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

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