Metaphor-for-Metaphor for by Donari Braxton

I walked up the stairs as if strung to the barn-like gambrel ceiling cered in my last tuxedo unmoving, or twined by my large left incisor by one thousand feet of fishing-wire, my manic body, already dead, frantically succussing in stupid Egyptian shapes, floundering heartbreakingly as if my life depended on breaststroke-swimming through a cloud I was crawling, by the end of the paragraph I was crawling and the human-parts had all but left me, on the grasspatch-like veins of marble mispatterns, this meandering stair-case that was groping for Babel, I scuttled upwards on four rigid paws, already calloused and bleeding, mouth agape and parched for better humor, crawling, and I had grown a tail, and immediately I did not wag it, rather I put it between my legs and decidedly kept it there—
Still there’d gone missing, hallowed out and mistranslated into something that never was; a one-piece studio with a bed with an angel who was masturbating in wait for me, her wings spread coquettishly, scrumptiously upon the white, linen sheets, enormous, glittering wings without folds, they were spread so large and so wide that it was as if they’d transformed the angel’s entire body into the consummate sex of a woman, enveloped in a cocoon of feathers—
From as early as the second flight I could feel her body’s warming and the moist, sensual air raining down from the roof like trickling water leaking, plopping off my forehead like holy water, the kind that smells of carnal things, and I could hear her, with my every step climbing closer, breathing heavier, loosing patience, growing bolder, coming closer, I knew, closer and closer to her final farewell—
When the voice of an angel, from the seventh flight, began resonating in the cleft of itself, echoing in the ugly white of marble drained, calling, siren-like, “Quickly, boy, come, come to me,” and whisper words followed then, barely intelligible, cryptic words: Forever, Paolo!; my ears had been transformed and the words themselves lost meaning to me, though clearer and louder than ever, and my tongue had grown swollen and saliva dripped, the universe was crumbling and re-forming before my eyes, but I could only think of the angel, of time, one step at a time, her unworldly climax lay not far in the distance, I could barely breath nor even begin to tame this desire, this one that no longer belonged to my species—Only an image, a hug, our beautiful members and her most splendid, divine orgasm, the imaginary, would always could always be mine—
If. I was following scents and they were forever up, up, up Donari, you must continue to climb the stairs, Donari, you are a human-being and angels will understand, Donari, and the tenth story flew by and the eleventh and twelfth, and then finally, the door, Donari, impassable, I learned after fanatical gestures, impassable to clumsy paws, a charcoal-black iron knob was mocking me, had derided sick dogs permanently exhausted where I could do nothing but wait and listen in, and she came, the angel, and it wasn’t mine but another’s name she was calling, it was the name of a man I could have recognized, a man I might have known, a man I’d maybe fucked once, or the name of what I once could have been, and when she’d finished she opened the door for me, and nighttime by then had already fallen and it was very dark save the bright starlight through the large curtained window over the canopy, and the angel led me to the foot of the bed, patted my head and lay me down there, where I slept very quietly for the rest of the night—dreaming the dreams of other people’s prophecies, I walked up the stairs like this.


Donari Braxton is the author of I. See www.donaribraxton.com for more info.