Poetry: Selections from Peter Magliocco

Letting the Dark Become Brighter, For the Lame Nightingale

For you wind strips the fragile sunflower

With an importunate dispersal,

For you I wake remembering my dream of Poe

(His dead beauties awakening in coffins

From premature burials; the dank smell of tombs

Imbuing their flesh caked it perpetual discolor),

For you I sleep embracing magnitudes of fragility,

In a daze swimming through unconscious clouds

Of non-reason.

Too late the salvation of pills keeping me undreaming:

Still hearing whispers I reach for answers

Concerning the afterlife of my fossilized self

No pity can really linger, only particle fragmentation

Of a summer solstice fading in the mind’s eye;

Listening to a pet parrot incessantly quote Plato 

To the bizarre hip-hop background music you play

As a torture method to forge a riddle’s bone of contention?

No more your solace a mind game at the expense of others

Caught in your final drunkenness, rising on that street

Slowly with you tonight, into clouds of Play Station 5

Transforming my childhood steps

With molecular might from nowhere.

The lame nightingale escapes me to perch

On your waterbed tomb to quote, not Poe, but Dr. Sun,

Letting the dark become brighter in the lilt

Of perverse atoms the blood-rush raptures us forever.

Last Rite for a Drunken Cannibal (#22)

The exact fact of being outside things

Never got me down before:

The flesh-eating bacteria-of-being

& nothingness via text messages

Doesn’t amount to much as truth

In the annals of renegade poetry,

Or purpled prose masking fake news.

This morning I shouted to the cosmos,

Getting out of bed, catching the horrific news

Trump will never be impeached,

The sky is falling (or raining down bitcoins

Instead of bona fide dollars), Willie Boo-boo

The Rapper awoke from his car only

To be fatally shot outside Taco Bell

In the stalled fast food lane … et al.

The media’s messages replace cross-

Circuits in the collective un-consciousness

Of the average consumer’s wigged-out mind –

& the celestial stars are indifferent,

Like extinct animals in the bestiary of science.

The virtual Buddha moves without qualm

On the other side of the A.I. moonscape

As seen from the video of disappearing earth.

Trapped in a cyber-real & parallel unreality,

I awaken again from my oneiric sleeplessness

Welcoming return of the anti-Christ pop-up in drag …

The Savage Innocence

It is your fervent hope

That love sings in you

Of pristine skin sewn

Onto heathen lips

Changing them

Into succulent organs

Playing songs of the stars

Against a backdrop

Of sylvan snow

Yet the ages of time devour us:

War-furies be-night all

Scalding beautiful mouths

From wizened faces

Of those savage innocents

Hiding in ill-fated places

Like the country homes

You grew up in, before the fall.

Before the blight of human ways:

Before the beach invasions

Took the land by storms

With cruel arrays assaulting,

& the wave-crescents vanished

Beneath some frozen fire

Silencing rhapsodies

Of the cool young virgins

The Clock Faces

Time is just another troll

Cutting holes from cloudy triangles

Into prismatic fire falling

From the beaks

Of carrier pigeons; 

The minutes just stray

Atoms from the hailstorm

Of Space-X

Seconds dissolving solar rays

Whiting-out the philosopher

Minds of artificial wisdom

With the voices of lost children

Crying for your return;

An hour heralding the cock

Crowing through dawn’s mist

Before all humanity’s temporal

 Holocaust of endless crime

& eternal barbarism

Time stops only on the clock face

Of those victims of war

Waiting for scattered seconds

To reverse the fallen

Sun’s shadow, forevermore.

Peter Magliocco writes from Las Vegas, Nevada, where for years he's been active in the small presses as writer, editor, artist, and publisher of his own lit-zine ART: MAG. He has recent poetry at Every Writer, Fevers of the Mind, Knot, Chewers, Modern Literature, and elsewhere.