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)

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

The Symptom of Sunsets

Black sky. Bleak sky. It is not enough.

No midnight mask can hide that

Jellied concubine, its rough shawl

Clinging to nothing, and calling for

Everything —

I am dutiful.

I am known to get the job done,

To pry the pickled fizz from the wall,

The floor, the crevices. There is no use in hiding. I will

Find you, metric centipede. I will

Bring you back, bagged and

Starched, ready for my digging

Hand, my heroic stance, thin and headless,

With your shy writhing answering the “whys.”

You are Exhibit ‘A’, Exhibit ‘B’, with a tail of

Ellipsis. Heed the critter, my reluctant flock.
Heed the critter and consider:

How am I to describe the symptom

Of sunsets? I, unoccupied.

A vacuum, a vacuum. A simulacrum.

How do I assign some elemental tag?

Ice? Shade? It is any other day —

The sun is a goddamned mole. The sky is

Emptied of its chip, gold or white.

So am I, so am I. A husk nearly

Dried. I am still. I am

Locked. I am hypnotized.

Here is your proof! The wriggling

Intestine of lenses. Eely threat of

Feeling. The never-level grows more aloof.

There is a certain comfort in

Numbness. A brother whose presence

I cannot sense in it. The conquering irrelevance,

The inherent sadness is so pretty, pretty. 
A pity it will kill me.

© 2015 BENJAMIN SMITH

Pressed Poppy

You are flat, you are flat,
Fixed between two slides like
A germ, firm. Flat. I lionize.
Brother of the cry of the back door,
Brother of the bat.

Trimmed of matter, trimmed

Of fat. Witnessed only in nudged knick

Knacks, or in a touch, a paralytic pressing

Of this, of that. You seem disappointed, though.

You seem a bit detached.

Black concentrate. The same as
In your grandmother’s frames – 
You are monochrome, revolving in an
In-between state, yet to navigate to grip

The knob. There is no knob. Not yet.

A cross-stitch wheel with your thread
A bridal train. It scrapes like a butcher’s babe

And here it is, the rift. Mobile in daylight, twilight,

All light, you walk. O look at those limbs,

Slim, black legumes in a crystal suit.

Ironclad, it accommodates.

You asked. Implored. Now mother moons lend

A poor, poor excuse for a voice. A sharpened sigh

At night, an audible frieze. Flat, pressed
Poppy, the glass is not your crutch. 
It boxed you up all Christmas-like, all

Chinese.

So lustrous, so compact, scalp smoothed

By the stuff of trees.

Dry, indelible, flat. Pellucid, with an upright riddled

Facsimile rightfully cast.  The onus of a

Caryatid, holding up this crust.

It made you useful, little loaf beneath the

Garden. Glassy aftermath – you hang horizons

On your shoulders like stoles, like holes unbidden

In the matte. It heard you ask and ask and

Ask. That swindler. That savior. That ashen acrobat.

© 2014 BENJAMIN SMITH