I Built a Citadel to Burn

The superfluity of adamant nights and babel of storms
Tarried and wrecked the quietude of my sleepy home
Desperately I groped for a banister, for a reeling rope
A lynch for long abeyance or a pallid streak of hope
But this town is already a wraith of its own ghosts
And perish is near, unabashed to morph a colossus form

Brick atop a brick, a tourniquet of bastion I built
Endeavoring to feign the contours of a thousand mirth
And vie I did, to an assuaging forget but not to flee
From the peremptory entice of effulgent revelries
And a shadow I casted, never shall falter nor tilt
And becoming the verve of the citadel I built

The soulless lullaby of bulwark walls err shan't
Dark shall fade, storms shall beat and die to pant
A safeguard from the descrying coruscations of light
Sequestering with its shadows, unfurling many a terror
Of veritable sorrows that yonder facilely linger
And these walls, like sleep and lullaby, only lulls my horror

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poem by Norman Santos
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I Have Seen a Fellow

I have known a fellow
With a statuesque threshold
For the flipping jabs
Of kerosene tongues
And I had seen him
In so many nights
Under a farcical lamppost
Reckoning the deluging drought
That had imposed his inebriation
With his sordid fingers latched
Into the waist of desolation,
And he was scarcely available
By the maws of the sun
For he is tethered
To inadequacy
And poverty
Of all squalid kinds.

I have seen this fellow
From a distance and he was fine

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poem by Norman Santos
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An Invitation Back to the Vineyard

Forever was the vesper's smile
Like in a nightmare's mist
An eerie breathing hiss
A servile guise striding along
The strife to escalate living
Throttling the abeyance of breath
With the red hands of gaiety
But the vineyard had no eyes
To witness this profound debauchery
So the trample cat-walked leisurely

Amidst the garden's cloak, I
Reckon with these ancient eyes
The dark that loiters in ubiquity
Under the nubile and florid light
Of the moon's chaste flourishing
Brewing the concoction of
A rose-wine dance of fire
And the whiffs of haughty ivy
Lost in the ghastly mangrove

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poem by Norman Santos
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Metamorphosing Into Poignancy

There upon the soughing coughs of
the interminable vacuum of gravity,
the poems sprawled intermingling with
a desire to be read along with tatterdemalion
tragedies awaiting for the fall of Troy's defenses
to succumb into the unsolicited succors
cloyed upon your generous hands

Bibliophilic remedies only revives the flowers
felled in your gray-faced mausoleum
along with the bard's crooning to the
marigolds prancing for rain and sunshine;
The reflection in the blood-spattered tiles pries
for a sangfroid perchance that barters treasures
for these despondent malingerers' desire

Defenestrated with a roll of tobacco-lust,
the effluence of smoke carrying your faint
ambers crawled into the sky before it fecundated -
skin to soul inward-fulmination, and gave birth

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poem by Norman Santos
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One Man Bandwagon of Harlequinade

I, inebriated by a saccharine mulling of the elapsed
Melee amidst the clock's sabers and now moored
By a pensive anchor that rattles with every mishaps
That whittles inside my ashen bones which chewed
Upon my scarce viscera; what disparity between poles
Could be more farcical than not one iota at all?

For in the surly leaf of the final page the verity basks
In a prissy repose apt for a surreptitious usurper
That I am, after all, a harlequin guzzled by a mask
Of a crystal ball, reflecting and deflecting, to pilfer
The unnamed mirth in every drooping environs
Siphoned by the reeling exigency of self deception

Ebullience is ephemeral only for the reason that
Death is a stealthy phantom, immortal in the ethereal
Grounds of a grotesque carnival ensconced in a hat
That I wore to subsist with the grotesque quintessential
Hamlet, teeming with a surfeit latticing fangs of beasts
And an infinitesimal number of vicarious pessimists

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poem by Norman Santos
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Bard Manqué

Where are you, bard manqué?
My eager ears still believe
And perceive the vestiges of your song
And the plucking of the caustic strings
Of your old sangfroid guitar
And I had besought and sought for you
In the undergrowth of the mantling fog
Of impasse in the gulfing city streets
In every cul-de-sac and even libraries
For every interpolation reckons
The cessation of a soigné epistle
And the drifting ebbs of clouds
Unfurl the elapsed chronicles
But still genuflects and beckon
That your shadows still resonate
In spite of the brusque rapine of melody
Now scant in a senile memory
I yearn for you, in the callous blares
Of the city's ravenous amusement
And in the abundance of silence;

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poem by Norman Santos
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The Immolation

The rotund sun slyly coveted
His diadem of light and warmth
Yonder the gnawing jagged teeth
Of these greedy mountain passes
And the days stretched without
The fire ball hung above the clouds
Of ignorance, innocence, malignance
So I squandered my gambling and
Gave up haggling with the King
I knelt before the oblivious sky
Scraping my bloodless knees
In the hoarse and mordant skin
Of the thinning ice beneath
Pleading for my immolation
So I can transcend in liberation
To the land of the phantoms

The oppression to be caught
In a reedy ensnare of vagary
Underneath jealousy and abhorrence

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poem by Norman Santos
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Mister Ebberman

In the bloodcurdling stretch of blind alleys
Akin to thawing sewers reeking with malice
A moniker, a sobriquet, his ambiguity hocked
Mister Ebberman, he sat like a frozen rock
A forlorn rummy with a violent brandy on his left
And on his right, a rod apt for a conceptual theft
Mister Ebberman, sober and pale as the liquor
Held his heart on the seams with flagrant squalor
Mister Ebberman mused past the stagnant river
Darker than the black bile of his abused liver
As he cajole to steadfast his ambidextrous hands
Trembling like the rocks of the floor, cold and bland

From under the river where winter rest its arms
And the albino sun forgot to provide with warmth
Mister Ebberman prayed in his vehement silence
He cowered and sighed for his river's decadence
Pensively, he waited amidst the toppling milieu
To reel in a fish and hope back in the view
Though his wan lethargic bait had failed to lure

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poem by Norman Santos
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Underneath The Sycamore

The glacial mist shrouding the eve
Cradles the redolence of your reveries
Prematurely ripen from a hungry vie
To keep time at bay and life a chance
In your statuesque grace blooms
A dream in the day, a comfort to lay
And we were so close in a distant way
But for the jeopardy of truth and cliché
This transatlanticism is for your decay

Every now and then as time tramples
When cicatrix sighs and sunlight halts
I get so alone, flat and hollow,
Despite of the truancies, I'm still amidst
The enthralls of the moon's harlequinade
And its servile and vivid orbs at cay
I would be lured to saunter back
Our winding roads and jagged paths
And halt beneath the sycamore
Where we met clad with liminalities

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poem by Norman Santos
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Wall Engulfed By Shy Flowers

There is a rendezvous with flamboyance -
a stillness gilded by the peace of detachment
as tacit as the uncurling of moonflowers
when the night sprawls on her divan
and raises her goblet to the distant stars -
and he alone, in his howling dungeons, can
usurp the esoteric grandiosity in malcontent

Everything is intimate and close
in the sterile skin of your vulnerability -
the drifting autumn wind, the lifted eyelids,
the dancing lips, the glaring waltzing feet
But in your soliloquy - unraveling threads
that strangulates your recuperating breaths,
your swallowed words raving in the dark
fanning the embers of your glassy heart
the spurious tides of the oceans crash
into a lull amidst your redundant tremors
and everything sink into the unfathomable

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poem by Norman Santos
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