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

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