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
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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