My world, the world, underworld

My hands are still bubbling. My feet, the crown of my head, my belly.

It is water evaporating through my veins, crossing the borders of my intestines, exploding along the mountain range of my back and traveling through the universe. It is light trembling in the darkness. It is my drowned sigh creaking with pleasure.

They are the stars. It is seeing the stars and swallowing them all in a single breath. One after another, like waves that come to me: I am the seashore waiting to be penetrated by the water. It is the foam that rises until it reaches my throat. Within me flow all the tides of the world; within me sway all the sands of the world. I am all the shores of the world that come and go, with the water of my womb rising and falling without end. It has no end: water has never abandoned the earth in its eternal tide.

Suddenly I appear floating in the universe, in the darkness. The rhythm of the drum comes to me, the pounding in the heart, the soles of my feet that resound, the echoes of broken cries of passion and power. I unfold as if I had never had barriers, as if everything had been a dream and I were the darkness, the universe, the beat of the drum, my heart in every fold. The history of humanity frozen in a second of ecstasy.

Merging, my crown and my brow. They feel as though they explode like gusts of wind, lightning, volcano. My eyes drift away and my life seems insignificant, tiny. Barely an extract of infinity, a line from a book. Barely a sigh of Odin. Barely, barely, barely.

I fit everywhere. My legs tremble, my thighs tremble, my belly trembles, my intestines tremble, my arms tremble. Everything is rhythm, trembling, surf that suddenly seems like a mountain: firm and in motion. I untangle the knots of my past, my present, and even those of my future.

My earth is here. Here far. Here near. Here legs. Here head. My earth is here, heart.

The drum, the drum holds life in its entrails, holds the invocation of the soul, of antiquity that demands its presence. The millenary antiquity that still exists in the groin. The drum vibrates loudly and the gut stagnant with rage trembles. The one that needs to move, needs the drum; to stir the soul, the tomb of its dead, the pain.

The drum, the dance, the orgasm. The braid that intertwines my world, the world, underworld.

Two feet on the earth, the head, the perfect braid. Triangle, mountain. That is what I am when I dance: I in movement, I in drum, I in orgasm.

Photography by Mariajosé Rito Michelena