A Channel Off My World :) Poem by Angelica Arancibia

Like a dropp of water over ashes,
a startle in my head finds my eyes wide and dry staring out in between bars,
thousand bars and the clouds passing by.
Suddenly something tears; some tenderness in my guts:
It is my voice short of consonants and sense, a new dialect! You may say.

An extension of a quill, a dropp of ink casts down shapes from the chamber of my head
where the noise is pain and the shades are goblins with long fingers like tarantulas.

A bird with long feathers and nails,
walks like in heels, dressed in puffed dusty costume.
I am trapped in a cage of thousand bars or
am I a penguin on a cliff ready to spring the wings?

I stretch out my finger, blister my lips
while my heart taps, like a wet flag.
A tapping in a tight cage, where strive turns into a spasm that shortens the breath.
Who did this to me? I am short of breath,
When did I decide to give up? I am full of ambivalence.
Not redemption, but revenge is my desire, is it evil or just human nature?

I lost my hat with blue ribbon, gold chain, my wallet, my farm,
I also lost myself many times; does not repetition make the master?
As a nocturnal bird my voice turns into vowels like threads of pain,
with no words to kick in the heard and seen world,
What are the rules of human beings?

Teardrops water the charcoal,
while an eraser in my hand pierces the fabric of the paper.
I wish I could return to the former page,
and restart the motion, and find in my roots strength as I rebuild myself,
being not a judge but an observer.

I will catch the words like bats or butterflies.
And tie them into phrases that would attempt the what and why:
I am here, I am, are you?

Only some compassion might show the swinging door of the birdcage,
which I am about to cross over,
and finally spread my wings on the edge of a cliff, to find they are like fins.
And then, reborn as a snail.

Love for the word that creates, and sees things as they are,
not making up a bigger ego than our boat can not hold.