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