One Man Bandwagon of Harlequinade
I, inebriated by a saccharine mulling of the elapsed
Melee amidst the clock's sabers and now moored
By a pensive anchor that rattles with every mishaps
That whittles inside my ashen bones which chewed
Upon my scarce viscera; what disparity between poles
Could be more farcical than not one iota at all?
For in the surly leaf of the final page the verity basks
In a prissy repose apt for a surreptitious usurper
That I am, after all, a harlequin guzzled by a mask
Of a crystal ball, reflecting and deflecting, to pilfer
The unnamed mirth in every drooping environs
Siphoned by the reeling exigency of self deception
Ebullience is ephemeral only for the reason that
Death is a stealthy phantom, immortal in the ethereal
Grounds of a grotesque carnival ensconced in a hat
That I wore to subsist with the grotesque quintessential
Hamlet, teeming with a surfeit latticing fangs of beasts
And an infinitesimal number of vicarious pessimists
Truth is, I lose myself in this insuperable loquaciousness
As I grope for what I desire and how the death is casted
Forlorn as a reticent lion's ought to be, I do behest
And plea for a hand to rise in the sea of the oppressed
Maudlin that I am; I kneel every night to haggle for my craving
To be in the bassinet of lovely people, or to efface this aspiring
The thought of your pity smothers me and, in my gaunt nakedness,
I know well that I deserve it, earned it, for I am truly devoured,
Like a hapless gazelle gnashed by a tiger, by vicious loneliness
That I inexorably severed from these golden chains, a melancholic discord
I'm ailed and dead-beaten from riling, from cloying a maneuver
And in the muted times of its rapine, I, alone, mournfully flounder
I, alone, wallowed into the graves of my thousand deaths
In mausoleums stalled in the quagmire of my chambers
Igniting the wick in my bloodshot eyes and slathering tourniquets
To dab the wounds to rebuild the skyscrapers you love to slander
So that in this parceled desolation I can become a writer
And assert my existence in this laconically fiendish winter
I'll bleed again before the eulogy of this poem tingle the schmaltz air
And reiterate my cacophonous half-breathing quintessence:
I am bleakly alone and I cannot stand it, sometimes I do not care
But it's only a sedating stratagem; I want to be with acquaintances
Whom I've seen clearly and held in the stark pitch blackness
And who have perceived the one man bandwagon inside the forlornness.
poem by Norman Santos
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Vicissitude I: Winter
A numbing sting eviscerates
The sky to a crystal hail
Her gloom falling from grace
Piling a stark garden of tulips
To mourn with the asleep river
And buried whispers in the ghastly gale
This mistral blanket of dagger kisses
Makes my bones shudder and cringe
In the dark nook of her vestige
Pawning a cigarette for the sun
Ensconced in a slathering absence
And ninety days of siphoned sun
I lambently mosey the emollient floor
Sinking without weight, stalled with no grounds
Seeking for an isthmus towards
A barricading sierra of seclusion
And averting the cajoles of death
In the verisimilitude of smokes
Dissipating from its svelte veneer
The sanguinary season continuous to fall
Pummeling my incendiary soul—
An attrition staggering for recoil—
But the torpor of the vision
Whittles an intrepid desire
To melt away with the thinning ice,
To be one with the lost interpolations
And amalgamate into the winter sky
poem by Norman Santos
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Gulf of Existence
As I peel myself to nakedness
My grotesque form seeping out
And trying to slither away
From their vindictive stares
I seek for displacement
In scouring ebonies and ivories
Only to unfurl the answer
That basks in another question
"Why am I here? "
And I thought staggering
"And not here at all? "
Like a farcical candle at noon time
Prick and twist the wick
With the flame hollering back
For survival, for a game
Amongst porcelains and tramps
I have lost my place
In the scornful prairie grounds
Whilst I perish vying.
This is inane and pointless.
I need a gulf of existence.
poem by Norman Santos
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Dismal Lack of Grounds
Illustrious nights fumbled upon my undulant sleep
Engulfing all that I have established
And all that I have feint for deliverance
With these few jocund people and their tacit pace
I am left to bleed in a boudoir that conceives
A man, like a chamber for a warm seeping blood.
I wish to write and trample in a palliate
But this loyal loneliness stalls in an aposiopesis
As I wear and tear upon my flesh for subsistence
Demarcation freezes me in a derisory face
And bends every streak of the affable sunshine
Into a febrile slathering blanket in my glacial arms.
So then I would write in ambiguous but soldering scripts
About how I am ensconced in a peremptory loneliness
And that I would cringe to plea for an entree
To a ground where I can assert my existence
Without these vindictive eyes and cold shoulders
A place where there is no conception, perhaps and preferably; insanity.
Are there words sedative enough to cradle a glacier?
Are there people consistent enough to stay inside a night?
Are there golden times before each lifelong nadir?
Are there scherzo tinkering at the edges and seams?
Are there balustrades by the last inch of a rope?
Have I been at any of your edges at all?
I would digress in my Mandarin class with these questions
As a part of me dies again, live again, and repeat the torture
Inside this labyrinthine dune, I would disembogue all the rivers
That I filled in every worthy soul I have once talked to sleep
And in the unmarked grave of the escritoire I would lambaste
All that I never had, so that I can rebuild something to burn again.
poem by Norman Santos
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Apathy in Your Fingernails
You may beguile the caravansary
With a stern yet imposed guise
Like a feral panther in repose
But you can never outrun
The ghosts that revolves
Around the teeming sun
That freezes her corona.
I had caught a foretaste of your eye,
It's impassiveness, on the mirror
That thaws and mars the listening
Into a muted gloomy song
Of nonchalance and ennui
In stark silence, it spoke too much,
Of your grandmother's wardrobe.
The wind propelled and throttled
And I perched by your shoulder
Wintrier than any fountain
And I saw you gag upon swallowing
The odium you had for the panorama
As you efface the amorous persona
And be one with your dilemmas
The bright sun could only remind me
Of your balmy scent that stifles
My tunnels and my chambers
For it reek to erect a gravestone
For a death you begrudgingly suffered
And how compulsory the satisfaction
Is there to achieve an ephemeral sedation
I am a witness of catastrophic nights
Where you tossed, turned, obliterated,
As you loathe the skin you wore
And the scars that ran frolicking along it
In the velvet of the night's cape
I find your phosphorescent excruciation
As you tried to scrape out the blasé
Apathy in your fingernails.
poem by Norman Santos
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Amongst Foxes
Take me on a banquet table
With seats engaged by five people
Or three with superfluous orifices
And vindictive but superficial visions
Such obsequious fanatics, such prissy sticklers,
Such laggard cajolers of idiotic beliefs
Worse, no fancies or beliefs at all
Take me unto this vulpine table
And I might as well abscond my supper
And gnaw upon reticence and the taciturn
Reservations, for in notching the hinges
Of my mouth may expose the famished gulch
Inside the fractures of the skinned skeleton
Or worst, display the daunting jagged fangs
That gyrates and scintillates from friction
From riling the presence of each other
Because in the deep alleys of my soul
I might be one of the hoodwinked monsters
In cordial suppers, elegiac malls, or crowded rooms,
In corridors where people saunter
Like lewd hounds, like stray cats,
In the abundance of roaches and mice
In pairs swooned in love or in despair,
Or even one on one, tooth on tooth,
There is a madness hulking on the viscera
And they are all instigated by the same paranoia
That we have in alluring festivities in banquets,
In riling the reflection of a beguiling fox
We fleetingly saw as we walk in a mirror house
Distorting our visage and vision and filtering
Our bloods to reduce that we are all famished
With different hungers and carnal seeking
But the same scheming and volitions
To puncture the walls sundering us
From our very own dinner tables
And so we dwell amongst the foxes
Amongst foxes, you cannot be a sparrow
And fly relentlessly with the innocuous trance
You find in the affable tackles of the climate,
Nor can you be the lion that you are
For you will beckon an unwelcomed signal fire
From the pregnant belly of a burning forest
You cannot be anyone else,
But the fox that you are not
And you cannot be yourself
But inside the cloisters of your cave
Amongst foxes, you have to play fox
And from the stench of their dwellings
You have to educe a frivolous park
And perhaps, struggling isn't apt
For the more we fight the demons of fate
The more we loosen our ends and swagger in blithe
And, inexorably, start to become one of them
The demons that you eschew in the mirror house
There is no death that can surmount
The bereavement in squandering yourself away
And become a faceless name, or a nameless face
Or the echoing wails of a voiceless shame;
Dead amongst the world of the living
Especially when you are amidst the prancing
And cunning melee of the foxes' stares
But then again, why dwell in a crowd
Of these carousing sleazy perfidious rogues
Who would not hesitate to filch
What you have and who you are?
And who would never understand
Why you don a fox's risqué guise
And loathe the approaching pangs
Of slowly becoming one, and still opt
To die while trying to conquer death
Amongst the foxes, the injuries are not evident
So you sully in an indiscernible fissure of your soul
We can never have espy the elusive answers
For before we comprehend the queries
They were already feasted by the agile beasts
But amidst the inebriations we hope to find
One dissimilar; shrewd and coy fox
Or perhaps a soul withholding similar scars
And humble conceits, and tail, and tales,
One who isn't very different from what you are
In the same veneer but still:
A prey under the steam of the foxes
And perhaps there is one soul
One who would not eat your tail in your slumber
And one who wouldn't define you
For what you have and have not
But give you a definition
Whilst you hunt amongst the foxes
And prowl a jeremiad in duet
Sewing tales that never meant anything to any fox
poem by Norman Santos
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Nikkita: Last Of The Thousand Novembers
I mosey
Around the livid halls
Of a thousand Novembers.
But Nikkita,
Let me tell you something.
This is the last of it.
I am bereft of life,
But in this
Plush death,
I have never been so alive
In the burning
Hours
Of a thousand Novembers.
A thousand Novembers
That gave a thousand more
Deaths.
The wind rushes
In a dash of daggers
As you make love
To the rancid tigers.
This is what you are.
A farce.
A trickster in the form
Of a tulip with thorns.
A ballerina who dances
And tiptoes through fire.
You are the
Burning ember outside
The window that wails
With the night’s tail.
So here,
With all the love
I had
That was never enough,
With all the
Prattle that I have heard
Your whereabouts,
Your new liaisons,
I don’t care.
Let time tell you
Of your own travails.
Let the motions of the clocks
Grant you your
Drudgery.
You are betrothed to
The night’s cantankerous
Soiree of tigers.
You are the tiger’s muse.
But not so much
A tiger’s prowess.
And so to a thousand Novembers,
My death
Wants verve.
And so to the
Tiger who took you,
And you let him take you
To his lair
Of rancorous disdain,
Putrid affection,
Petrified howls,
And sullied fangs,
Slowly puncture
Through her skin,
Mad tiger.
You are as mad
As her crazed tempest.
And to Nikkita,
You are the last
Of a thousand
Novembers,
And mine too,
In a thousand Novembers,
I am your last.
I am the last.
poem by Windsor Guadalupe Jr
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Labyrinth
It descried me,
The sleeping tiger's fang
Hampering my neck,
And the endless brunt
And the plastered smile
Shrouding the perdition
Thawed with the white snow
As stark as amnesia
Where am I
Amidst your indifferent stares?
Cloy me again
And pilfer my vision
You are my adamant eyes
Sunken in delusion.
It caught me
The lacquer compassion
And the myopic acceptance
Chafing the fortified resistance
To undrape the bronze skin
And reveal the gaunt soul
Shackled inside a den
Of brazen yearning
And of unabashed fears
And here, at the floor
Of a vale I cannot fathom
Your touch still lingers
And it hurts with a pain
More immense
Than you'll ever unravel
As you graze the engraved
Scars and dilapidations;
These open wounds
Bathed in salt,
I felt the bleak fate
Of solitude bursting
Into evanescence
And the wallflowers
Weren't the only one
Crying with me
But then again
It sank to where
Everything is girdled:
The cul-de-sac of this
Ephemeral labyrinth
These emptied chasms
Inside of me
Contains your ghosts
And they will forever saunter
The dark limbo
Of its ornate alleys
And my eyes will
Grow dark as oil
Darker than
Oblivion
So I can keep you
Like a secret
In the dark
Until one day
I shall shrivel
From incinerating.
poem by Norman Santos
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The Harlequin
In the clout of a shotgun world
Of feral catwalk alleys
And dog-strut hungers
Subsistence is a farce comedy
Rummaging in the ripples
Of one's convictions
And the furor wrought
By such idiotic bliss;
Of obstreperous finagling
In the batting eyelashes
Of make believing,
Is the swansong
Of the ethereal, non-carnal,
Point blank demise.
Ball a smoldering spit
Inside the brawls of one's feet
And you may find the streak
Of unflawed erudite alibis
For these chortles,
And the pantomimic silence
That I spill in a platter
Of another slapstick charade
Of a feigned harlequinade—
Raveling a thread
Of luridly tangled fences
Made of yarn and lattices
Of tethering promises
A make-up in lieu of mendaciloquence.
Will you comb the tresses
Of this woebegone capitulate
Within the pillars of the self?
Deceiving the perpetual churning
Of the crippling bones
And all its lovely yearning
To be one with guffawing
Without the inflection of pestering
Yet, the manacles I woven
Cannot be shorn by the secretion
Of a perfectly maneuvered
Soliloquy and isolation.
Palm this intoxication
With the treacle of your blood.
Guzzled by a mask
D'you think the harlequin
Breaks the twitching with
Veritable effervescence?
Roll those marbled vision
And undrape the visage
Of saccharine pride;
A harlequin is poignant in all places
With black teeth and disembogued eyes,
It is you who laugh
With every esoteric motion
Be it flight or fall
What are you looking at?
What are you wishing for?
poem by Norman Santos
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Revive The Vicissitude
This perfect night
I clenched my jaws
From the cinch defeat
Until eternity extended
To the opalescent curtains
Of my room echoing
The blaring sound of silence
And the muffled weeps
Of desolation
That crept up with the dawn
Late, at my four AM gazing;
Siphoned out of verve
Drawn from cigarette sticks,
Disembogue the rancid kick
As I accept the coup-de-grace
Of death in living death
But a tepid air deluged
My dribbling punctured chest
Humming a lullaby
To bring back the rhythm
Of all my hapless pleading
Please, please, please
Let me, let me, let me
Get what I want
This time,
Finagling the winning tyrant
To open the bleeding bolted fist
And the abeyance of life
Deflated with sleep
Thank you, munificent lady
Of the nomadic caravansary,
For reeling the rotting viscera
Of the evocatively forgotten vicissitude.
poem by Norman Santos
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The Lion of the Dusk
The flourished crimson heaven
That had been mantling the meagerness
Of the famished world
Slowly escaped in seething hisses.
Every layer of faint illumination
That dissipates is refilled
By a jet black cloak.
The cicadas and the crickets
Seemed to enjoy the sublimation
And started on a
Strident carousal,
The soaring birds sang
Their swansong as
They heaved the thinning air
To ferry their plumage home,
The dog-tired grass
Halted from beating the blows
Of the southern winds,
The wind dragged deeper
From the clandestine place
Where it was accumulating
And the afternoon zephyr
Started to whistle
To call for the pouncing gales,
The trees stooped
And their eaves scooped lower.
The premature night extended
Its pliant hand holding
A lighted match and sets fire
To the slumbering
Sundered quasars.
And then it hanged a slice
Of a bloated disk
Burnished with pallid opalescence.
There was something subtle
In the dance of the dawning eve
Along the halls of ambiguity
That is not too subtle,
For you can feel it in insentience.
It was subliminal and with ornate
Delicacy that could only unfurl
Its armadillo potency
To a soul with a lion's heart.
In the pensive metamorphosis
Of the firmament,
An olive pond resting
On the core of the frowning
Life ebbs with the cloying
Darkness.
Its resilient diminutive surges
Swelled and rouse into
A silver river.
It roused shrilling,
Hastily filling
The drought in the hungry mouth
Of a vale.
It circumnavigated
And shrouded
The whole forest
And the lion could not escape
The lure of the briskly mirrors.
The clarity of its veneer
Resembles the piercing
Enamel of death's scythe
And the lion mused upon
The face of reality
In its hostile fangs.
Wrought defeats,
Scarred abandons,
Marred advances
Were groveling in the dark lids
Of two tired and deluded eyes.
The lion stood like a frozen rock,
His feet were a frozen brook.
Before the frozen pillars thaw,
The lion ran with scorching alacrity
Escaping the alluring slices
Of the starlights in the vivid reflection;
Running back to slumber on his den.
His den; a cavern of profound
And grotesque assemble
Of copper yarns, metal strings,
And serrated attachments
That pulls each other
In a taut embrace
Then toppled
As a cloying phantasm.
And there were hurtling daggers
Nicking in his tawny skin.
One got him in the chest,
And he lowered his head.
His golden mane tangled up
In the stubbles of his face.
An owl hooted
From the distance
And the echoes of it
Hammered the punctured chest.
The forest stooped lower that night
In a desire to haul and cradle
The tatterdemalion lion,
But the forest's arms
Could never reach a wandering soul.
The lion ceaselessly vied
In profanity.
He hunts surreptitiously
For chances
Of vindicating his golden diadem.
In such instances,
He would divulge the colossus heart
Made of diamonds.
In those instances,
The scars and disease
Would overwhelm and engulf
The diamond heart to shatter
In jagged pieces.
The forest has ears,
But the roars and prowls of the lion
Exploded in an atomic static
That no ears
Can ever realize.
The forest has eyes,
And he can see
The lion sprinting into
The expanding breadth
Of the pitch black
Holding a fire fueled
By a lithe ardor between
His latticing fangs,
In the semblance of
The waking dusk itself.
The forest had no tongue
But it had called the lion
Several times,
And the leaves pranced
For the wind to carry its message,
Brushing the laments of the lion.
The forest called him "The Lion of the Dusk".
And the forest could only brood
In the brittleness
Of each sunrise,
That he could never speak of
What the lion was
And no one would ever find
The lion in his lanky,
Unattractive and farcical veneer.
poem by Norman Santos
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Screaming Silence
Juggling abortive bliss and ephemeral anguish
And discreetly dwelling by your pensive shadows
I started to grope for exoneration in a muffled wish
Only to find myself lacerating with greater sorrow
Yet, I promised to be stern in despite the grating slits
And exhumed the corpse of all denied warfare
I quaffed your poison to fill my emptied wrists
And subsist in the chromospheres of the tiger's lair
That my own coercions, fractions, and distractions
Feigned, like a cross to drag and carry in a furrow
Teeming with vindictive eyes of incarceration
My silence screamed of sated state of hollow.
poem by Norman Santos
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Nothing But Death
There are cemeteries that are lonely,
graves full of bones that do not make a sound,
the heart moving through a tunnel,
in it darkness, darkness, darkness,
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,
as though we were drowning inside our hearts,
as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.
And there are corpses,
feet made of cold and sticky clay,
death is inside the bones,
like a barking where there are no dogs,
coming out from bells somewhere, from graves somewhere,
growing in the damp air like tears of rain.
Sometimes I see alone
coffins under sail,
embarking with the pale dead, with women that have dead hair,
with bakers who are as white as angels,
and pensive young girls married to notary publics,
caskets sailing up the vertical river of the dead,
the river of dark purple,
moving upstream with sails filled out by the sound of death,
filled by the sound of death which is silence.
Death arrives among all that sound
like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it,
comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no
finger in it,
comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no
throat.
Nevertheless its steps can be heard
and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.
I'm not sure, I understand only a little, I can hardly see,
but it seems to me that its singing has the color of damp violets,
of violets that are at home in the earth,
because the face of death is green,
and the look death gives is green,
with the penetrating dampness of a violet leaf
and the somber color of embittered winter.
But death also goes through the world dressed as a broom,
lapping the floor, looking for dead bodies,
death is inside the broom,
the broom is the tongue of death looking for corpses,
it is the needle of death looking for thread.
Death is inside the folding cots:
it spends its life sleeping on the slow mattresses,
in the black blankets, and suddenly breathes out:
it blows out a mournful sound that swells the sheets,
and the beds go sailing toward a port
where death is waiting, dressed like an admiral.
Translated by Robert Bly
poem by Pablo Neruda
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Millennium War
Cringing by the haunted mangrove
Of a torrid and sleazy quagmire
A phantom despondently probe
For that disrupting familiar fire
That ruptured his scarce hearth
Stalled in this lazy flailing marsh
Gnawing at the chambers of his heart
Perverted by a war of a farce-
Comedy, and he kneads his head to reckon
What struck the igniting mayhem
That left him forever cringing on
And contemplating with a requiem
Gnarled in an infinite knot
Of bereavement and defeat
Left squandered to erupt
In a concealed war with no fleet;
In a poem cycling with semantics
A narrative exploitation in bleared-
Millennia; a struggle for romantics
Fastened and taut with profound fear.
poem by Norman Santos
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Ravine Of Abortive Bliss And Sorrows
From dancing with your lofty shadows I trampled and lost
The metronome of my shifting pace and the road I wallowed
As pernicious as losing the maps to your own penetralium
The dark conquered my impenetrable but open heart
The hysteria brought upon her livid lightning in my eyes and I raged
My infinitesimal voice ricocheted in your halls but are you estranged
From my voice, dear monoliths? Or was I lost in your wailing corridors?
The immense sky was a watchful eye upon every shift
Like a king in a game of chess restricting my abashed feet
And checking and rivaling every move in a wintery snare
Its glacial and hoarse whimper was an intimidating roar
Its watchfulness stalled the night in these impassable walls
That incarcerated my defenselessness - like an implored aegis
And sometimes like a fluently guised and malingering demise
In this hall, where I am everywhere but no longer hold existence
Disembogued of everything, yet tethered to everything -
A veiled allegiance to the inner burning of angels and demons,
A fortress for all the daunted hope, an albino blindness to mendacity,
A ravine of abortive bliss and sorrow devouring the insubstantial soul
And burying its involution to a death that will bore subsistence
A silver rope hang from the sky and its bony sheen beckoned to me
Like a ray of life in this ethereal death, a banister in this amorphous path
But darkness turned to light and it dissipated into the bright
The lighted wick was charred, its sputtering tongue blown away
With all the shattered dreams as the cold gnashed on my bitter bones
Alone and naked in a nameless and faceless void, I learned
That even the brightest of gold and diamonds succumbs to evanesce
Tiny droplets of the moon showered with milky phosphors
And set a gleaming stain in the sanctum of this ravine, like candles,
And my eyes, beleaguered from resentment, watched my own funeral.
poem by Norman Santos
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Downward Spiral
Hurtling through a downward spiral
We, the dominant species
Have gone back in evolution
Transforming into a substance more grotesque and lowly
Than the rotting corpse of some dead animal
Where not even the maggots would dare to play
We are a cruel and unusual form of torture to one another
Speech spoken from lips are always words spoken in a tongue
Meant to whiplash and emotionally bruise others like us
Others we think are so different
We are parasitic, despicable beings
Always feeding off another’s pain
Striving to see them beaten, broken
Their pride eaten from the inside out
And all the while we strut a fabricated mask
Of painted worry
Pretending to care about others
As we silently feed on the pain
Of those we don’t like
Because we are humans
A substance more grotesque and lowly
Than the rotting corpse of some dead animal
Where not even the maggots will dare to play
And we’ll just keep
Hurtling
Farther
Down
That
Downward
Spiral
poem by Cat Summers
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Attic Key
When the transpiration of earliest dews
Failed to staid and invigorate
The amputated isthmus of the atrium
You would blithely shun
All the lovely, saccharine bones
Even the crunchy stride
Of the svelte V-formation
Of the veering migrating birds
Paving the soggy nimbuses
Of hapless shades and parasols
For they unfurl a reminder
Of capitulating abandonments
And like a wolf without a howl
You would aimlessly amble
With feet of morose
To cave inside, distraught,
In the clandestine dappled corners
Where the myriad of the dead
And the plenitude of dying breaths
Rattle uncouthly for
A greater hunger
And in the riving of hushed comport
Of the attic's remedy
You would sulk to descry
Your maudlin heart beating briskly
Sodden from the attrition
Of the charlatan sun
Amongst the trellises of cobwebs
And shoddy bed of dusts
You would lay your empathy
And the stagnant breathing
Of the attic's clockwork verve
Would feign an assuaging sweep
To resuscitate the prattling blood
Fervently seeping through
To clutch you closer
Like a bullet darting through
The place where no one knew
Divulging its own nadir
And that was all
That your bleeding needs
To find that you are
Not yet in the bottom
Of your so called pits
And the sun would again seethe
Grazing mellifluously
The bullets buried
To your aching lovely bones
And swear and spiel a promise
To purge the bleak attic
From its latticing derision
And let the light stray and stall
When the next morning dawn
But you always seem to forget
Where the promises coiled
Perhaps, you have crucified a script
In the scathing walls of the chambers
Of the pumping mechanical valves
That you need the fathoms
Of the attic's secrets
So you would stash
The attic key
Into the pathos
Of remorseful wisps
In cases
Of emergency.
poem by Norman Santos
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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When The Opened Is Closed
Hiding behind the alley ensconced
In the open page of your palms
The sun never reached your core -
A cold song the harpist cannot play
Without scathing her lissome fingers
Your pernicious montage can reel
Unfathomable pensiveness stalled
With a detrimental distraught
And like the gyratory leaves of July
We plummet down into an ennui
Of counting the withered petals
And plucking the defensive thorns
Reading behind the taut lines
That strode in the rousing verses
But when the library closes
How do we festoon the metronome
Slowly sojourning to decadence?
The sunset leaned on a pillar
And the moths confabulated with dusts
Shook from their giddy wings
Drowning the very poison of their being
Into their virulent eyes and even
Fatally caustic jellyfish wings
I asked for all the poison
Now I am but a living treason
With apathetic bones
In parsimony of truth and humility
But when the light had flown
Away with the peripatetic time
Your sad song devoured
By the luminance of the sand:
Your pensive theater closed
With all the eloquent environs
And visions obdurate from doom;
And castles and lore revolves
In the innocent corner of the mind
What reason or unreason can oppose
The closing of the latched doors?
As the mousetrap closes
A two-faced charade spoke of
The floodgates being opened;
In this hunger game
We will never win
When the opened is closed
And dabbed with a bulwark flood
To run a quagmire of cellars
We can only amble back to our ruts
Running away from what we chase.
poem by Norman Santos
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Come On Death
Surly
I am so surly, and I am so surly
And come on life in, and come on deaaaath
Ohaaaaaahhhh, ohaaaaaaaahahah, ohaaaaaaoooohoh
Surly, and I am so surly, and I am so surly
And come on life in, and come on ...
Noooooooooooo, noooooooooo, nooooooooooo, nooooooooooo
Surly, and I am so surly, and I am so surly
And I am so surly, oooooaaaaaahhhh
Deaaaaaaaath, deaaaaaath, deaaaaaaaaath, deaaaaaaaaaaath
Come on death, come on death, come on death, come on death
Surly, surly, surly, surly
Im does finishing to hell
And Im does, and Im does hell, hell, heeelllllllll
Come on death (x4) -- ohaaaaaaaahh
Come on death (x4) -- deaaaaaaaaaaath
Performed in new york, ny on 09/28/91.
song performed by by Nirvana
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Yellow Haven
I remember the forfeited nights when hunger
Had sent me mangling into fortified walls
Groveling to thaw into the pallid inflection,
Squirming from the scraping inside the chambers
That putrefies the veneer to haplessly reveal
The unwritten words in the wrinkled skin,
Where the poisons crumpled to potions
Picking slivered beads and making a chalcedony
Of pebbles to grind in our running feet;
Turning serpentine vespers into the cinders
Of the day's vigorous fanning of ambiguity;
And ephemeral drizzles engulfed by the wave
Of esoteric perpetuity in a colossus rave;
In spite of the incisive transatlantic distance
Imposed by tacit seclusion and disparity
I found the light show on the ocean floor
Where gods are servile of the fathoms
Placing their languid heads in stone tables
For an immolation to omniscient mortality.
In a cup of golden concord that entangles
Our meta-fictional lives in a conscious strangle:
A highfaluting chaise, for arriving and departing
Impassable planes of plutocracy
To premature decadence that lingers
Into the absence of your sculling chortles
And vivacious silence riveted in the listening floor
As I touch you and feel the seraphs wafting
In your skin and melting crystal castles
And as I part, shoved by the demons
With awry prongs locking in a tale
That not one without a sip of the sharp
Spangling revelries in our fragile cup
Could neither evade nor leave triumphant.
I am one amongst the motions and susurrations,
Stringed in the latticing chances of conclusions,
Assuaging the winds of odyssey, never to bury
The skeletons when time flew like an albatross
Enslaving the sea and nary a home but the sky
Teeming with the liberal sensations to descry
The asphyxiated lungs of lost voices,
And collapsing ribs of lost viscera,
Intertwines the demon's lair into
The ornate heaven for the mortals.
As soon as we touch and spew verve
We lose contact and the valley of death
Yawns wearily to devour the mechanism
Learned in a plenitude of scant days:
A close good bye juggles with hello
Oblivious with all these lovely people.
poem by Norman Santos
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Stalemate Exodus
In gradients of gray
I reckon of euphony
the savory verdigris
titillating my defunct compass
coaxing me to move
as the leaves fall to senescence
with a hapless acquiescence
This silence feigns resilience
mourning for the rotting sequence
and the stifling emptiness
alchemically transmutes to gold
but the rusting chains can't deny
the nursed grievance inside
the pangs of my vault
The chains of despondence
kept me incarcerated
in this haunted quagmire -
a cellar of wrongness
and lucid phantasms
once was my heart
For every time I try
to mount a ladder's stave
I slip into the venoms
of slithering snakes
I guess I am bound
to this squalid love -
always clandestine behind
a brambly foliage
because to love
in times of darkness
is to love in love and death
My mangled hand
leans on this cul-de-sac
too brave to squander in death
but too afraid for suicide
and with my morality suspended
in an open putrefaction
I will futilely wait
for your healing hands
or your raging destruction,
an exodus of vicissitude -
fall on the winter of our discontent
or succumb to the cycle.
poem by Norman Santos
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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