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Songs
of Love and Anger
Ara Mgrdichian
One
The smell of Mastiki gum smelling up my ashtray...
I think of you again and watch the cigarette extinguish
against the hardened, chewed up gum you left behind.
I watch me extinguish the cigarette against what was
rubbery and vibrant in your mouth--that which was once salivated, full of
your spit and movement. It lays cold and hard now, against the glass ashtray
and I give it brief heat while killing what usually kills me.
Two
I picked up the dead rat with steel smelting tongs, by
the tail. It ate the poison cookies. Greedy parasite of urbanity. Greedy,
poor, unwanted pet of production. Just another silent partner roaming the
junked up halls.
I pick it up with the tools of my trade and drop it into
a zip lock plastic bag and deposit it with the rest of the refuse that
putrifies, that was once something, that was once animate.
Poison cookies for the greedy bastards.
Three
La Traviata pours through the rain soaked windows as you
drive away from yourself. Seek out a plausible past, seek out a possible
future, in between the real places you go, in between all the things you
make yourself do, in between your career oriented casual wear and calculated
well-kempt spontaneity geared toward garnering a bit of interest from young
men weened on music videos and sexual objectification...
Frank Capra movies and detective shows.
In between, you revel in your car, even oblivious to the
iconic meanings of rain and La Traviata and driving. But you’re awakened
everytime you exit the dream machine and speed. You awaken to a world you
are bound by.
Four
You are dead.
I pick you up by the tail with the smelting tongs, out of
my ashtray, along with Mastiki gum and extinguished cigarettes--used self
destructive consumer items and you.
You hate it, but you’re dead.
And in your own vicious circular way you ask for more,
moaning, assuming lordosis position, asking that I grip the tongs even harder.
I hear this as I hear your La Traviata in the rain.
I drive you away this time into a plastic zip lock bag and
place you on the heap with the rat and the other things that once were
animate.
AKM
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