The Binchōtan Charcoal & Its Ash
By Vi Khi Nao
There is no delusion that she wants her.
Is marriage like owning a very expensive art piece?
Your spouse the painting?
You the crooked frame that won’t fit?
Is this how desire is born?
From having less or from wanting more?
She wakes up calling her name.
She wakes up knowing that she doesn’t want less.
From House of Cards she learned a new rule: “I love that
woman. I love her more than sharks love blood.”
Or something along that line. She may have misquoted.
It came out of the pre-disgraced Kevin Spacey’s mouth.
Her God doesn’t exercise telepathy or residence.
Hands, eyes, mouths, authenticity.
It’s a city without mirrors.
Because touch, in itself, is symmetry.
—
She held the woman’s face in her mind’s eye &
realized that they would never be lovers &
as soon as she let her go, mosses grew all over
the geography of her hands and the woman’s face.
Is this because it’s a debt that must be paid for
not believing in somebody?
In herself?
She felt the desire of desire as if it was a binchōtan
charcoal and its ash.
Masakichi Yakitori
and the Pyramid Club.
—
On Easter Sunday, she sang a Christmas carol of Lao Tzu.
Lao Tzu, where is your power to persuade a tree from falling
asleep on itself?
Does night dream of actresses sleeping on leaves?
Where is the human figure in this?
Your Saturday is a memory without a body.
A pair of lungs that knew too much about your mother’s rape
tells you to leave reality through a threshold of a dream.
You knew how to be authentic. How to get rid of people.
How desertion works in the wilderness.
You exclude sound from your thesis.
It’s a way for you to desert poetry without being too poetic.
—
There were thistles inside of your mother’s vaginal canal.
She wasn’t violated in the wilderness. He has dragged her there to
say that it was okay to want pins and needles. She wasn’t numbed
after all. Her body didn’t pretend to be a God. Just a whimpered
Lao Tzu.
In a remote mountain, the men are smoking pipes and their vapors
smell like evergreen.
To punctuate their desire she says: God is being difficult. But he is
not.
I have to tell the world that I am sad and have been forgotten. Is
there a way home from not being homeless? Is there a way to swim
in an Indian reservation without being caught?
Listen: the isotope was just a trope.
There are ways to move smoothly in and out of insincerity.
We grow to learn how to brush melted butter
onto doughs shaped like the cavalry.
They arrive galloping on the baking
sheets without yeast in their armors.
—
Every Tuesday we acquire clues from the shape
of your mother’s scream.
When it was hoarse, it had the shape of a small bonsai tree.
Your cat licks you and licks you.
You know it’s not 300 bc.
Desire comes and goes while leaving lies to clothe themselves.
Her anger is a troublesome candidate of sadness—
lights itself on fire.
From time to time, the cunt of that fire grows ember by ember.
Once in a while, a house made of screams floats down a black river
on the planet Pluto.
Its chimney is not designed to ventilate silence or resilience.
It’s designed to allow screams to escape without suffocating
everyone inside it.
Once in a while the rain arrives to suppress the anger of the
scream.
When anger soaks like wet grasses on the house’s floorboard, the
ants come out to showcase their military might.
They resurrected the screams from their wet ash and carry them
on their powerful backs.
The aftermath of a rape is portable and transmutable.
A possible somatic experience for the ants, but may not be for the
human or the inhuman.
