-I-

Adoration-
Somnambulists cast
paradise magic, allowing a thimble to fall
upon the floor of our private heaven
(a perfect disquiet to our loving)

We daily reveal our reclusive
sensitivities, a flash (a lowered head, laughing distinctly)
Trailing close behind German poets/path of devotion, a second summit of their passionate influence, rippling generations ago now:

(vineyards caught by grasping suddenness/placating daytime/fig & flame/false tower of Babel, ornamental ruin/he feels owed the sensations of an active spirit, to repent the contrary forces within him/myself)

-II-
                      & upon my reflection in the Cabaret of Hell,
I see a gate perched at the base of my wondrous
Sehnsucht-apparition

                    BLUE MOON                 WALLFLOWER

(or perhaps the other way around?)

Overtaken by oscillating darkness/hall of mirrors (memories)
distorted flashbulb *** and anger

until the acts become indistinguishable from themselves/doubly
******* tigers brushstroked in animal blood... essence of devour/temper/
captivation, incredible lips, pulp teeth, pure excitement all disfigured
& joyous

-III-

My azzurine goddess, faced away in
shame, no wonder why!

(hair let down in a drowsy spill of
uncertain hours, wavering in a sullen high, thickly feeling,
the immensity/pleasure renounced for a cabbalist subliminity)

Mockery of the dead dead dog/blind in boyhood/while
curious ghosts skate across the ice-peripheral of our dreaming

I feel love, and horror/a frigid hand who's body I have dissolved-
-caressing my back tenderly
bordering terrific malevolence

...Later, in another try at my own eternal return, I find my comfort brother, accompanied by an overhead
divination lantern..

pounding! At the sun skull, for you (my cherished)
are of high order
I tempt soaking the cloth,
to steer the intention

..missing black mass, indulging instead
on feverish Damascus perfume

Splash ramp
down. Flesh, wailing
vampire/poet
hidden by darkly earth to inevitably
decay by their self-solitude

(descent writhes in the milk of heartache
and cusps the night firmly in his *****
withering palms)

I refuse this fate, and
in Western-fashion
fire down the city worshipper which was once
I, too        (unmercifully so)

..burying his bones in the Scottish dirt

Terrarium hydrangeas, pale (yourIrises) lipstick daggers
slashing in the white sleeve-
red with epicurean
baptism

-IV-

Big bad wolf
banished to his hole,
I kiss the winter fruit clean from your mouth (succumbing to pinnacles of fire/your lost domain) ******* on pebbles, trying to crack through the surface
like a dragon's egg for pride
(big bad wolf is hungry)
We wear away the season, memorizing the newspapers
which are tossed carelessly to our door. Ah, the kitchen ballet dancers are finally tired..endowed to the triplicate beauty
that we individually define (takes a bit to get there)

You/I privileged to ******* Venice with our mutual
imagination,                              owing to Calvino

To crave eachother
as an Acrobat craves the

trapeze

She tends her cactus garden,
beads of perspiration,
works with a maniacal absorption.

One of many visitors she receives
yet looking at each other's eyes
dawned this quick realization;
similar maniacal obsession and passion.

A tornado she was, self created,
in her swirl uprooted
many huge trees, even tombstones
by the sheer force unleashed,
with her poetic flourish.

Love of a crazy woman
with effervescent creative  surge,
is a magical portion
brewed by a witch ,
in her forbidden rituals, night after dark night.

Injured by conjugal lust, unrequited
prompted to walk the garden path
holding hands of lovers, one after the other,
who took her to wilderness, deeper and deeper
and at the end to a blind alley,
life was a tribal dance,
from where return was impossible.
She never had to apologize to her mate,
who for all the world to see, remained  with her
till he went behind the curtain.

Imagine a life, a walk
through a cactus garden,where sharp thorns would nip,
searing pain and bleeding has its moments of exhilaration.
Life pulsated wildly for her on such notions,
(There were many who walked with her for each adventure)

They met, poetry flowed like wine,
she had a rare warmth seen in women of such creative combinations,
she feared nothing, but  her truth made many squirm.
Midnight dances of her and her friends gypsy bunch,
attained such fame.But all ended in a great  betrayal,
she was deep down a naive woman,
craving for love, to immerse in it.

On occasions she would change identities
at will, she was one but many
there wasn't any one like her before or after.
They would walk through the witch's cactus patch,
somnambulists reciting poems,
when they are together, in private,
cactus spine criss- crossed his skin
her nail wrote poems on the back
of the lover of the moment,
each one bled like soldiers in combat.

One monsoon night brought
everything to an end,
the cactus garden was trampled by
big grey wolves, the journey
met with an abrupt end.

What is she, cactus herself,
vampire, witch, lover indefatigable,
with the heart of a lion?
Erotomaniacal  poetic surge,
yet a fantasy in flesh and blood?

**They buried her
in a cactus garden away from town
not even ten people arrived to mourn,
not even all her lovers, had time that afternoon.
Her songs of pain, pierced hearts and they
still shed tears,
cactus garden, it was---
the metaphor perfected by her life and death.

Incognizant of the excrement,
I'm the dozing tenant of advertised adversity.
I ignore the fact that the world now is like a toilet,
And I avoid it, I avoid it, I avoid it.

Boy, did you get exploited?
How could we know we're
No more than numerical exponents?
Can consolation prizes console him?
We're not aware of the ventriloquists
Or their true motives.

Popular perfume conceals
The stench from the load of,
Finite excrement that
The suited men sold us.
They told us that it would be beneficial,
Not an imposition on our self-image,
Pinocchio before he found
Out he was artificial.
Is the American Dream a reality?
Why did I hear a dissenter
Say it was superficial?

We must have missed something,
We see no issues.
Meanwhile, my Uncle Sam designated
You as the mental missile.


Originally written 5/25/11
Revised 10/15/14

(c) 2014 Brandon Antonio Smith

I found a coven in the woods
Amongst an oaken forest glen.
There,
hidden behind a curtain of Spanish moss,
amongst fiddlehead ferns and fungi bloom,
two of Gaia's faithful maidens
Enchanted me unwittingly, and took possession of my gaze.

A Pair of Muses
One, of the forest
One, of the sea
Both wind and fire
Equally
In opposition and in sway

Their incantations softly chanted
In a tongue to me unknown
and I listened quietly entranced,
between them in the glow
Of their cauldron hearth fire
Embers burning low

She of the forest was enigma, playfully shy,
coyly toying with the strings all men share,
And in her den, among her herbs and powders and potions  
In preperation, and prepared.
She spoke in riddles and in parable,
Both with body and with stares.

Instantly she knew me
As I had never known;
As if Devined by a mysticism,
Ancient and pure,
So sublime it startles the soul.
In her eyes,
so sweet and sincere,
simplicity and innocence obscure
A strange and intoxicating knowledge
Of the rare and deepest old
Of the world and it's great secrets-
What its darkest reaches hold.

She of the sea
Was shimmering
A specter
Against the stars
Floating

She was Waves
Of aquamarine
Blue Green
Irridescent
Obscure and reticent
Behind her ever pulsing shade

Camaflouged by her surroundings
This piscian vision lingered in relief
Over a Gilded titan mother of pearl chariot;
The Persephone Throne.
She cast her stare upon me;
My hypnotized mind laid bare,
Wiped clean of anything I had seen.
No man could know her shrine of love
Nor the secrets that she keeps,
And none ever remember;
For one cannot resist her lair

An aquarian cavern,
A haven of calm,
Rest, respite and solitude.
It's lotus blossom lantern
Heart of glowing gold
Cast in shadow upon the ceiling
Glimmering radiant refractions
of the waning day

Her ocean sings soft and sweetly,
Casting mist into the air,
And a siren's song disrupts me
Ever suddenly
She washes over me,
Unaware

And though the seven signs they showed to me clearly
Still the stars I misread
through misted eyes,
and soon I fell to dreaming without sleeping
Or so I thought, though i shall never know

In their atmosphere I relinquished this mortal coil into the haze,
And disappeared completely
For an instant, just a moment,
perhaps it was hours.
Perhaps,
it was days.

And as abruptly as rushing water to the somnambulists face
I awoke,
As a dreamer awakes
from dreaming of waking,
alone and bleary-eyed,
dreary and confused
amid my own disheveled cave.
And where they've gone, I wish to go,
But where that is, I cannot know
For I would follow them until the days
Turned forever into nights amongst
The Forest and The Waves

Shall I get drunk or cut myself a piece of cake,
a pasty Syrian with a few words of English
or the Turk who says she is a princess--she dances
apparently by levitation?  Or Marcelle, Parisienne
always preoccupied with her dull dead lover:
she has all the photographs and his letters
tied in a bundle and stamped Decede in mauve ink.
All this takes place in a stink of jasmin.

But there are the streets dedicated to sleep
stenches and the sour smells, the sour cries
do not disturb their application to slumber
all day, scattered on the pavement like rags
afflicted with fatalism and hashish.  The women
offering their children brown-paper *******
dry and twisted, elongated like the skull,
Holbein's signature.  But his stained white town
is something in accordance with mundane conventions-
Marcelle drops her Gallic airs and tragedy
suddenly shrieks in Arabic about the fare
with the cabman, links herself so
with the somnambulists and legless beggars:
it is all one, all as you have heard.

But by a day's travelling you reach a new world
the vegetation is of iron
dead tanks, gun barrels split like celery
the metal brambles have no flowers or berries
and there are all sorts of manure, you can imagine
the dead themselves, their boots, clothes and possessions
clinging to the ground, a man with no head
has a packet of chocolate and a souvenir of Tripoli.

My beloved night was dense,dark, wavy, soft velvet,
fully naked, moving in rhythm with me,  frenzied, sweet,
we moved heaven and earth to reach the acme of delight,
then flew in to a sudden  culmination,words fail to express,
the day dawned, blazing molten gold,ages were  impatient steeds,
together we rode, gained wings, became transcendentals, sublime
reached that tranquil, trident  blue peak where silence for ever reigns,
we had a deep yearning to sit and peer deep in to each other's eyes,
and see what remains after the last wave returns to the ocean's heart.

Above the emerald mountain,ran a river that fell in to an abyss,
the white foam of it's smile told us, about all we sought thus far.

"Ÿou have reached here in your frenzied search for the elusive
chasing the essence of a conundrum unexplained , cyclic, cryptic"
looking at  us sang a little bird, from a low hanging branch
of the tree of diamonds, that shaded us with it's clear light.
We felt the thousand petaled lotus  bloom within us that moment.

"Day and night are the horses that draw the chariot you ride,
an oasis you'll reach, then  hear stories that would ease your pain
you are in a story that reflects on the periphery of a bubble,
that exists in innumerable worlds simultaneously and hence
none is real, your truth you create,every minute and live"

We are somnambulists, that sit and paint colors in our fanciful dreams,
when we smile the colors stick to our souls till the apparition dissolves.

Vast, empty, midnight hour,
hunchbacked lampposts glaring over parasitic black earth
choking its host.

A parking lot,
an ecosystem’s blemish—
hot tar seeping into the pores of the earth
like a stubborn blackhead in a lip line.

When no cars burrow into the blackened hide
like lice
the great absence of life
is an atrocity.

I imagine myself skateboarding across the tier
as the small town cops
watch languidly with vague interest—

A skateboarder’s paradise
where wheels and accomplice minds roll across celestial barriers
blasting infinite pulses
into the microcosm.

What greasy punks have their mother’s van parked here,
huddling by the heat vents
and jerking off into a Pringle’s can?

Empty parking lot
looks like a cemetery
filled to the brim
where headstones meld
over a mass grave—

delineated by white lines,
the apparitions of vehicles and their hosts
haunt the frozen space.

Another horrible excuse
to waste land,
a wasteland in and of itself
where Tom Eliot saunters aimlessly
and buries the dead.

The saddest sight to behold,
this vacuous parking lot
littered with stray shopping carts,
phantasmal plastic bags,
gum splotches,
***** stains,
candy wrappers,
cigarette butts,
used condoms,
lonely cops
and patient drug dealers,
ambulant skaters,
tired punks,
bored teenagers,
somnambulists,
stumbling drunks,
hunchbacked ***** lights
prying for life beneath its sallow gaze—

The air encapsulated within the perdition
stifling,
the pavement below stifling,
a constriction only visible
when emptied of its contents.

A cop wakes from their choking nightmare gasping
to find themselves trapped,
****** in this parking lot
where the walkie-talkie buzzes
with the weeping and gnashing of teeth.

The warehouse store
looming above the waiting room
lifeless, silent, dark countenance—
Big Brother sees all in the gaping maw.

Cascading before me,
stretching towards the highway passing by,
waiting for the panorama to finish scrolling,
the treadmill to cease its cycle—
all the while lamenting life’s absence
and reveling in the potentiality it possesses.

We keep on searching
Inventing and re-inventing
Dexterous minds
Looking for solutions
Problems seeded deeper
Takes root firmly
As we hone our skills
To mitigate our fate
We create a bid divide
Chasm wide and unfathomable
Disarrayed paths
Somnambulists take the lead
Unknown hurdles
Every time they falter

The night sky of sleep
was ebulliently psychedelic,
specs of colors, yellow, brown, red,
created an ancient language
that spoke, secrets of a forbidden past,

The helicopter crept through,
the sky, tearing the canopy
of lights momentarily,
landed on a high rise apartment of dreams.

                                Now, after all these years,
difficult to remember,
who lives where;
aren't we somnambulists,
without navigational aids?

I would suddenly wake up
from one dream
                             within another -

soft touches of tender fingers,
sweet whispers in my ears,
soft light spreading its palm on an exposed shapely breast,
                                                         ­         I'll sense a disquiet,
a sigh, the pangs of a weeping heart, incidental results of
a life of passion, strife and agitation,
getting ****** by currents,
diving deep in to swirling waters
                                                          ­    

                                                           ­     In a dream, a young woman,
                                                          ­      standing on a podium, in a class room,
                                                           ­     teachers in a trembling voice
                                                           ­     how to appreciate poems:
                                                          ­      "From beyond light years,
                                                          ­       comes our grief..."
                                                       ­         the scene dissolves in to mist.
                                      
                    ­                        silence!


I am an yellow moon,
she is the pale mist circling,
we are in an embrace, momentarily,
                                         in a dream
in the jeweled bed of the night sky.

Sleep visits me again, a man
in a grey overcoat, smiling, beckoning.
It's easier than you think, he tells me
just like they say, counting sheep
and stars. There are somnambulists
and the creak of bedsprings, some nights
silence, but more often the clock ticks back
and forth. I sit beside the bed
with its sagging dust ruffle and watch over
the sleep of the living. It's funny,
he says, stifling the lamplight,
especially when they talk, and when they dream.

Digging through the rubble
searching for hope
even though hope
seems like a blurred emotion
better left off
to the somnambulists
who often live their lives
in a haze of damp regrets.