Wraith King

Cunning eyes of a burning fox,
Wisdom of the adamant ancient tree,
Riveted tongue of stashed lighting
Buried in deafening thunders,
In a dapper veneer; a guise
He had once been a king
But his own brewed tyranny
Ousted him from his regality
And his putrefying power
Is gravid from suppurating
The things that his empire
Gnawed and swallowed

Dour without his cape,
His gilded diadem,
His valiant sword,
Or his vast sovereign
He is a brand new king
Of his own ethereal grounds
Of the old and the dying

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poem by Norman Santos
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The Ebbs That Never Err

Amidst the seafaring souls
Buoyed by the waves they sculled
A bedlam lulls maladroitly
Frothing in the sea foam ghastly,
And sinking with the cascading lights
Slapping the cold tiles to shatter,
Descending yonder in the fathoms
Where darkness fell with the unknown

Such ubiquity it possesses over the maritime
Valleys that the compass cannot navigate,
Such garrulous secrets donned in bane
That it became the dehydrating salt
In the virulent taste of drowning
And as we ferry ourselves
To a plushier verdure of land
In this éclat secrecy of irony
The phantom lurks in every splash
Pushing us through… and away too
And it promised to never err

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poem by Norman Santos
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Times of the Parliament

In times of viral idiosyncrasy bloating
The plumes and dowry groveling to puncture
The birth of impassable interpolations
Esoteric from the cinders of my vision,
Their croons hum a lilt in a lazy melody
A euphonious resonating in the chambers
Eloquently caroming in complacent synergy
As I reckon the lucidity of the sun's sapid
Streaks in the somnolent floor to harry
The destitution that visited their truancy
Hallow is the gloriole of the exonerated malady
In times where the parliament go astray
In the inert moseying in apache stance
Goblets circling like emancipated doves
And we watched it with the constant sways
Of the pendulums hoarse flight of eddies
Overwhelming the velocity, the blithe cacophony
That coiled into downtrodden harmony
In times where the parliament swing differently
The innuendos aggravate the salient disparity

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poem by Norman Santos
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He And She (And I)

The rigmarole of the world
passed over the stagnant wind
and here I found my shelf
waiting deep in desolation
inveigling sleep and protection;
I succumbed and play gargoyle

In the stillness of time and
the mayhem of transitions
I watched your lips danced
and sing the wordless lullaby
The melody that you spoke of
that echoes through the bones,
touches the silhouetteless souls

She was a fire coruscating
behind the forest's eaves
and the splendid mirage
that her voice casts is a wine
that enamels the sad veneer

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poem by Norman Santos
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The Waiting Room

As I lay, pensively, dying
Beneath the seething graze of the sun,
In a metaphorical metamorphism,
I found myself, in films, meandering
Like a white eccentric and fictional lion
Dashing through the endless pitch
Hollowness of an ornate forest
The insipid beast teemed with fear
And not of valiance, as in the label
In this pocket of a gyratory cul-de-sac
The ghosts, glacial and searing,
Runs along with my buoyant feet
Their wails struck the barricades
Of the looming myrtle trees
And an echolalia came to life
In its corporeal form, a wintry
Pang that gnawed upon my chest
And I ran faster, like a frenzied fiend
‘Till I saw an opalescent stranger
With a lamp on his rooted feet

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poem by Norman Santos
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Glass Boy, Spare Some

Pliant flame, spare one simper for a boy
Who wore a vessel of naked sincerity too lucid
That reduced his opulence into thin films
Of frailty, steadfast with detrimental affection
Of vulnerability, committed to debonair convictions
He submits into a disposition of undeserving woes and pains
In a terrain with no tender arms, a valley of jagged hopes
That glistened like the epitomizing skin of shattered glass
Phosphorescent crust encumbering a fragile soul
Spared of scarce sympathy, corrupted of his golden crown
Abrade of flaws and lamentations, tethered in a town
Of make believe people and cheap bliss that tinker
Inside a hollow glass receptacle too agonizing to touch
The papyrus-thin veneer of diaphanous crust
In a vow to transparency to the skeletons and demons
That cordially lingered in the wardrobe of terror
Giving away all that there is; hope and its disease
Porcelain grandiosity drained in a lack-lusting ride
Of rueful nights, sullying to impotency a glass-like pride
Held by the hand, but who would hold such fragile hands?

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poem by Norman Santos
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False Hopes

A causeway of light arched supplely
Into the latencies of frittered days
Where I bargain for death obdurately
Sapping putrefaction placidly to decay
And perish from the unrivaled despondency
I muse the furlough of every passing day
But a causeway of light arched supplely
Suspending the black ribbon's sway

Oppressive condoles are salves of the defeated
And these rived my bones and hauled my soul
Out into the risqué nakedness of light to be diluted
Into a transparency of savage cajoles
For your sincerity lacked consistency, instead,
My vanguard and subterfuge you stole
But oppressive condoles are salves of the defeated
And in your ephemeral graze I still conceded

The obsidian horizon feigned resilience
So I stifle my vessels to capture you ever closer

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poem by Norman Santos
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One of the Many Final Thoughts

Aghast was the slithering road
Laid before your decrying sun
When it met the cross-road:
The navel of its breadth

Its fluent lasso caught trampling
In the gluttonous mouth of the machine
That leaden every word,
Assuaged every agony,
Exacerbated every felony
It's a cycle: an ouroboros

In these capacious effluence of thoughts -
Of two-faced forgiveness and revenge:
A phantasmagoria in wakefulness
We remain unscathed, for we are
Benumbed by our inner callosities
And our pensive sympathies withered
In our obstinate grip while our bones
Honed a new constitution in black

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poem by Norman Santos
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Ephemeral

Lying awake at night I probed
For hidden pockets and alleyways,
Searched for every lighted window,
Prayed for unlocked gates,
And hoped to find a devil to blame
To exonerate you and our bellicose collision
To purge the most beautiful stair
That I was permitted to ascend
And in kindness, carefully descended

I endlessly searched
Until I forgot to count weeks,
Forgot my reasoning,
And forgot the pendulum swings
To rive us with decadence, senescence
Riveted in this malady of guilt and regret

As I search for a demon to blame
I was ensnared in their spider web
As they formed inside my heart

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poem by Norman Santos
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Taverns

Amongst buoyant chortles
And charlatan tales
From sinewy gutters
Of jocund corruptions
The wafting jigger
And latticing clambers
Of fervent tongues brought
Nostalgia dissipated
From the clogged pores
Of the shriveling skin,
And melancholia was
As evasive as the wind
With the yearning dithering
In the echopractic reveling
Frosted eyes mounted the seams
Of barricading sierras
And you wouldn't hear
The riddance of the opened doors

In these taverns

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poem by Norman Santos
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