Sequestered From The Emancipated Roses, Deadlocked Thorn

The soigné ultimatum of a flyleaf
stole the peripatetic petals -
in a void facet purged
from floridly trampling texts
How they fandangoed with the flames
and glided transverse frozen brooks
is now a monastic monument
under the sun's stropping gilt
casting a plethora of shadows
that recounts the saccharine antebellum
in a soundless narrative

Amidst this sierra of statuesque memories
I orphaned all my abandonments
humbled and embarrassed, eyes downcast
and unheeding for the celestial supremacy
that waned from my succors,
Flowerless hands scathed by thorns
shearing the obsidian armor

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poem by Norman Santos
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The Making of a Prince II: A King with Too Many Names

Eyes of adamantine admiration,
Eyes of green jealousy,
And like my own of enigma;
Skin of robust splendor,
Skin of soigné plutocracy,
And like my own of harsh grating;
He had a extensive collection
Of these myriad visions

Brands and names,
Epitaphs and banners…
He had too much already
And I cannot endow him
Of a gift, of a name,
But in spite of the perplexity
Of his multitude, I knew him
And the core of his magnitude

A soul, a heart, a thousand words,
An assuaging fix, a destructive machinism,

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poem by Norman Santos
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Pleas of a Claymore II

Have you ever seen a saber?
Took so much beating
In a plethora of derision
As the hands pounded his convictions
Against the feral adversary
Of his stale conqueror,
Lackadaisical and crestfallen
But still fawning in a lash back
To find the elusive direst
Of his tethering fate,
And his silver blood spilled
And scintillated in stellar
Like the mistral tears of a maiden.

And some people esteemed it
Musing in avarice for the clout
That this claymore possessed
Despite of the scarred visage
Or perhaps, because of the incisions
And they would lather the lacquer

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poem by Norman Santos
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Claret Pagoda in the Cerulean River

A slow waltz
In the crimson line
Of the dusk's horizon
Drifts me back
Into the cerulean river
Where I used to glide
In canoes with lovely people
Incarcerating myself;
My thoughts, my squalors,
My despairs, my bliss,
That no soul would understand
In a profound reclusion
That not a single soul
Ever understood.

In a slow waltz
Between my hands
And the grating oars,
And between the paddles
And the sporadic tides,

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poem by Norman Santos
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Behind The Machine Gun

There are nights spoiled
like women dancing with macabre,
men praying in pub houses
both soaked in the belly
of licorice and blood-colored
soldering of chemical spirits,
like children sleeplessly lying
in beds without bedtime stories;
parents making out with whores
in a nameless stag diner,
like these moths suspended
in my cobwebbed chandeliers

These somber nights would
sometime trample in the crevasses
of my womanless bed
crying a song to my spine
and clinging to the crowfeet
juxtaposed my cellar eyes
and what I would do is:

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poem by Norman Santos
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Redundancy in Abundance

Exuding eloquent dismal
Over the trickling perspirations
Of exhausting redundancy
Is but amassing more to credence
In the thicket of its abundance
I'd rather hold my breath
In a hiatus.

For one, the searing streets
Is full of stray cats making slinky love
With the baleful rake of amour
And their hoarse caterwauls
Disembogue the quintessence
That sex became overrated
And love dissipated
In the grazing of tongues
And bracing of flesh.

And there's the lubricated
Lubricous gears of the tethered clock

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poem by Norman Santos
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Unanticipated Legion

Once, on a hill where a rubber tree stood
A sea of clumped stars in the darkness brewed
Lanterns and chimes tinkered in the dark of clouds
And dumbfounded was the gloomy vow

Astray, a vagrant meander into the slope
Past the reluctant brambles, rummaging for hope
And into the hill where enthralling mirth flow
And the ebullient air hummed saliently low

He picked up his head, mused upon the castle
That rubber tree personified and he tousled
His hair, an ounce of ardor peeking through the coyness
His hands tracing the lines, ears listening through the dampness

And from the damp a saccharine voice spoke:
"Such black eyes—a mirror with fluent strokes"
And the orbits probed for the prying soul
Winding his knee and rubbing his sole

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poem by Norman Santos
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Rollercoaster Vagaries

Just when I capitulated and succumbed
Into the callous hands of contingency
You trespassed my penetralium
With agitated legs of confusion
You were a sedentary beast in an open field
Of bowing grass and seething sun -
You malingered without a purpose.

I watched you disentangled the tethers
That was long shorn and in a placid thought
I wondered if you didn't even know
The long months that it coiled scored
And what of fading does oblivion concern?
I ask you, where do all the things
That dementia took lingers?
I ask you, from what do you want
Me to run from; your sudden meddling?

Like a black bird at midflight
With wings relentless of the wind

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poem by Norman Santos
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From The Distance (Of Life and Death)

The ghastly mantling fog
That had spun out my eyes
Adamantine and brazenly cold
Is your very breath slicing
A wanton shrill in the supple skin
Like how those words flung
Into the impassable distance
Toppling the dearth expanse
Of time strutting down her golden stair

Those words are the spine
Of the hundred tacitly inscribed
Poetries in blood and smothered breaths
Along with the thousand winding days
Plummeting into the abysmal trench
In constant winnows of your redolent
Balmy zithers of the morning sun
As I speak of these words, I entangle
Myself in the wisps of your tresses
And gape in the crevasses

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poem by Norman Santos
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Lionized

The night dawned beneath
the searing diadems
sprawled on the floors
without a king or a queen
like a roarless lion
prancing on a tawny field
without any manifestation -
a gilded mass of a shadow
capitulated from its vigor

The light spangling faintly
upon the sweating glass
the pendulum crashed
with the moon on her boudoir
clad by gargoyle clouds
we possess the darkness
cloyed by our eyes

We took ferocity for granted
whuthering from the ascent

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poem by Norman Santos
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