Mother (Another / Unrealities) [unfinished]

Last night I sat with you on your brownish barge

Of unrealities, dragging mine as well in my

Spent lids and my stutter and my
Fingers or face canes. It truly seems an
Island, the square table a moon, the rug a
Coarse, weathered face of a lake.

To talk to you, that is why I boarded,
Armed with frantic report. My chest
Had been rented to gymnastics, my lungs
Inoperable. Hour, hours - our speech was

Scuffed, stopped, struck up again.
I cried to you, mother, my unrealities
Nestled in my lap. They 

inflated, briefly butting with yours.

With each mounting comes a break, walls
Flaking on one side or the other, tears like
Armies rush, rush, unintentionally intrusive. 

Sacking a node of sensitivity. 

I saw the week of the white flag return.
While I drew back the gauze, revealing my two
Bodies, I kept catching a glimpse of you,

Marooned, digressing to the white Isis from
Before in flickers of film. The rivers
Roiled around us, tightly shut thighs of force.
You said of your father
"He was never mean to me."

It is terrifying, the power clenched in the
Crooks of spoken words. In the hardened hush of
Those one refuses to say.
One stumbling noun, one greased verb and
A bird of humility, of beauty,
Twists to one of prey. 

Black Lion

The letter B has become optical, its shape
Reflecting your glasses. The negative spaces
Have turned to nests, cupping your carved eyes
That death dropped in flight –
It is the spine of a thick Steinbeck that

Stares from my shelf, rods and cones
Bound in the same gray and blue hues of the
Walls of your study. The armchair is fully plaid
By the bedroom window. I sit on the edge of your
Side, a riverine stone. It is too neatly made.

It is too still, that black lion – How it fakes breaking
To a clap of your laughter when my eyes close.

Let me rebuild you, if only for a day. A green spreader
Spilling chalky beads, six cigars stuck as candles,
Hissing their sweet smoke into the air. And now a
Yellow rose from your gray feet, a bloom that blew the
Stars to misalignment with its extreme beam of color.

It must be a monstrous thing, that black vulture.
Always suckling my shadow, the anvil that slept
On my coattails for a summer. It must be to have
Lifted your marble body, wings of sopped tissues,
Taut, carrying you away, away.

No one stands steady in the gust you had
Blocked, my colossus. What a disoriented dynasty,
Hair wind-ripped, shocks piled on our heads of fog.
We are Stringing ties and shrouding ourselves in
Your shirts to cry. Son, Daughter,

Wife. Robbed twice in two years, she felt you
Today. My grandmother, chipped from emerald,
Holding onto your cane. Her sparkle stalls for a
Moment or two, your jewel of all jewels. Channeling with
A wooden avenue, but there are so, so many pieces of you,

So I put back your eyes, softly on your desk next
To maps, ships, busts. The hung sunset to my
Back. Our shaken give-and-take will survive you,
I’ve decided. I will borrow your Shakespeare, your last
Living loan to me.

A molten slide of gold is filling the footsteps
Of a storm and I see it is you, and I am silver,
Sentinel of debris. The black lion stirring on its
Stylobate at the summit of a mountain of books.
Tumbleweed. History. Yes, that is what you will be.




© 2015 BENJAMIN SMITH

Piscine

A stomach of dust can have me for dinner. 

My head in the waste bin, guts plucked and 
Rawness within removed - Too true, I am no 

Particular delicacy. But, see, I've  already begun 

To section my flesh for a lifetime by finger. 

When I grow nervous or panicked I

Catch my claw at my neck, gently 

Scratching, as if to peel open a 

Flap capping a backup gash for a 

Lung's fill of oxygen

Like a goddamned fish. My 

Eyes swivel to the sides, my skin 

A rubber suit of armor, slick and wet, 

Soil for fins. A mouth fixed to a 

Shrunken zero. And you stand 

High as a fever, swaying like the 

Concrete heat that sits on the 

Hood of my car, a jittering veil 

Between us.

You flick your cigarette. It turns to flies. 

I carefully bob at them, their 

Promises, warnings - Look at your face. 

Below that glass nose rest two thin worms, 

One atop the other. They part in invitation - 

The graceful, grubby curtains of a dark hidden 

Hook, meant to pass unnoticed - I've noticed 

A thousand times. You lower your face into a 
Dream, spitting that slow steeled gray J into the 

Crests of a sea - I fall for all three. Hook, line, 
Sinker, and you're feasting on me. 



© 2015 BENJAMIN SMITH

A Letter

I have met the shrill of cheap gold 

For fifteen days, prying its 

Old mouth open to find the jet of your

Sigh. It animates the scarf of

Spider webs and dead moth beads that

Hug it like a womb. My nails drag

The bottom of a firm lake. I want my

Nerves to nurse paper. 

I am waiting. Minute has not

Marched at my hip since the Sunday
Light slid along your upper lip, brow,

Eyes. The air is a bog of paste, each frame

Plodding through. Such

Extravagant discipline the minute has,

Manacling its hastened pace. 

I am waiting, savoring my

Red, sticky rock, gooey bit of Mars,

That planet shivering below

My meek meadow of chest hair. 

I house a great weapon there. You

Yourself hold a beautiful lethality, your

Astral tail lingering like a lance.

You come and you go as a

Crystalline meteorite, a battering ram.

Give it four months, maybe three, and

You collide with your allocated crater

Again. The every day truncated, my

Heart shimmered with the wholeness

You provide. 

I am waiting. Barren bowl, the glitter

Back in orbit – I sent you six. 

I could not stand the cave you gave

To me. I cannot stand the love that

Sears in that holy pit like salt.

You are a bicycle, blue

And bubbled, the breath in my aunt's

Guest bed.

The human has not two ears. There is

An additional one that sprouts above

The left nipple. An empty dish, waiting

For your stellar echo, bouncing back

To me in the sealed shield of a letter. 




© 2015 BENJAMIN SMITH

Mother ( IV )

Spilt bleach on my eyes dig the

Shape of a railed bed, the woman

Strewn about it. Permanently – I've

Abandoned the steel-wool-scrubbing. She

Doubles over, her spine a spasmodic

Fire hose planted with a row of loose knots,

An aggressive wave filling the room with

The slap of sick on plastic.

It took that rocky gulp to make me feel

Truly bodiless. The finger-guillotine, itch of

One defeated rids the senselessness

Of sun in sky, sun perched on land.

I wiped the slime from the betrayal of her

Mouth. Noise, noise, cauterizing our
Honeycomb. I was deaf in the tide of her

Silence, my alien arm reaching for every croak.

It is a hard sight to dismiss, your

Mother crumpled in a hospital gown,

Especially when a blanket of dirt teased

Her like happiness. So much noise is a chisel.

My head first filled with chokes and hair –

Then, her being rolled away from my following,

The nearing crunch of the mole, the squeal
Of the ripening baby that tripped her.

© 2015 BENJAMIN SMITH

Mother ( III )

A throne of sponge soaked black

Pools with every pressure – the ass,

The side, the back, even the eye.

Anticipatory floating through a

Weightless house pulled me past it,

Beige and leering. An anchor would

Drop from the sky each time, flattening

My chest to mottled paper.

Despite their constant invitation to

Lounge I’ve grown to hate couches,

Comfort. A crib-cage, a plush prison, the

Stilled throbbing lace cocooning

My mother. He has one in scarlet, a

Monument of sorts. I drown in its

Redness, feeling her hammered

Across my lap.

There is always a herd in the upper

Level of department stores.

Firm, feather-filled. She sits or leans or

Lays in each one. Pleated skirt, hosiery,

Or the ghostly slip and camisole with a

Night’s worth of oil. Smudged face.

Twenty of her, staring at me,

On couches – What I’d give to

Breathe fire.



© 2015 BENJAMIN SMITH

Mother ( II )

You split me, a slow stacking of walls

In my middle. A black turtleneck

Shields the flannel, the form of force,

Lady Lumberjack. Your axe is Mitotic,

Wedging my softness in two. I do not

Wear duplicity well – your half tugged

Away more mass.

An unborn child is a needle,

Lubricated to jab a channel into me.

Brother, brother, you have knocked

Me up too with a mind avuncular.

A needle is a rake, scratching away

Another section of the pink of

Thinking.

What a laudable reduction, the stuffing

Of skulls ripped to strangers. A house of

Tusks. I am three brains. I am three eyes.

I am three lenses, not caked nearly enough

To blind me – which is still wholly my own?

The crinkled, shriveled one, leaking
Its cytoplasm.

© 2015 BENJAMIN SMITH

Mother ( I )

Her fingernails had been cut short
Nearly to the skin.
Ten thin white bands on each tip.
Ten rolling pins flattening a white
Napkin, smoothing it, jittering, like
Some great Olympian molding a plain
Or basin, a bowl for the ocean of her pain.

Her once-sculpted hair was limp,
Burgundy lips cracked with their
Absence of color. Her smile, amplified with
Twitches, and her eyes cradled a
Plate-grating wildness as she looked
Off into the valley of her thoughts.
Zip ties for shoelaces.
String is the enemy.

I had never been in an ambulance
Before. Neither the aft, nor the fore –
Fear wrangling me, face lassoed to
Dry and wet. Never felt it slide back
Into the sloughed off with such agility before –
Before, before, before
Her vomit parted the water
With two empty bottles, witnesses, weapons,
Stationed on the floor.



© 2015 BENJAMIN SMITH

Arthritis

You are raining pins on me,
Contortionist – I never dreamed
You’d stick the arch, the hook, 
Shoots like sturdy stakes;
Folding in and in and in, a letter
Like a leaden foot battering
The brake.

Who hewed these slots? The
Bristled gates of pressure pods where
You could roost.  O the glut of you, marsh,
Manuscript, movement –
You fat socialite, benevolently drenching my net.
As if you were some miracle,
Some mercy worm.

Your face rips to a grin.

Patient raider, the fugitive in a pivot. I
Bathe in flapping puddles untried, tumbling
Through the new, the new, the new.
But you’ve a beak, a beak like a key,
Like a blade, like a screw –
I retract my leg.

The post is in.

Immobilizer! Maturing at my pace – Why
Do you? You were a baby made of
Candles once, globular and glowing, an
Egg-headed irritant. But now you are
Arthritis, diamond birthright. And each
Delivery, an adding of
That acrid spice.

Snaky wraith, your brute braids
Bite at my every opportunity. These
Stirring lynches collar, creep, cajoling me.
I am purple Cerberus, my
Six eyes scabbed –
I do not want to see.



© 2015 BENJAMIN SMITH

(dVERSE Poetry Pub prompt: Poetics - Layers)