The Mercy of Becoming

(September 2023. Burning Man 2023. The infamous “Muddy Man.” I got a lucky last-minute free ticket from my friends Mac & Kat from Austin in exchange for helping them drive their RV from Austin to Black Rock City. Emma stayed in my bus with Waldo for the week in Washington at Elkenmist. We got to BRC a few days late. I had one glorious full day of driving my new (used) OneWheel around the flat playa, a dream I’d had for a long time. Then, while I was as far as possible on the other side of the city, the rain struck. OneWheel wouldn’t work in the extra-sticky playa mud. So began my long trudge through the increasingly-thick mud as the rain fell, carrying my very heavy OneWheel over my head. It got harder and harder, each boot picking up many pounds of mud with each step, getting increasingly stuck. I only made it a few blocks before I was worn out. I went to Aaron’s camp and found my friend Michaela. We made a giant pot of ramen in a damp tent. She gave me a large knit poncho to wear in place of my soaked clothes. I ended up spending the next few days in that poncho, which went down to my knees (no underwear or anything underneath, bare feet in the mud.) I was basically a refugee; I knew my tent was surely flooded, all my clothes and everything else ‘d brought soaked like a sunken ship miles away across town. Michaela and everyone else in her hexayurt were sleeping elsewhere with friends, so I was offered use of the yurt for the night like a hermit crab shell game. The yurt was only slightly flooded, slightly wet, slightly muddy, slightly cold, but it was still a great kindness. I sat there in the dark, trying to sit only on a corner of a sleeping mat so as not to get the whole thing wet or muddy from my own damp poncho. All I had left on me was my phone flashlight, my black notebook, my pen, and my trusty ketamine nasal spray. This poem is the result of using all four of those a lot in the dark wet tent for a while, until I was able to catch a few hours of sleep with my cold feet in a puddle. I’m very proud of this poem; it’s worth all the damage my ankles took squishing around barefoot in the mud all week.)

The Mercy of Becoming

I hold the world up in the light—

Which is joy in the future of memory—

One must imagine Atlas happy
Says Sisyphus in the rain slowly trudging mud
One wheel held aloft for the heavy world
To spin upon and around the weight of ancestors
A still point only stilled by spinning time
(A tight verb spiral, what nouns look like
From the 4D eyes of death which is God)
As decay I ask the question of life how
This flow can crystallize into lastingness hard
And rememberable, a something to swallow again in light.

Remarkable— that anything can be named.
The stop of throats is the wet edge of divinity,
And to stack life together is to live a story.

For now, this tent survives the changing rain.
For now, I am dry of time’s river, shivering and warm.
I clutch close my I-ness like a dream upon waking.
I am what I am by mercy of becoming.