Alayan cyborg & Rock 'n' roll'
by Louise Bak
[ poetry - april 02 ]
Alayan cyborg
our eyes are tide-tugged up the peak to the hailing figures,
down to the trough of the honorable, despairing elder.
the recumbent post-acting porn star is in the front left,
drawing the scarlet damask on the cart, through the
mirroring at the water's edge.
he embraced her, but what he felt beneath her light coat
was no more than the firmness of her tightly-wound obi,
with its padded layers and its huge bow. he raised a
Sakaki branch and waved it over her head. its paper
pendants flashed a pure white rubedo on her cheek.
their silence was that of a number of small rabbits,
each holding its breath within the shelter of its own
lusty Belsen thicket.
is love supposed to glow on like this after the set has been
switched off? he ran his hands nervously through his hair
and suddenly faced the beam of a flashlight. he felt fear,
squeaking between the pressure of his fingertips. rearing
her head from his chest, deftly tabi-shod, she moved in tip-toe.
a purposelessness of a Taisho-era swoon, her glaived-bust
bulged with electrons, and her sesamoid cells split
into cubic heaps. she was drooping from the bye-bye in
the sweat saturated air.
her father ripped off his kendo mask. his lips formed a line
as straight as a sword, and the waki arose with plastic vacuoles,
bursting orgies of flowers. they expect it to crumble into sticky
powdered sugar, but when the knife makes contact, it scrapes
but does not give. though she pulls at it,
the surrounding tissue doesn't move. People's eyes were
moist, watching as her skin shone like vinaigrette dressing.
on the monitor, a digital marigold quivered a sincerer gold
in its pot. the director yelled cut, as he pulled the flesh away,
we could see the heart was not connected to a thing. guard
cells were bursting to prop open her stomatas for maximum
oxygen flow, so she could utter her last gasp. she sucked in
a saliva packet and burst it
before the official flashlight and bonds were waved again.
noticing with a blurred eye that one of the group was
flurried, she touched her lips to his, as to feel their texture
clearly. the lofty deck on the crane bristled with a sniper.
a kind of shyness kept him from daring to tell her that
each man would undertake his mission with a petal of her
alaya hidden upon him. the tropical light was like hundreds
of massed spearheads of
marshalled troops, on her again. he licked the glucose pools
under her eyes as her erotonide chip jabbed through her outer
cells and glowed like fired wire. if we only we knew the film's
real special effect lied, in signalling the action of him, accepting her,
on lips, that had yet touched no other.
Notes:
alaya is a concept paired with a kind of awareness that nothing within the universe truly possesses its own substance. Theories around this concept grew rather numerous, "the one hundred thousand diverse exegeses" that characterized Buddhism. Another theory suggests that alaya consciousness was half-defiled, half-undefiled, and hence could serve as the bridge to human salvation.
rubedo, redden, reddening, results from the fire's most intense heat.
Taisho era was a brief period in Japanese history when a whole-hearted surrender to the emotions enjoyed favour. This earnest passion has now something of an anachronism that has become something to provoke laughter.
waki, Japanese priest.
Rock 'n' Roll
i am familiar with this one - blue milkcrate full of suicide notes,
bungee-corded to the back fender, artificially black corkscrew curls
bouncing in his wake like rogue coffin springs. there was always
the clinking of wineglasses mingled with 'Electric Eye' entranced by
the old electric drip coffee pot with the box of paper filters beside it.
hangnails peeled off, we pile our squealing bodies up against the
door so he can't get out, though he pushed and screamed until
the indiscipline of a centipede had us all falling into his high-grade
arm-pit. we try to squeeze-dry the saliva of kisses for the 'elected
electric spy' vowing to practice blinding glances of unidentifiable
beauty in front of the bathroom mirror. stalagmites of sleep cling
to the eye-liner, tranquilizing Ceres' eyes together in stagey grief.
a bony fellow of indeterminate name, shakes nuts and bolts into
his mouth, while tiny blood vessels burst in my nose from crying
the moment before, to protest something i don't recall. the guitar solo
scrambles, as i lift his hair out of his eyes with the eraser of my pen.
he raises and lowers his arm in a strangely mechanical dance.
he freezes and turns, seeming to stand on a rotating platform, excited
that crumbled bay leaves scattered across the windowsill will deter
ants. candlelight and a record-looped backward, "I asked her for a
peppermint-t-t/I asked her to get one," does the trick. nidificating
laughter, dots the mystery of staring into space. we're scrunched
into a painful shape on the couch, elephant-deity etched in to our
bulk. someone pinches my forearm to stop my laughing, while a
hush puppy gets rammed into his toweled lap. with his hat pulled
down, he exclaims with the song, "Hey, look, Ma, my chair's
broken," while playing in the bath water with the tip of his tail.
Notes:
'Electric Eye' is a song that appeared in Judas Priest's first platinum album, Screaming for Vengeance, that evokes a modern technological environment of high-tech energy and surveillance, perceived by some to be endangering to listeners.
The reversed lyrics on Judas Priest's Stained Class album, scoured for Satanic messages, came out with humorous results. The lead singer Rob Halford reversed, "They won't take our love away" with "Hey look, Ma, my chair's broken." The last Satanic discovery in the line "Stand by for exciter/Salvation is his task," came out backward as "I-I-I as-asked her for a peppermin-t-t/I asked her to get one." These lyrics were unveiled in a court situation, whereby everybody laughed at these subliminal "Satanic" messages.
