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:
connive with the varmints
and try not to hide the sordid
and vile words rummaging my guts
What I'd do is:
I'd open the shutters and welcome
the machinations of the night -
The still vehicles, the sensual hounds,
the morose streetlamps
trying to crawl the lissome,
svelte, undulating electric lines
I'd steal a cigarette stick and light
to let the incorporeal hands
probe inside my ribcage,
touch the collapsing tubes
close enough to the intimacy
of the mechanical blood valves
And when I realize with
everything in line for the sepulcher
I would sit behind my machine
fire the tacit shotgun and allow
the disturbed sparrows to become
my terse alphabets and that
is how I come with poetry -
as the squalor in mollusk sex
the muse is dead like the story
of an effaced morning glory
Isn't it wretched?
Poignant and putrid?
Like how everything in the night
is fecundated by raw emotions
as sanguine as a senile coma
dreaming of a euthanasia
or another chance to divulge -
to be hauled out of the quagmire
and again, desecrate upon creative hands
the cicatrix yearns for more blood,
the tourniquet gripping the hematoma;
searing with all the valor
that can be supplied to the harried night.
poem by Norman Santos
Added by Poetry Lover
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