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