Related quotes: In this lair I built...

Old Lion Man

In this lair I built
all around myself
the tigers lost their hunger
and lions slept like coals
without a flicker of flame

There were footsteps
lambent and poetic.
How can one find me
ballasting a violent nothingness
in the void of this cellar
where the prison is the warden?

Perhaps the spigot
made the saline water
sing enigmatically
into the harried pipes
of gelid gold and brass

As the dawn morphs to dusk
I saw you, calculating steps
like insurmountable avalanches
to catch the iron shackles
on my aching legs
You found me amidst
the chalky light and air
of my cobwebbed heart

You found the Braille
on my terse paw prints
and read the laments
of ludicrous misshape
like no one else did
and for a stolen moment -
while the aeons became bubbles,
the breeze sang violins,
the sleeping cars dreamt of revving;
several degrees out of phase
I saw myself in you

Like sleeping mirrors
we awaken into the terror
as we look into each other
and exchanged livid lights
and lucidly formless hopes

But the glass is shattered
and the bones dangled
like an inebriated pendulum
tautly vertical in
pleading for you again
to pillage my time
and percolate the many stains
of the unwoven tassels
on my parsimonious tapestry

The spuriously ratcheting flames
on the wick of our charades
wept like candles
but the tears will not
sing its weathervane song
burned generously
like toppling bridges

Where are you now?
So distant from the heraldry
not even your hair
comes to my waning graze
but in this lair, the shadows
remained riveted on the walls
and this telescope is inverted
I am the only one plummeting away
into the gates of exodus

Like a caged beast sleuthing
the pollens of yellow daffodils
I lost my virulence for hunger
in this malignant dream

Unbreak my cage if
I can no longer be tamed,
my fastidious heart is frail
my fastidious heart shall fail
so crucify me now
before I become
a lion or a man alone
if I am a lion man at all.

poem by Norman Santos
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!

Related quotes

For The Nameless Bard

Your silence is a shrill cry
traversing the alley of edifices
stalled within the shadows
solely painted for your furlough

The epistles that bewilders the night
and the riposte that brawled in back alleys
coiled in an inert cacophony
and the populace remained asleep
without the pall of your sagacity

Soon shall I find your silhouette
a misfit in the familiar places where
you casted a shadow that remained riveted
toppling with the monuments
of your conquered charades
unmaking you a constant unreality

You have waned underneath the moon
and the waxing horn of its harlequinade
along with the asylum of your cavernous heart,
and the tears that ran your metal pipes
no longer croons in the silence of the night

Slowly you are subdued and daubed
by the myriad moths girdled by a lamppost -
A hound barked, a vehicle revved mad,
a drunk man roared, a canary sang,
but your salient, sapient revulsion
remained silent and gone

I lit a cigarette and succumbed to its veil
plotting subterfuges incase
I hear your laconic footsteps return,
your florid lips relearn a song,
and I cajole for the accident to collide
selfishly hungry for your waned light

I starve in oblivion, swallowing daggers
that I incessantly honed whilst
the minutiae yellow quasars spoke
their scintillating whispers to me;
that the war you consigned yourself into
found the key for the adamantine doors
and your laments turned to odes,
your odes morphed into intimate privacy
until you dissipated form the dark nooks
to bask in your separate concord

But I shall remember you
in your superfluity and brazen soliloquy
like an owl behind the gloomy trees -
an indomitable sentry to reckon,
and I shall sing of you without a name
a little degree out of phase
whilst your notes gyrated elsewhere
because your shadows are still made
in these modest places I conquered.

poem by Norman Santos
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!