hey angel

By: Dhwanee Goyal

sweet angel, made of satin ties and rubber gaps, tell me, do you ever stall? look at your reflection in the mirror until you are withered, then blink in confusion, and move on?

do you ever marvel at your beauty, skin made of porcelain material and lips of frozen flowers, the form of a millennia-old goddess? do you, too, see yourself as a breakable thing—a lingering caress, and you just might fall apart? cords wrapped around your neck like a vice and golden knobs holding you in place, do you realize how you are a victim of your fragility? do you see like i see, multicolored hues fading off into derision, or is your world of a dual color scheme? do you forgive and forget because it is so hard for you to distinguish between evil and the simple bloom of life?

how i wish i wasn’t a simple plastic cover—angel, do stars, too, ask for your permission before they fall? do the parallel concepts of mortality and inevitability have you in a chokehold, and how far are you willing to go to escape their grip? do you live in a glass palace (or is it a cage?), and even so, do you recognize your privilege? do you know of prejudice, or do you perceive it as simplicity, nullified explanations originating from the same unique point? i bow down to you—me, with the knowledge of your stark-white innocence; you, a floating concept. could i perhaps hold the mellifluous tomes you have penned and try to catch a glimpse of what you see? were you able to catch that same transient feeling in another body? before the songbirds disappeared, did you bury it in their throats? the birds are now fragments. still, their siblings perch on otherwise abandoned willow trees, cooing with the hopes of a lost love, a buried trove. it was you who had directed them north, away, but their three-fingered feet, like the multiple needles of a single compass, found their way back. ah, to be you, satisfied by the mundane, unaffected by the disparity you see, ignorant of the rags that hang themselves on the clothesline and weep.

do bodies spit out the same dirt they’ve treasured for years at the sight of you? do you feel the wrath you’ve carefully contained inside your bones, how they with their calcium structures rattle with the fervent wish for something? and you, angel, out of control now (out of control always)—do you feel the elegant handlings and unprepared stumblings? do you notice your tissues opening, rejoicing—a laceration that integrates whatever is thrown at it, fiery denouncements still sputtering out of your mouth without meaning? and for once, you cannot catch hold of them.

could you be any more superficial, bouncing between reverie and allusion with your eyes taped shut, mind in a trance (you never get enough sleep, you complain)? do you realize that your halo has disappeared? that a fringed reality has crashed into you in its place, and as you open your daily offerings to see what you have wrought, you ask for more, more and more still. “do you wish you could be more like me?” you ask rhetorically, through blood-smeared skin and a wide cheshire grin.

you refuse to look truth in the eye even though its fingers are the very last things you feel.