Lindsay Kolasa

grow wild
eat dirt

So I will tap
into my own
lyrics;

if I can —
you can.

Looking inside,
I see the ticking
talk

of my being
which endlessly
banters

something —
nothing.

Crystal shaped thoughts
being transformed by
movements,

curving and twisting
towards the shining
sun,

from down below…

We are tapestry
of sifted soil,
intertwined.

We are wild —

we are all
dirty.

*Written while living in Birmingham, AL sometime in 2000

—

A friend of mine posted this poem on Facebook the other day. I thought it went very well with my poem. Enjoy and tap into your own inner dirt…

To be
civilized is
to hold oneself
in opposition to nature,
which is to hold oneself in
opposition to oneself, to be ashamed
of the animality of the self, which to the fully
civilized means the “filth” of the self. All of this
destroys any possibility of communication or entering
into communion with anyone but other civilized
humans. If we listen to the creatures and to
the elements, and even to our bodies,
we are then primitive,
backwards.

So
we learn
very early to put that
away. We learn to despise ourselves
and to feel ashamed of our bodies, to hate
the dirt and to hate everything about us, because
we’re human, which means we’re humus: they come
from the same latin root: earth and dirt. But self-loathing
is a difficult thing to acknowledge—maybe the most difficult—
so all those characteristics we must loathe if we are to be
civilized, if we are to dominate, get dumped into
others who bear the shame and
who end up feeling
dirty.

~Jane Caputi