignificance — which being a lone wolf (“my way or the highway”, “my family”, “my home”) he has failed to reconcile with the continuity of everything. And the woods; the woods are quite the opposite of this.
Trees are the guardians of Earth and our closest metaphor of the nature of the Cosmos. Our teachers. Our highest forms of life here.
A giant car,
the size of 30 Empire State Buildings
rose up before the metroplex of Dallas-Fort Worth.
Holding aloft in the sky,
holding all dominion,
it towered over 1 billion miles of highway.
The highways ran left and right
as far as the eye could see,
merging into Space
and Infinity at the edge of the horizon.
Speckled here and there were signs for
AppleBee’s,
Wal-Mart,
McDonald’s,
and Home Depot.
This colossal of car held sway
and took place of the 5 million people
living down below, back on the ground.
The remainder of the cars,
that the seven and a half million people
once used,
got up and walked to the ocean.
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