Myshel Prasad is a writer, musician, painter, and occasional actor.  She has performed as a musician and spoken word artist throughout the United States and elsewhere including the NXNE festival in Toronto, Pop Montreal, BBC Electric Proms in London, and in Prague.  She released three cd’s with her band Space Team Electra, including “Vortex Flower,” recorded with Chicago producer Keith Cleversley and “The Intergalactic Torch Song,” with Sandy Pearlman in San Rafael, CA, and plays in the tenor section of the Glenn Branca orchestra.  She earned a BA from New York University and an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.  In 2007, Myshel was a recipient of the Kathyn Wasserman Davis Scholarship for Peace award and began studying Arabic at Middlebury College in Vermont and is currently enrolled in the MA International Policy Studies program at the Monterey Institute. 

“When the world all around is calling for clear distinctions, loyalties to Self and hatred of others, and, most of all, belief in the public and legal discourses of single languages and single states- smooth narratives- what greater threat exists than that voice which rejects such easy orthodoxies with their readily understood rhetoric and urges, instead, the most difficult readings, those that embrace the painfully impossible in the human heart?”–Maria Rosa Menocal

The Intergalactic Torch Song
 

a)
I have heard this music all my life:
Immutable chant.
A tender insistent.  

b)
I have heard this music all my life:
I am no more.
I am given over.
I am leading an army of secret policeman converted in to bhakti poets.
I am bombing the pyramids and the empty prisons and the mainframe of the debt collectors.
I am dancing with millions in the streets of the capitol.
I am seated alone on a moon disc that floats over a lotus on the inside of your heart. 

c)

I have heard this music all my life:
I am milk and blood, resistance and love.
I am growing corn and coffee for myself.
I am weaving blankets in the old way.
I am singing in the sway of evergreens.
I am following lines of stories across the desert.
I am tracking deathless jaguars across the cool quiet surface of a mollified earth. 

d)

I have heard this music all my life:
I am praying in the womb of the chapel before it explodes.
I am wailing at the dust of the wall.
I am on my knees to the holy city one last time.
I am eating the spent dark spirits of an age.
I am the Mahavihara become the hive.
I am the hive in flames, swinging from the branches of the last tree standing in the music of the cosmic morning. 

e)
I have heard this music all my life:
The great intergalactic torch song. 
The music of The War.  The music of The End of the War.
The deep machinery of dripping sonic curves. 
Fractal waves. Violent voluptuous wings.
Grind/spin/whir/clamor.  Grind/spin/whir.
Implicate becomes explicate, time undone, the world remade. 

Scent of hyacinth,
gardenia,
ubiquitous jasmine;
my fingers touch the earth 

This is where the honey is. 

Center stage in the coliseum,
Victor Hara has his hands again.

Dreams of Lost Water (for Jerusalem)
 

I
Too much explaining and rejection.
So much voice and so little song.
I dare to turn my face away from Memory-
take the sugar-brown sand at its word-
and bloodlessly remove my wings.

II
In the middle of the night I wept for the death of an olive tree.
An olive tree that existed only in my imagination.
I imagined it too late, at the moment it was cut down.
I failed that tree because I did not imagine it soon enough to save it.

all copyrights belong to Myshel Prasad