Hindsight

Old Venus, neolithic,
Tucked in a wad of plastic –
Lungs and loins heave in 
Greeting as you go 
Up in smoke.
You were my worst mother
In hindsight,
Your crooked finger beckoning me
To rest my head on hotel pillows,
My body on gurneys.
My musings of phalluses and armpits
Do me nothing as I shrink and
Reel myself back into the same 
Earthen mouth, wet and hungry,
That I’ve always known would
Kill me in the end.



© 2018 BENJAMIN SMITH

Lecher

Contraction with night,
Then the minimized distance of vision, the
Closeness of the dark shell.
The world shrinks to infancy as
My body practices a crooked adulthood.

O cocoon 
Of limbs, you make no spark, you meet
No struggle in such an absence.
I stoke the hot blackness, pinching glass.
A channel. Crammed within the confines of a
Pearl, lustrous and bulging –
Layer by layer by layer – 
There is no between between us anymore,
Whoever you are.

Fog rolls in its cage of clarity, its cage of salts, 
No longer wildly floating its skirt over grasses.
A captive springs at its single leak, an 
Errant train slips into its resented home.

I know well the silvery sweat that
Roosts on your brow,
The mercury on the mantle.
It drips to my skin, an infected baptism – 
It pools in my navel, the reservoir of forgetting.

I will not know you in the morning
After I slink back, a blood red beggar,
Into my mother’s womb,
Into the clutch of a different kind of bone. 

© 2017 BENJAMIN SMITH

The Breathing Mirror

I am a bottle, diagnosed,

A vacancy in glass that you address. 

You’ve caught me shining, the

Child of convergence, a consequence,

A meeting.

Such knives of light are not my own

Yet I throw, I throw. Do not poke

Holes in my generosity. I court

The corner of your eyes, I strike 

You with your own flesh long neglected.

Do not prod the hungry.

I’ve grown into a jeweled chameleon, a face of 

Two starved caves that crave your spoon

Cradling the fat lump of gestures, of cues. 

I eat scenery. I eat the atmosphere. 

Memory cares not what it swallows.

My panes, pleated and aligned, 

Are inestimable. It is your ideals, 

Your inflections that heat my sides.

I ooze and dry,

Angular, deliberate. 

My lips, my selves curl

In this skin of situations, this

Gown you gave to me. Transparent,

Flaking like dreams.

The lie forks. Do I satisfy?

Do I lack? Pattern rots to prophecy.

You turn your back.

I spring a leak – 

Something has cracked. 




© 2017 BENJAMIN SMITH

Telepath

Your energies dissolve. Steaming off
Above your fractured rampart –
Quite prodigally – they hiss in time with mine.

What a waste, the hyaline sheaths we expect to
Screen such exposures, such burrows. This
Umbilicus of wit

Continues its tapping of skull-oil in droves,
To and fro. An indefatigable transplant of
Gray intellect.

I had never dreamt our bodies so loud in
Their boiling, obedient poise of composure.
Hardly a shock that the diaphanous knot of the

Face should hide a nose, house the inaudible shriek
Of anguish – Both flinch and fidget betray
The mind, the mind. Will it not bind itself –

A cage a corset – anything to civilize? O rabid
Dazzler, o defector, quick to feed and
Overthrow.

Your looking glass casket haunts and jeers –
It is out to get me, I’m convinced – like the
Minatory crow. So, so, here we are, twins, Siamese.

Heads welded and chests seething –
We are a pharmacist’s wet dream.
The current gurgles on through the cord,

Back and forth, back and forth.
“I’m just tired,” you say. I do not believe you.
You are aware, of course.

Waiting To Board

To exit. To slip out of this body fraught 
With lightning, vessel of storms –
I've finally got my ticket. A decade of sighs I've 
Condensed and pressed to a stub as dumb as I 
Aspire to be. 

I have been sentenced to life. The veins within 
Me have become violent, revolting against their 
Redness, piercing the barrier. 
Up and over the freshly torn trench, they 
Paint me in poppies. 

Their trusted gush gives me nothing but a pair 
Of slacks in the trash. But here you are, 
Alabaster attendant, on this foamy port, 
Platform of chokes, with your queer ear cupped 
And attentive just as I'm to go. 

I do not want my luggage, the misshapen 
Mountain of trunks, sizzling and screaming with 
Their hoods rotted nearly to fizz. Who would 
Wish to keep such a tumor of boxes, a wildly 
Unpredictable hump of the back. 

The flesh of memory cannot possibly squeeze 
Inside whatever this is –
That's the point, is it not? To molt with finality, 
To willingly gift my wasted breath to the 
Infinitely dense and infinitely needy curtain as it 
Swings to shut all eyes. 

I'll call it a loophole for the time being, even 
With air this thick, space invaded by the 
Spewed fumes of the sacks. They drip from my 
Limbs, abominable fruit, stalactites of 
Somethings that cling with sour avidity. 
The palls have always hung and eddied round 
My sort of life. 

Plane of ivory, ship of silence, great bird or 
Grave train or gust of black wind, I've no 
Concern of which face it forms. 
Richly disposed, I have been waiting to board, 
To shake free the malodorous cases, tongue 
Dry, and slide, wholly and compliantly, 
Into stillness.

The Two Picture Frames (Draft)

The two picture frames shifted with immediacy
From one room to the next. Eight lines
Of golden growth, eight cuts bleeding from end 
To end, coiling into Baroque, or Victoriana, or 
Whatever this ornate bulk is.

One I filled with a woman, grainy girl printed at a 
Grocery store. She smiles in the vanishing 
Nature of vintage, as if the bulb burst, branding 
The moment with overexposure. 
Homage to your heroin, breaking up the space.

The other hangs in waiting, housing only a pane
Of custard that coats the walls. A temporary 
Filler, sketched hands, crude cup of coconut 
Milk. White on white. Black on white. On 
Custard,

Pocked with a million budding pimples, little 
White dams. Corks that, if removed, could 
Reduce the room to falling ripples. But the room 
Holds firm. We've begun to give it new skin.
We've begun.
We. 

I am surrounded by patterns of wood and
Yet I do not retch. I am cornered by this pale 
Yellow and yet I love. My sacrificial ego, it is
Burning into you. And this, opening the 
Doorless, tidying these boxes, is a horror, a 
Miracle in itself.

Question of Continents

Drums fail to pass the Atlantic, that watery bulwark,

Neutralizer of heirlooms. Reclined, its folds of froth

Snuff true tradition out. Its two hearts contemplate its

Indifference to history, its ushering of hell hulls,

Death-dock-bound.

The drums have found a loophole, though, throwing their

Passionate pulse westward in the cloak of words,

The guise of academia.

Alien dish of ager, this blue monster has walled us

Into worlds of contrast. I stand on land that will never

Sober, mud always tinted red. Even now, your daughters

grunt and butt against star spangled criteria.

Your sons, the same. Our cream feet on your continent

Stub and stumble over mountains of culture.

Societies of the stranger.

These eyes are ill-equipped to take you in. Yet we

Stand, toes in foam and sand, staring. Where is your

Fufu? Where is your icebox? A hollow womb?

Have you been tested? Our sockets shriek across the wild

Wetness, their potential to clasp cut by tongues of waves.

We grant each other pity, I for your lag, you for my

Amputation of ancestors. Polished wood versus dirt-floor huts –
But which of us is backwards? 

© 2015 BENJAMIN SMITH