Mishi

My silence on my puncture via exotic cultural dynamism is only due to the fact that in those dusk to dawn chats with mystery Eurasian man, the last of my youth and sense of magic went with his rejection of any meeting between us. Not that I didn't keep looking, but whereas the later Argentine Cecil would have been settling on a pompous but intriguing old fool, Mishi, by contrast, took my last hope for real passion with him and his bong inhalation, and I became Petrarch and mailed him an ode five pages in length, pulling it from circulation later. Would you like to read it?

The Last Virtual Seduction
                                         
                                  for AT

And I have come out with bloodied hands again--once more on the
wheel towards the routine and the rack,
fingernails torn from the flesh in a Peter O’Toole scream, his
English witticism to combat the German fascist with the tip of a pen--
lest we forget,
the guilt of our ancestors, between Axis and Reich:
and what bubbled in a lethal caldron of darkness and blood, in the
mixtures of marriage between system and slaughter,
a German soldier found his geisha, a
daughter of that fiery Chrysanthemum Throne to bed her
and wed her. How such a
dynamic and vital an issue would spring from these
sinews of fictions and fervor?  A prince
who would dance amid sunbeams and hook me in the mists of delight, like
a flower whose petals transfix on the sun with no
choice but to follow the orb in its path from dawn until dusk
and through dusk into night to the next dawn again,
I found lightning made strike far too 
early and too fast, a
flint struck its spark to form the
tears of flickered  flame, their
shapes to join and merge to yield the larger fire

the tribe will gather round
and feel the thrill of fear and awe we still feel pulsing the
beat in our blood
when we see the mighty cat stalk the bush
and tell its tale, fear and awe in our gestures and our
speech, rising and falling excitedly, reminiscent of hoots
and calls when we feared to become the prey of the sleek and mighty
feline, pristine in its majesty, enthralled by moon’s
reflection in a glassine and deadly eye which held us to its
gaze, and gave him name, in those early
days, in the time of the nomad & hunter
Kagamishishi the Mirror Lion may have made his
way on a story teller’s tongue, a legend one
day you would take on your own, as on its own it did woo
me, your handle:

a sixteen hour play whose dance transforms the sexes,
a woman wears a puppet on her hand

and through the motion of movement, the 
placement of slipper to floor just so,
and measured at a pace to seem forever passes by in what
she transforms and turns into, as the clock ticks, a
second is like a grain of sand, one
grain removed from a mountain for every million
years, and still hard pressed to catch up, an 
eternity in what the mirror reveals, reflects back behind the 
beauty of a painted face,
the muscle of the feline behind his mane,
and here comes the lion as Kagamishishi leaps forth like
ghosts in the smoke of a Shinto temple,
an echo behind and before us,
flesh bursts alive from a pane of glass, the
birth is the roar of the King of Beasts in possession of his
pride, those final weary
steps upon the stage his alone to make and hold me
fast, the tired and dazzled audience,
an American girl wide with wonder,
the eye enchanted and enlarged, the
pupils held to the computer’s glare like magic in the
dark, like magic and the snort of cocaine, hope’s
blossom gives its violent birth,
all between dimensions of a keyboard and a screen
you watched the heart in shock, 
how it did plummet
and how it did drop, bouncing back in your throat retained:

and love is not possible this way, no— you shake your
head, thrash your hair and stomp, to rebel against the tidal
wave of passion surging to its shore; resisted too the pin
pricks of that hopeless lovely special waltz which found its
circumnavigation in your valves to Mozart’s key, the steps themselves
light as twinkles on the mobile above the newborn in his
crib, for these are the stars that dance their finite skies of joy
as beholders to delight fine as a fistful of talcum 
you throw in the air, to snort and explode up your nose
and blow you away well beyond the Oz-Land Emerald City
Oppenheimer never dreamed in his deadly fusions of atoms,
never dreamed, as you yourself were but the stuff that dreams were made,
when Emperors urged their subjects to wield broomsticks
while his cities bulged to mushroom clouds that blast
and burn away to cinder,

this blazing past of terror to score its mark along my 
breast in the very silence of the things themselves that are always left
unsaid,
the revolving doors of time in an instant removed, to weave back
and go forward again, to denude like
the peel off the flesh of an orange, with the linger of acid in the
sweet of its pulp:

you have to swallow this hard,
down it goes and please digest:

How many programmers with their million bytes of code,
the bewilder of zeros and a wilderness of ones, a
thousand micro-typists to create the words between only two,
the most complex and elemental of your binary
pair,
 a man and a woman, like you and I, we
who might find ourselves in any bar, across any table top
where I might nurse a favored drink, with a
discussion of the classicists whom I might like indeed:

The viola might rise and pluck; the violin might coax and warm
the circulation so inflamed you see its sparkle in a 
soft and limpid look I cannot help but offer--
a spinel falling from its meteor,
a crystal to pierce the muscled heart
and make the flash of light beneath my smile which has its
hints and textures, just a trace of the Old
World left, in the curve and fullness of my
lips when they come into the play, like the
Mediterranean breeze to billow the sails in the Italian strains
still here, in a great-grandfather’s passage 
and travail, a random tap to my shoulder,
this finger of time, to remind me
this is left
what is left for me to meet: a classic case perhaps,
a classic clash of East meets West
never so classically simple, nor so far removed, as an
inner voice of the woman-child might attest:

No dad normally I would not be attracted to Asian 
men but this one is different and only half

Japanese and happens to speak English even better than I
These are the wheels which already turn,
evolve a defense against the ghost of protest not even 
needed to keep a safe divide.  It is only I the
poet who would dare beyond the probable of cause:
Oh where are my emotes?  Those dear commands for which I but slash and think,
my bubbles in the air like champagne, my colons to make my expression 
its pink, and a private message sends a whisper, a confession, 
or a pass--
and here alone in the apartment I can almost believe
I am here in his office and can loosen his tie,
or nudge him in the ribs and listen to his cries in lieu of the
past lives which haunt us all—
This is going to sound really sick but my ex-girlfriend was in to anal
 penetration—

and there is a logic to this, a computation mode,
behind these mists and streaks of passion which only partially conceal,
like a woman in the dark undressed behind a
see through silk, to let her silhouette seduce the final
swollen urge to thrust,
the final union of the good and bad I know, 
whether to stand about face, and halt,
reassess and plan the retreat, or move forward on ahead  
and plow:
I am physically disabled like the clients whom I used to serve

and the past is an echo on this loss of relevance,
the motive to ease the agony which vibrates and strums the soul,
the purchase of this computer to find my way online, 
and for one moment, in a vulnerable space,
a vulnerable time, 
the virtual world became a glittering baroque too
bright, floating and formless,
the real one cast aside,
the one where you left employers by their way
and lost work as a concept though somewhere
still maybe it hides,
a glance in the recycle bin— check your Windows 95—
and you roll from wall to wall, 
fiery as a dragon’s fire when full of rage,
an anger so many knights have tried to slay in the
darkness of my lair, and failed, even death himself,
his sickle but to make a slighting graze

born in the breech three months early,
I would not breathe at first
and would not breathe again so a
wee bit of brain tissue died
and spasticity became a word, a ruler, and a
secret not easily relayed, in how these
muscles tense and spasm of their own accord
and the knees of my leg which do not lock to stand, never to know the
promise of a ballerina leap,
and the balance on her toe with which a
heart might match her splendor, so much the
fairytale in which I sought my way

I cannot handle it you said, in the face of my few
rare victories, so minuscule and small within the squares wherein
any Napoleon might have made his bid:
So what am I here for?

Surely, not for the sake of art?
Or love pure as a diamond which draws a wrist to bleed, the thick blue 
veins of my strong and muscled wrist, a substance harder than iron
and sharper than glass slicing straight through what I felt within my
grasp, a very choke hold on the
vine in its ascent,
and a vision obsessive perhaps,
a vision obsessed,
creator of all my omnipotence

a crucible, in which hope and folly mingle,
more alive than the rushing currents of my river,
far brighter than the rays of light which warm my sun

only in my dreams

someday the lady might kneel before you, below the
mercy of your sharpened sword,
frozen there in stillness until a 
hand reached down, to raise my vision towards the sky,
and I would know then, in a moment called forever, what the 
mirror in your eye reflects, to see the 
song of myself staring back.
.
*************

The last time I was so smitten I would have done anything, or so I believed, to set eyes on him, seducing me only by teaching me about high Japanese classicism. The real me, that being the one who fled her emotional fantasia over much ado about nothing, died here. Not quite ready to allow it back into the field.