Hapless Bard, I Hear You
These hours of the night beckons
A solemn caveat to remember
How to unfold an empty leaf
And hold the old quill pen
And scribe the cranial iron fence
To unleash the tattered bard
Glacial like his antediluvian harmonica
A partner starving for heat
Amongst the ears of the arsonists
Inside the impending eaves of the dome
Of a frozen and infertile brook
Ensconced upon a motel room
With walls void of sympathy
And latticing chandelier-like cobwebs
Tinkered by the ominous wintry wind
As an old song played in his mazy head
Which it isn't too pleasant
Especially when the windows
Opens into the sea of concretes;
[...] Read more
poem by Norman Santos
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Dwelling Place
Every night, I fumble to scavenge
My place among estranged acquaintances
And when deception sought for suicide
I will return to a haunted chamber
Inside my cold steely heart
Where the lofty and glacial gates
Loomed hostilely in bolted chains
And I would mount the escalating height
As inebriation descends from liver to soul
And the equipoise of time let down its velvet robe
Draping the horrendous vicissitude hovering my home
And the heralding thought that when I knock the door
It would either be a hammering holiday
On my parent's irrational loathe
Or the crispy echoes of the hollow quietude
In the stretch of a colossal living room,
Darting through a number of quarters
That the eyes can both perceive and not
I'll shake the my fists and make believe
Then I'll get through with all the heedless pounding
[...] Read more
poem by Norman Santos
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Enigma of Her Discerning Whiffs
Your trifle attention astride the immensity
of your attraction ballasts a sharp saber that luster
to shear the cords of the most painful affliction
asleep in the penultimate scabbard of the heart
or, to a wound, plant a seed of the most atrocious
beauty - a pleasurable devastation, like a wind
astray in the subtle life of a breathless swansong
Your bountiful remedies - terse and florid riddles
like the scintillating interpolations of autumn leaves
inviting a lone wolf to a company of thieves,
whetting the spark behind stygian clouds
And there is no asking how you do it
as natural as the flock of clouds chasing
time to the mouth of truancy, deluding
the silver eyes with a quasar's oscillating tiara -
In a mystified simplicity, you spit the flames
draped in prismatic veils that the irons
desired to bathe in and allow furtive hands
to mold a gauntlet to fill in the crevasses
[...] Read more
poem by Norman Santos
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Emaciated Shadow
The sun ballasted searing aloft
And the emollient equinox escalated
The taunting ladder of schism
Upon the bequeathed garden
And, startled, everyone erected
Shifting legs and reloading guns
Never realizing the core of the brunt
Each one, feigning to be the only begotten son
Naked are the clandestine hedonists,
Clad in silk are the quaint sybarites,
And the ignorant martyrs were repelled
Into the flueret floors of the chasm
Where the light deemed barricaded
From reckoning the mantling shade
Meanwhile, the shadows were casted
Upon the vexed and judged ones
I mused on the cantankerous catastrophe
As the others transgressed in hubris
[...] Read more
poem by Norman Santos
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
We Are All Savage Underneath
A sullen ochre rose reluctantly
Breaking dawn in the distance
An oblique path of sleepy ray
Flashed across the coiled bedlam
I rubbed the comported eyes
And the pallid ebullient light
Revealed the tolls of lucid dreaming
And reeled an abhorrence to waking
In a place that was my safeguard
Now a cellar of mordant jealousy
From the tobacco scent suspended
To the ruffled gaunt sheets
Rue lingered with a phantom smile
Eyes burning behind a grimace
These blood stained hands lay
Seething in the wrists
With the blood of a crime—
Claws in a pang in the viscera
A tattoo of guilt that will
[...] Read more
poem by Norman Santos
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Sala
A quaint sepia photograph reckons
Of my deceased old grandparents
In their cordial nuptial palpably soaked
And cloaked in God's veil and covenant
It perishes amongst the ghastly cobwebs
And the dusts in the wailing lifelessness
Of the immodest and muted living room
And in my somnolent and castrated vision
It had painted another mawkish picture,
A concrete memoire of the absence
Of love, of death, and of love in death
So I refocused on the sala instead
With the scraped pastel wallpapers
Toppling on the cold floor parquet
A catastrophic finagling that reveals
The abused skin of my genuine home:
The arms of acquiesced oblivion
Sprawling on the threadbare divan
And watching the midnight sitcoms
[...] Read more
poem by Norman Santos
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Sylvan Guest in the Forlorn Forest
As I lay in the resentment of serrated ryes
And beneath the tempest of impaling lances
That I stashed inside the scathing frame
Of my blatant harlequin repose;
Such a sapid filth, such a torment,
A stranger intruded my forlorn forest
Marauding with a flock of gypsies and pixies
Cloven beneath the echoes of her gyratory
Ebullience, submerged in her spruce plumes,
She laid another set of superfluous cards
In a house of marble and sycophantic pillars—
In the form of her vessel; gilded jewelries
Sealed in sprightly paintings and poetries
All for a shambling gambler's ineptitude
And unsheathe a sword of nimble odds
Succoring, caressing, a despondent hand
In an earnest finagling, you've sublimated
An ornate forest into a lustrous Silver Lake
Adorned by a buoyant polished Swan
Pardon my florid tongue, please do not dispense
[...] Read more
poem by Norman Santos
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Escalator
It was one of those bountiful days
Where a minuscule latency of silence
Could mean the void of everything;
The toppling of the fortress' pillars,
The infringement of the rosary beads,
The rapine of the cheapest hope
That you had found in someone else's pocket,
The kiss of a dying cigarette bud,
Or the burning end of the cigarette bud,
The last page of a novel and its woebegone demise,
Or the solitariness amidst the buckling jovial nights
It was one of those plundering days,
When I can see the violent waves
Palming the swaying bay, seizing the dock
Beating endlessly the benumbed shores
And I see it amongst the swarming populace,
In the slow hands of the hasty clock,
In the precarious streets and highways,
Even in the lull of classroom deliberations,
[...] Read more
poem by Norman Santos
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
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.
[...] Read more
poem by Norman Santos
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Weak Beacons
The sunset of November leaned against
The propinquity of a hostile defense
And a yearning for all the suspended tears
Channeling from a cloyed and battered heart
Its alloyed blood rushed with a vexation
That molted daggers of vengeance
Unyielding to the farce world of stones
But in the illustrious night, the bones quivered
And rattled like the austere pebbles
Carrying our impeding lamentations
Somewhere, the red sun's beam engulfed
A drab bud uncurling its ancient wishes
Left unheard as the pollens shook away
Like dusts waning from the sun's graze
Whilst a flower withered to decadence
As its corolla expanded into a circle
Touching each other and coming closer
To the juxtaposition of life and death
[...] Read more
poem by Norman Santos
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!