Cave Painting

The Dalai Lama and I were giggling in the dark,

painting crude pictures on the cave walls.

He holds the flashlight because he is too sensible to do the painting.

He loves to laugh, and we spend the day in the dark,

stomachs hurting and eyes watering.

In the dark, the true dark, he teaches me to meditate.

“We are here in the belly of our mother,”

returned to the dark deadly womb,

From whence we came so shall we return.

The darkness is a warm blanket.

There are no dimensions, it is everywhere and we are nowhere.

Our voices seem to disappear right out of our mouths,

like a chorus underwater.

I imagine it would bounce around like a laser in a house of mirrors, returning minutes later to scare us with it’s dusty alteration.

Instead it is muffled, swallowed up in the choking wool midnight.

There is a jellyfish bobbing through the darkness.

It glows pink pulses gliding through this nightmare shadow.

From it a thousand points of light are born, and the fish dissolves.

I lean back and laugh at the living disco ball cave.

The Dalai Lama is still speaking, though now I am sliding through the dust with my delicate brail antennae fingers.

They bounce and scan the texture with record needle softness.

Like fingertips across a breast, skimming the skin, preparing it for lips.

I am able to move through the cave with sticky fingers and toes.

The dimensionless dark becomes a world of bumps, dusty floors, and slick ceilings.

My eyelids grow closed and shrink from apathy.

Tactile vision

Fingers enlarge and I am able to know my location by the way my voice disappears. His voice appears.

These dusty dark caverns with sharp stone and absolute night are too concrete, too bedrock, cold and uninviting.

I can only smell earth, taste my own dry soil, touch stone.

In the darkness he becomes annoyed because I only dream of the female.

How do I get into so much trouble?