Poem: I look better in black

Embracing + transmuting the shadow

Art and poetry can be forms of shadow work, a safe place to explore and express the inner world. Sometimes spirituality and healing are about love and light. But there’s a time to embrace and transmute the darkness.

In this poem, I share some of my personal spiritual journey, a reminder that every path, however unconventional, can lead us to salvation.

I look better in black

I’ve heard it said that heaven’s gates only open to those who rise above the dirt of Earth on the glowing wings of love and light. But when I suspend my superstition and perceive instead with my own naked vision, I can’t help but notice that darkness and light are distributed here in equal measure. And searching for God is like a fish searching for water. We don’t notice that which is everywhere. 

As for me, I was initiated by moonlight into a secret lineage of Vodou priests and saxophone players on a Friday night in New Orleans. My gurus were dead poets and pop stars who recited sacred mantras in rhyming couplets. And I drank my holy communion from shot glasses in dimly lit dive bars while classic rock played on the jukebox. 

I drank ayahuasca on the 6th floor of a commercial real estate building in Manhattan. We gathered as strangers inside a tightly packed room and had visions and vomited together while the shaman sang his icaros over the buzz of New York traffic. The next morning I walked home under the brightest sky I had ever seen and smiled stupidly at every customer inside Starbucks, where I stopped to order a latte. 

I worship the goddess embodied in the flesh of my lover, and pray on my knees to her holy temple, a portal between worlds. 

I once saw God in the faces of drunk hipsters at a Modest Mouse concert in Minneapolis, who danced and liberated their bodies in the cold Minnesota winter, an ecstatic expression of joy which had been vacant in the religions of their youth. 

I took a roadtrip across the American midwest and had a kundalini awakening after eating psilocybin mushrooms in a Nebraska cornfield. The next day I drove to the Black Hills of South Dakota and wept at the site of Mount Rushmore – an act of violent graffiti carved into the most sacred site of the Dakota Sioux. Overweight American tourists mindlessly took selfies while the true inheritors of the land sat chained by broken treaties to reservations overridden by alcoholism and suicide. 

I found divine union on Tinder in New York City. I was trying to get laid and she was trying to regulate her nervous system. We laid together in her Brooklyn apartment and shared our fears and demons and trust issues and holiness, and moved in together two months later to save money on rent. 

I dropped acid at Big Bear Lake in Southern California while the October breeze kissed my neck like a tantric lover. The akashic records opened before me but I was too busy refreshing Instagram to notice. 

I prayed to my ancestors for guidance, but they were still traumatized from fighting in endless wars at the behest of presidents and kings who used my family lineage as disposable cannon fodder to protect the prestige of empires. 

My guardian angels speak to me every day in the coded language of television commercials, song lyrics, and overheard conversations between strangers on the street, teaching me that God is not an untouchable, disembodied concept in the sky. God is among us. God is speaking. And we must only have ears to listen. 

Simply being alive is holy. And the only church worth joining is the inhale and exhale of oxygen and carbon dioxide shared equally by the bum and the billionaire, the high vibe and the low life, the sex worker and the queen, as we step and stumble and walk each home. 

I did not fall from heaven. I rose like a sunflower from the soil. So you can keep your white turban. The dirt tends to stain. And I have always looked better in black.