TantraBensko

I write poetry that can not be paraphrased, that could not be predicted, and would transform me in the process. I am a different person by the end of it. Each line creates the next, the sounds, the multiple meanings, the context of the line breaks, juxtapositions, the flow of the music. The character I would be writing about would emerge as from a trance of the poem itself, lucid dreaming. If I could have known the ending at the beginning, why would I have written it? The poem develops through revisions, going deeper into beauty, discoveries, and when I feel a line of light move through me, I’ve probably got it right. I would like others to also feel that shiver of light. That shimmer.

I am a model, creating artistic photography from the inside out. I have made my statement to the world about modeling being a way of bringing through the light. I bring the spirit through my eyes, to the photographer who is in tune with that. Bringing through beauty, feeling the light, expressing self beyond self. So the observer will be seeing a transparent being. A self in relation to the larger self. Pulsing out of the darkness, being both the light of manifestation and the darkness of absolute being. Photography works with light and dark, so why not reach into that concept and play?

I have often sent transmissions of light, or Shaktipat, Kundalini work, to individuals, which causes them to see visions. Many wrote their stories of these occasions in my books, such as Being Turned to Fire. Leaving my life in an art studio, running a gallery, I consciously chose to do that rather than physical arts for years, as a different method of art and refining the fire of consciousness. I have enjoyed the numerous reports of hours of visions from sitting next to me over the years. People are growing more in touch with their fuller selves.

Eventually, the digital art programs and internet allowed me to transmit images more like what I had been doing with energies. As with my writing, and the poetry of the body, and sending transformative energies, I create my art as a means of transformation. I like the end product to be a little mysterious, leaving room for miracles. Sometimes I start to do one image, and I end up with a book length set. The pictures set off dreaming, and we play together…. I love to talk to people who are talking in their sleep. It’s delightful. They finally catch on and wake up.

Sometimes I talk to dream characters, and they themselves become lucid.

I like to call my art Lucid Vision, and my writing Lucid Fiction.

Tantra Bensko Flameflower@runbox.com

Meditation on the Breath

Why does the evening converge inside your lungs?
It does not breathe
Out, only in, until
So condensed, it is night, and your hand
Cries, and your hair cries, and the water
Is thirsty, and you break down

On the bridge and lie
Hearing the sky in the water below you,
Leaves biting the water
And swallowing birds, water
Drowning their sounds, and the moon

Let’s you breathe, your breath white now,
Round puffs of xylophone music,
Hanging on the bones of their sound,
And the water leaps
Onto you in drops that you catch
With the tongues of your skin and it is good.

Snow Sculpture

You work hard and days
Turn colors with cold.
Then, kinetic sculpture,
The form begins to fade away
And change its contours;
Angles change and holes

Appear, points turn around
With water drops.
Wheat farmers in Nebraska
Wash their hair
In your sculpture's flow;
Clouds move it across the sky

And down again in Mexico;
A cactus drinks it,
And it rains down
A horse’s back, glimmering
Along the sides, shaking, flashing,
Curving into the darkening brown

Beneath his belly, growing
Hidden in the heaving
And the breathing, shadowed
Texture of desire.

tantra bensko art

The Lateness of the Night Lies Dreaming

Are we one, then, dreaming we are two?
But in my dreams are colors moving,
Colors from your dreams
That should not move.
When from the darkness then my room
Is sudden light, the scarves
And pillows, drums and crotons
Quiver, vibrate back and forth
From you to me, shimmer
For awhile as they caress
Our thigh, your neck, my amethyst
And voice, and lift themselves
Into their place upon the walls,
Upon the floor, and then stroke gently
Your life distant
Once again, then shimmer back
Until they grow
So saturated
In their forms and shades
That they contain what you
There is in them and then
They leap inside me, scarves
Around me, drums beneath my hands,
Pillows sliding down me, crotons
Painting me until I know that I am colors
Speaking through me
Answers that I have to ask,
And colors have to move to speak
Through you. They sling out
Through your heart and circle round
Into your life, to someone whom you love
But may not know, and lean themselves
Inside you from below.
But left inside you they grow dark
And then your thighs don’t shimmer
When caressed. My hand now
Against the paper, and my fingers
Tangled in the pen, touch you
And will touch
You when no longer there, and so
Your finger quivers as it writes
Upon me words in water,
Words I cannot read nor drink
But feel them as you drink
Them with your tongue
Across my wrist, and down my back,
And swelling curve into my leg.
You grow thirsty as you drink,
The water being thin and light
Upon me. And you want
To wake and hear me say the words
And with that, lose your thirst
And your desire to speak because
I know your words.
We will speak in colors
And our dreams will breathe together.
We will breathe against our bodies
Words that heat then cool
The skin. Words of lettered lines
Of breath, but of no sound.
And we will listen to the body
With an ear against it. Then we will
Lick and eat the ear.
The words entrance us, and we stare
Into each others’ eyes and tunnel
Back into the pupils, finding
Something closer there than sight.
I kiss your eyes and eat
The distance found in sight.
Distance shimmering on the walls
Where you are, where I am.

tantra bath

2004

Licking Secrets Clean

The mannequen on the cross,
Roped and rouged,
Does not feel the same

As she thinks she does.
And our fantasies of her
Miraculously somehow wanting us
Do not fulfill, but tease,
Telling truths

To strangers in shackles
In old, cold rooms.
More perfect than we
Are, her hands,
Disengage and feel
Our secrets

And do not mind the cold.
The perfect body
Mocks our flaws
But her red lips smile
With understanding.
We have imagined

The comfort of a blind lover,
Who can’t judge our looks, only feel us.

We have imagined the comfort
Of feeling our secret
Perfections in crowded rooms
Of our other judgements
About ourselves, which avert
Their eyes from our pleasure taking.

The mannequen’s blind eyes, open, green, serene,
Look away from the cross, her hand
Against our crotch, against
Our suffering, our agony of being
Alive and beating warm.

Tantra Bensko

Egon Schiele: In Prison

He squats in prison, asking for a large mirror,
Charcoal, paper. The judge said he lured
Girls into looking at their bodies, let tender
Children see paintings the opposite of pornography.
Given no mirror, only paper, he
Draws his long and skinny hands. Later, he pulls
His cheek, exposing his eye. He opens the walls
With a sweeping gesture, to see his gesture.

See past the wall’s strict form.

With his hand, he sees through walls: from the street,
From Schonbran park, girls go to rest in his house.
They sleep off parents’ beatings. They eat.
Always tying dirty sashes, trying to seem like freedom.
Collectors need images of them
In Hapsburg-clenched Vienna, even if they’re open,
Skeletal, eyes red, blue joints swollen,
Struggling to the form of square and canvas,

Like words to their rhythms.

He’ll make the rich of Ringstrasse—which circles Vienna
For shooting riots, faking the glory of stucco days
With ornate cement—he swears he’ll Make them see Moa
As she is, and Fredericke, thoughtful, her
Face turned sideways over her hand clutching her shoulder.
He’s drawn their hands dark and long, their bodies small.
Or if they’re clothed, their hands have all
Their painful nakedness. He’s given them his.

~Tantra Bensko

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