desolation angels

why i dress up as an angel every halloween

I. The Angel of History | Walter Benjamin

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past.

Angelus Novus, 1920, Paul Klee

Where we perceive a chain of events he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.

Snowballing on dirt roads. 
Healing:        a Sisyphean task : molding a mud hut 
                                                               in torrential rain.

The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.

Immense loss. We don’t float in the ocean. We drown.

But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.

The Pan-American highway is           a failed project,          tarmac sponged into the psychically dense rainforests : No machete         can tame The Darien Gap, drenched refuge of fugitives and spotted frogs,    dichotomizing       Turtle Island :            No road connects the two Americas, not even    dirt.

This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

The American experiment will have been          a flailed project,   
            dogpaddling in its own piss, tides arisen. 
Progress: swimming against time, which is anti-hegemonic.             Radioactive decay.

Where is the literary Freemason Lodge?!!!

Three books I’ve read allude to Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, from his essay Theses on The Philosophy of History. Sure, everyone and their mama is in love with Walter Benjamin, but I kinda freaked out by the third time. (I don’t want to be the earthworm of the mycorrhizal network.)

I’ve been trying to read more deliberately, instead of devouring books like they’re the salve to my Instagram addiction / dopamine deficiency. This winter break, I’ve hibernated in a rabbit hole, reading books recommended in other books. I’m cosplaying as an English PhD, scrawling lists of esoteric words and media reviews.

A map of orthologous historical angels:

I. Apocalypse Dreams

can’t talk rn,,, im having apocalyptic visions

Made a mixed media (sharpie pen/acrylic paint/oil pastel) canvas that’s based on an epic poem That Is Being Written On My Laptop’s Microsoft Word. Still a work-in-progress bc I want to add beads & embroidery. Took one line from each page. The narrator is both an Angel of History and a dumb bitch.

1. a million hands smudge fingerprints on the sun

2. skyscrapers pin up the satellite-beaded sky

3. my hirsute wings are growing too long.

4. A sleep demon gouges out my third eye for brunch

5. don’t set me on dumpsterfire.

6. nematodes rupture their host’s exoskeleton

7. no one owns the sky

8. 21 missed monsoons.

9. fall asleep counting falling stars, a tasbih

III. Halloweekend

Every Halloweekend, I don my cardboard angel wings from Buffalo Exchange, phantom limbs. (Sorry for being basic,,, I have Martian knowledge of pop culture). When I was seven, I would sleep wearing purple mesh fairy wings,,, make dua’a 	that they would fuse to my shoulder blades by Fajr. 	

I went to college to learn	 Drosophila melanogaster anatomy, and am still convinced  that 	my shoulder blades are imaginal discs, fated 	to telescope out 	into wings.

my first Halloween was a Monday / a tech bro who didn’t make it into a frat threw a party on a rooftop of an apartment he didn’t live at / I flew into the freezing pool as a thunderstorm strummed in / got hyperthermia / got laryngitis / my voice was an ember, lost as I am / went to poetry class in the morning, noon / we were supposed to have a field trip to the Blanton but it was closed / couldn’t talk so I wrote on a drawing board to (ex)communicate for two weeks / munched steroids on an empty stomach / subsequently internally bled

IV. Lilith

winged poem I wrote when I was 19! Part of my “unpublishable private literature” (Allen Ginsberg).

V. Snow Angels

I walked around looking for a patch of purity big enough to make a snow angel, until…my fave parking garage rooftop (my panopticon)!!! Spyglassing the Texas Capitol.