The Life of Spoken Word Artist Cassandra Tribe

Requiem for a God (video)

Loving you
has made me
an enemy of the state.
They would hunt us both
if any thought
you still among the living.
but they consider you a dream
and me,
some dangerous fool
to be locked away
and slowly destroyed.

Sometimes to cause death,
life need not be removed.

They should be hunting us both,
but you
have abandoned me.
Left me as easily as one leaves
a newspaper on a seat.
A lover left staring into
an empty space
which was once complete.

It is not grief I feel,
or longing,
or wishes for history -
but a slow age that spreads through me
and weights my bones.

Loving you has revealed
the depths of me.

    #

The language of my homeland
has always been silence.
In silence we greet the day.
In silence we eat.
In silence we work and play and age
and in death,
it is silence we meet.

Here in this strange world
you have brought me too,
all is noise,
song and words,
silence
lacks the voice to be heard.

The priests and monks
sorcerers and sayers
pretend to value silence,
but the silence they teach
is an absence of life
and not of eternity.

To them, silence
consists of nothing,
the rivers of thought
and streams of belief
that flow through their silence
are dry and choked
unable
to teach their history
to age upon age
with no need of books
or learning.

The silence of eternity
wraps itself around the soul
and bleeds through the skin
leaving on each layer
a film of words,
a language too thick to be strained
and weakened.

And the soul,
as it grows,
and time draws it forward,
reads these words
like pages from a book
found free
and blowing unbound.

     #

In your wooing,
sentences you left incomplete.
I filled in the gaps
with words stolen from old dreams,
and never once
did you correct me.

You let me build chapels
and castles
in the deepness
of our space between.
You let me puppet gods and statues
idols and dances
to the love and life
that you seemed.

And all along
did you laugh at me?

Anticipating the end,
when all would come crashing down,
and dreams would send
me running from their falling demands.
Too late!
Too late!
To take back the last moment,
the one where you looked at me
and with smiling kiss
destroyed the fantasy
that let me believe
and still remain in the nest
of this world that surrounds me.

You destroyed
my capacity
to believe in blind eyes that see
and say the sun is dark
and dark is light
voices that strain
to drown out the sound
of the thunder of pulse
that answers the beat from the ground
for without my castles
and chapels to shape and control
all you were trying to give to me,
I am left
joined left vein
to right artery
infused with new blood,
with no place in a world
where blood not beats but pools
and pulses are shushed.

The absence of life
haunts these cities.
The night is filled with the
dreaming cries
from a populace that sleeping
cannot forget
there once was more.

Artery drained,
my body reordered,
what was right now left,
what was mine now ours,
you smiled just once
and fell to the ground -
a god no more
a mortal undone.

    #

Here I stand,
your pulse within me,
your excrement upon me,
and I can make no move
to clean my skin
of the only thing I knew true -
all else false
I see,
now begins.

Was that the sun you imagined
would shine and warm
my life?
That in dying you reveal
you were never anywhere
but within me?
That all our conversations,
our slow hot movements,
skin against skin,
were naught but dreams
left side talking to right
daring to reveal
hidden things?

You tricked me into believing you,
and in trickery
you have made me see
how easy it is
to fill a plate
with deceit
and yet
deceit it was
but a deceit well needed
for without I would
wander fogged alleys still
in a perception of wonder,
thinking what was mine
was yours
and I not worthy
to clean your feet.

Now,
I am preparing ointment,
tincture
and oil,
just as I am supposed to.
I am alone,
so no one cares
that I break jars by
hurling them to stone.

You are dead,
what do a few cuts
from pottery mean?

As I rub the perfume
into your graying skin,
I wonder,
is this the way
you would have me
take my leave?

Painting you
like some doll,
a child's broken plaything.