When I was born I am sure the Voices took care to be quiet
And not terrify
Or drive me mad
From their thousands long dead
Recent dead throats.
They were a faint rocking murmur
Waves of generation
Back generation
Connecting their voices
Their languages changed
Changing
The further back they went until….
There were a few voices
Of faint clicks
Grunts
And snarls.
As a babe
Then child,
The voices were a sea deep inside my consciousness
Slowly poking
Prodding at me with THEIR long dead
Even recent dead
consciousness.
In my teens I thought the voices were the drugs I was using
Or using to silence the voices
Voices that spoke in so many ancient
And recent tongues
All so familiar because …
They were my ancestors
alive still inside me
With death,
Their voices not silence
Merely passed on through my parents
From theirs
And theirs
And 2 mirrors face each other and you see infinity
And that was
Those were the voices inside me.
As an adult I would feel them crowded behind my eyes by the thousands
Watching all
Murmuring whispering laughing crying comments of everything in my life
I treated them with humor and compassion…
“Hush now,
I have to focus here
Finish this bowel movement
This job
This drive to work
This meal
This conversation
Or we’ll all be lost without being passed on.”
I did not pass them on but there was gratitude
That their thousands could vicariously live through me
at times like a mad crowd trying to experience all I
Saw
Heard
Tasted
Smelled and felt.
They made me realize the joy of living
Everything
The rain
Sun
A cold winter’s day
panting in the heat
THIS WAS LIFE!
WE WERE
They were… ALIVE IN ME
All my ancestors going back to the most primitive incoherent yet…..
FEELING….. One’s.
When I became sick they ran through my body like a maddened fever
All of them trying so hard to heal me
Making me sicker at times by whispering ancient even poisonous remedies.
Despite them
Or because of them,
I healed I lived until…
Those mutant cells grew in me and there was nothing THEY could do
Or the doctors
And I lay dying
And dying
The greatest sadness
The greatest joy,
Was hearing the thousands goodbyes
Of ALL my ancestors
As they slow died
Again
As they had died before
often in each other
lights that flicker and die
And in a rush of final consciousness to me,
Gift me with their entire life stories
Life
Feelings
Life
Sensoried experience and sensation
Like thousands of orgasms
They died inside me as
I LAY DYING…
Closer to death I heard the last voices
Men women and children
At times I felt even the unborn had tried to talk to me
To share that limited womb experience,
I heard the last voices
Joyful
Sad
Loving
Raging and hating…
Against this dying with me
And vicariously from behind my eyes for the most unfathomable numbers of times.
Finally I knew what it was like to be like other people around me had been
To HEAR THAT SINGLE VOICE AND KNOW…
This is ME
My birth voice beyond the ancestral multitudes I was born with
My ONE voice…
Hearing that last voice
I let go …
And now within you…
Within your mind with these other multitudes…
I tell the tale of ancestral voices.