Angel Atrapado X

Angel Atrapado X


All those gathered in the assembly began
standing up and speaking. In my last life,
I was the son of a merchant who beat me
across the back with a pair of glowing tongs.
Before that I was
the daughter of a jealous rival,
one of the long line of smilers
banished to blackened chapters,
and condemned to sweat beneath
vinyl canopies. Recently, I tried to prevent
further interference, momentum, and shifts,
but a fly began circling inside my voice.
We will be the transportation, the bicycle
or bobsled, the hill or gravel path. Then we
will drink our flasks of human acid, and
drift out past the hinges of falling stone,
the platforms crowded with martyrs
trying to call home.

It is only now that I realize I was confusing
the bell with the voice answering the bell,
the voice hampered by the docile propeller
peeling back the sun. You were there,
or someone like you, someone so like you
that you had become the one I was
addressing. I was there, in the noise of
the ashes and lamplight.
Yes, I was there, in the middle of
the sentence, its balcony of vibrations,
and there was nothing else I could do
but jump into the linoleum,
plastic, and wood.

He liked to unbutton my blouse in front
of his mother. That's one reason,
the other is not worth mentioning,
at least not here,
not now, not while we are where we are,
doing what we are doing.
No, in this air,
its red velvet box,
I would like us to stay as we are — two
parrots nodding and screeching,
broadcasting snippets of tales
told to us by one legged men
in their foolish old age.

How can I be worried about her?
She is up there. She is beautiful.
And she has a brain. A man's brain.

Certain phrases or starts of the body
begin to be interchangeable
at every juncture, corners
where words meet words.

She was talking again, the motor humming
in the dream's backyard,
the air full of its own decaying light.
I was skimming through my wardrobe,
checking the moisture levels and
bacterial growth. This is perfume from
the Milky Way, you said.
This is sap we twisted from our bones.


John Yau

Posted over on Lacanian Ink