A Mirror Floating in Water

According to the universal rulebook of literary publishing, anything posted on the internet is considered "published". So I've heard.

Sooo, this post will be deleted upon my sending out more poems to literary magazines and journals from around the country. Sounds pretenscious? I know.

Okay, all I need to do is for you guys to put on your hyper-critical thinking hats and tear apart each poem one by one, so that I'll know what I'm doing. If you don't like the way a certain 'a' or 'I' is placed, don't tell me, SCREAM IT.


Kay, here they are, some of you may have already seen them posted on here, but that's okay, you must only torture yourself one more time:


Sleep

Silently, so softly
Is the noise and violence of sleep
Within it is ourselves, trapped
Overtaken by its spell, its
High singing, shall sleep not say
It is high time, time has come to stop
It has slowed and numbed its ticking
The narcotics of sleep being its cause

As if waking up from a weary dream
Forgetting the ability to remember
Overcome by a feverish high
So rests the sleeper in silence and persistence

But silence and persistence do not always allow stillness to follow, especially in sleep
For many eternal battles are fought silently
With signs of bloody struggle splattered on the warrior’s sword,
Not a sound of a scream
Nor the drop of a needle
Is heard, drowned out by silence

But it only takes the breaking of the looking glass
From silence, echoing its wave across mountains
Chanting its name, with aggression and coercion
With falsity and illusion, deception and delirium
As if in a trance, flailing, forgetting and flailing, forgetting
The hypnotic night, speeding without limit
To its constant goal of slowing
Itself giving a false representation
Like the impression of a face glued to the surface of time,
Silence lasts and then is broken
By the smashing and breaking of glass,
Then, silencing silence

Slipping, as if into a deep sleep
Seeping, seeping says the stone as it
Fagles its way to the bottom
Of the ocean, deep within it’s never ending
Depth, depth is the distraction of man
From otherworldly things it descends
Descending, drowning in a never ending loop

The hand of death, puts its palm over the brain
Seeping, sapping all of the life out of it
Until death plays a trick
It begins to speak, speaking
Of such things, its grip tightens
No pressure, none at all
Something more dangerous; warmth
Death spreads out its arms and embraces
The body, then the mind, with warmth
For death is sleep and sleep is death and
The world is all but this, within it
Trapped

Sound delaying its triumph
Yet this is a misrepresentation
For sound does not hold its peace
It is the ear who has put its defenses up
Silence draining, like water down a sink
But where does that water go?

Images into images, sight into sight
The piercing sound of silence
Has given my guitar a new melody
Shrieking, silently, its soft sound




Si renderanno conto un giorno

Si renderanno conto un giorno
Saprà un giorno

Maybe ignorance will tire fault
And the clouds will overcome the moon
The moon, will be at fault.

Haze of hazelnut coffee
Dreary over eyes
Too much of late;
9:45
Humid, no rain
(It rained last night).
Pressure over my head
Sleep brought over my head

Bulb falling from the ceiling
Bouncing off the table
Smashing upon the ground into a thousand little pieces

Banging fist on the table

The moon, the deer, the forest
Black sky, dark as black space.
Full moon not to return until the end of the month
Or was it a new moon?

For others, full moons do not return
And new moons are begun in the celestial cycle.

I returned to the forest on Saturday
The sky was blank
The spring had dried
The trees were bare
(But there had been no snow).
That doe which had stood in the moonlight,
Gone.
The crickets were dead
The night was still
A silence, an unpeaceful silence
Like an axe cutting through oak.
Immutable silence




numb


1.

Turn the facet
Let water run out

Reach for the knob
And turn it.

Light

Open drawer
Fingers touching cotton

Phone ringing
Blaring, no one is on the other end

Four tablespoons of coffee
Two and a half cups of water

Fresh

Walk out and step into the dismal sunlight

2.

Contradiction at every corner
The world is disappearing, fading
Inanimate figure, pass by
Turn at the light

Empty street, car, single
The world is a sick habit

Forgetting what it is to be remembered
A ghost in a dead man’s dream
A voyeur’s punishment

Invisible sight
Patternless, yet with so many echoes
Dissolving into water on a hot frying pan
Hear the sizzle,
As it becomes a puff of smoke in the imagination

Sick clammy hands
Sun stricken eyes
It will be no different from tomorrow
than yesterday

Strut, strut you poor player
Sunlight upon does not shine the gnomon
Why should it?

Have not the time to awake
And remember the snow
Desiccant in last end

3.

Falling, into the hole-burnt silk
Only to come out,
To an endless record, regurgitating
Odd things of life

Footsteps echoing throughout the hall
Giving awareness of spatiality
Knock, knock says the floor
As if some sick joke

4.

Turn at the other corner
Where it is the same again
Inanimate figure, pass by

Seagulls swarm around
But here they call them baygulls
Everything is fading into the dismal sunlight
Now fading

Fading


Fading








Miscarriage

Fleeting night in bonfire
Conception at midnight
Brief solidarity.

The moon plummets down upon the sprinkling air
The alcohol sanitizes hands, artificial water.
The luminous reflection which so seemed to be the plunging
Twine, now splashes upon the shimmering lake.
Reflection of face and silent memory, awakening
Empty forest once alive, integrating
Signs of reiterating wake
Regurgitating ache
Plummets down to the filtering vacuum.
Fetus, a dry expectation
Already, once dead.

“Doth thee have the shimmering glow of thy lunar orbit in thine hands?
Crush it”


The Thought (due to font difficulties on this website, this can only be viewed on my other blog)
http://danielbenoit.blog.com/2009/08/03/the-thought/


Oh and btw, read these short stories while you're at it. And criticize them. And tell me which is the best one. For those who do it will get a piece of candy.

Stairs and a Midnight Walk

The Pool

7:03