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

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

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

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)

Two Dissolving Towels

(2013)

Two dissolving towels draped over

The left flank of a small steel fence,

Not eroded, but discolored, not

Rusted.

The right, sagging, an occasional

Nuisance to shut.

“You have to lift and jiggle it

A bit.”

A camouflaged baseball hat hangs

Where the wings converge,

Wedged snugly to secure as

Much as possible in this star’s ghost.

On a Sunday morning I see this and

Am saddened

That the man who has dirtied the

Towels with smudges of oil

Is not sitting with me, talking about

Baseball.

I do not care for baseball.

He is a coach for my brother’s team.

I expected to see him, squashing a

Half-smoked Marlboro in the ashtray

At the picnic table,

Nearing the end of a Stephen King

Bible.

Foolish, fresh anticipation.

I am twenty-three and still feel the

Need to be cradled, just
A bit.

© 2014 BENJAMIN SMITH

Ode

Get out of there.
Siren sans the sea, you’ve stored

Yourself with kitchenware – Oui, oui, you are a 

Remnant woman, papery Miss. Swimming
In packaged smog, a gray goddess 

In a cloud contained. This cave of grays

Is no place for a deity the likes of 

You. I eat each of your moves, unrolling the 

Lines. An archive stacked on the steel 

Shelf, silver rack cooled, as if they still require time 

To cook. What a waste. Varnished, calloused, 
Scarred. For god's sake, put them back in the book.

Isn’t it uncomfortable? Huddled up
Near the back, near the back, arms
Wrapped about your voice, a choir of
Watered screams – Get out, please come out.
You can’t continue bottling my theology. Your 
Grail-head, your lap-chapel. Your hair is a prayer.

To deserve to perch in a
Tabernacle, yes you’ve that badge, that

Patch of grisly gauze. But why will you not
Budge? Look upon my back! The black
Manifesto, square and of skin.

You may take it, you may peel it off

If you come out from there.

Hold it to your breast and nurse it with

Sweet ennui like the mother you are. The ‘a’s 

Will latch fast. It is yours, stitched to 

Me at best. It crisply calls and I hear it. I

Hear it all, your turbulent way of the

Stressed, the unstressed, the pause –
The door is horizontal. 
The door swings down – Shuffle to the side, 

My opal, my gassed Godiva. If you will
Not oxidize with me then I am coming 

In. We will sit on that spindly stage

Together, both in chairs of casserole 

Pans, cookie sheets. Two levels, like
A glimmering bunk bed! You were 

Wise to retreat.

© 2014 BENJAMIN SMITH