The Road Away The Night

The night perched on its favorite peak
To let down the pall of oblivion and
Murmur temptations into the wind
It's reedy voice swept and perforated
The euphonious singing of the stars
Like a dissonant violent string it shrilled
And shattered the taut smile hoisted
In the harlequinade that comforted
This pilfered parcel of direst and slosh
The aqueous blood of the saline sea
Where the memories drowned struggling

These convoluted meandering that lead
In a rendezvous with death's scythe
Is starting to outnumber the plethora
Of my night terrors and day dreams
And the shadow of my blinded fears
Is starting to blend into the thin walls
That rectifies my ebbing faults and sin -
I am lost in this aimless wandering.

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poem by Norman Santos
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Birth of the Lion Man

And he was a man with revealing sylvan eyes.
Sad, wandering, eager-eyes swathed with sagacity.
Coy he was, like an eagle in the wild; aversive but suspicious.
He is not a child, but he is less than a man.
A critique and a wonderer loathing his own skin
At the top of his head, he watched people
He watched them flash harlequin smiles at each other
Smiles that harmed his eyes like polarized lights
And he remained aloof, preserved to his flightless dignity.
His nest a bare warren of pride and fear
Every leaf of the book he turned with dismal eloquence
Disgusted with the filth of the forged layer
He desires to strip them, undress them
To crack the cynic Monalisa smile and the soul submerged beneath.
A spin-off awaits to swivel as he walked the cobbled streets
Unmasked, but masked with forced vulnerability.

Strutting the town like the lazy-pacing clouds,
Invading skies like searing rays of light
Her lucid radiance in the kind afternoon

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poem by Norman Santos
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Memento Mori

I forage subtly and voraciously
Decrying the astray empathy
With my whittled fingernails
Recounting the forlorn tales
In the ornate map inscribed in a mirror
Perplexed with a flamboyant squalor
Like how the needle skate gracefully
Into the vinyl of ubiquitous maladies
Of my lackadaisical days
Of hoping with feral rays
Congested with a tightrope chance
Gnarled in a rat-king trance.

Dyed synthetic pompadour hair
What hue conceals in its lair?
What combs the wisps of melancholic flair?

Sylvan ears with the left lobe pierced
What echolalia do you keep?
What songs do you perceive?

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poem by Norman Santos
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Ignoble Castigation

A raven perched atop the hinges
Of the world's revolving doors
Whetted the desire of his skeptic vision,
Stroked the bristling fabric of inflection,
And masticated the subjugated souls
Stifling on their sordid meat-suits
Debauched by a malingering insentience
Of the psychasthenia in their palms
Clutched in a boulder of their riling fists
Hungry and desperate but would not receive
And the raven had reduced and educed
That world is a hunting ground astride
The stretch of fastidious bewildered beasts
With diadems, and canes, and bibles
And quill pens, and cinnamons, and rifles
Sympathy and apathy wedged on porcelains
A tangled maze dwells on their sequins
The astute spectator traipsed in a blather
Of angst and irk upon the slapstick picture
For every beast is ignobly castigated

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poem by Norman Santos
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My Zithers Sang No Melody

Like an arachnid, I constantly weave a web
as I swing across transatlantic roofs and trellises
to catch little mildews and a menagerie on the latticework,
I knit the metallic sheen of their wings and armors -
these little quasars of my sundered oceans
and the nebulous framework creates the quintessence
of every single thread I veer and embroider from drudgery

Like how a marionette is played by strings, I tethered myself
into these lissome rivulets running behind our old hills
but when these bridges are toppled from the constitutions
all these filament enshrouds my void, flimsy frame
like a folder of daggers puncturing the tiny vessels of the blood
that shall deluge me from the inside to suffocation

Without these manifold stairs of escalation, I remain
riveted into a seamless sea - a glacial rock standing amidst
the turbulent lashing of the waves, washed by setting suns,
all the muses assailed into a furtive sculling away from me
Without these laconic multitude, I am small, I am little,

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poem by Norman Santos
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In An Owls Cry

When the crimson corona anchored itself flimsily
On the gnashing teeth of the chipped horizon and duly
Propose a solemn banquet in the expanding firmament
For the nocturnal vagabonds flagellated by no retirement
And premature dews transpired with wintry on its mouth,
Sunken and sullen eyes arrives to life in a quavering mould
Pregnant as the gaudy stale and dour of the moon hovering
The vast ineffable night and its stymied folks unfolding,
Sharper than the raging diamonds on the looming vault
But not as convivial, the hilarity, in these diamonds' molt,
Robust than any thicket of forest these orbits can pierce
Ardent than any saint uttering a prayer on the feet of fear
Gaping beneath the anonymity in the pitch black view
The denizen of eternal hours of darkness and its beaux
The eyes of the imperceptible sentries of the night;
Invisible, iridescent, surreptitious, feared and surmised
Bleak in the ensemble of the smokescreen's cape
Dexterous plumes no tempest of Boreas can scrape
Concealing the preying razor spears in a subterfuge
The emollient resilience, in the stark arcane further subdued

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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.

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poem by Norman Santos
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Funeral for a Friend

The corona of the sun rolled
Into the steep ridges of the cliffs
Where the swaying of svelte legs
Still cast the black pendulums
Out-shadowing the anthem of the day
And as it flushed the slithering roads
Without a hiss, raising the skeptic head
Like the serpent that it was
Still, I traversed the valley valiantly
Shunning the venoms and fangs
Straight into the point blank demise
Of ephemeral times

I shall don my best guise
As I trample in my meander
And swallow the slivers
Of sequestered amenities
And I shall mount the granite legs
With the impetus of veracity
Detaching from the rail tracks

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poem by Norman Santos
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The Railroad Man

Your eyes possessed the sunset of tomorrow
And denies the sunrise of today
Your callused hands burnt from the struggles
Yet flimsy with superfluous abandonments
Like empty stations, you futilely wait
To be filled, but in your sleep
You have forgotten the weight
Of your ethereal passengers
Encumbering your peaceful calm

I watched you watch the railroad tracks
But they never altered, do they?
I watched you watch the passing trains
And the faces antagonizing the ferry
For they are the faces of departing,
Faces of the arriving - unstained
Of any rue or purpose, aren't they?

A bloated gloaming came
And I espied you once again

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poem by Norman Santos
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Her and Him

She fell in love at the first sight
of his prismic points and insights
depicting a plethora of fireworks
consecutively sparkling in the sky.

Whilst he trampled in a delicate stupor
to muse upon her eloquent words
woven like a tapestry to mantle
the unfathomable slumbering firmament

Stocks of unedited ends and tales
smokes out of his hidden system.
Soft punctuation in creative rhymes,
fills me with bliss in every line.

Her unabashed tongue gyrated
to recount the tragedy of felled stars
And the rapier of her caustic words
slurred with a vicarious quiescence on mine

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poem by Norman Santos
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