Dead Asleep Poem by Windsor Guadalupe Jr

Look at all the fancy people,

Drinking wine, passing time

French-tipped women dance madly

Underneath the spinning moonless sky

And the men, with elegant black poise,

Carry these women by the hand,

Their smiles contained the luster

Of all the stars where lost men are trapped

-

Look at all the drunken people,

Lifeless by a black suede chair

Where the lunar tail blows,

A tender air of ecstasy,

I watched them sully themselves

And sleep underneath empty bottles

Ashes and wine reek from their slightly parted mouths

As if to kiss another moment in the clarity

That never contrasts itself from sinister bellows

And hallowed sun light

-

Moonless; or the absence of the Sun

I never know much about the world’s conspiracies

Or the portentous shades of a transient bliss

To have lived in their revelry,

And to have died in their misery

Perhaps euphoria is nothing I can suffer gladly –

I tried to breath through thick mists

And suspended my dreams, grand in content

But revolting in its portent

I have long been searching for ebullience

Underneath the pillows,

The rear view of a waterfront,

Inside the drizzle,

Eye of a savage storm,

Or the picturesque nature and tapestry

And the slithering creatures upon a vineyard

One never told me it would be this hard

-

Laying lissome on a gossamer cloud,

It sings of a reverie that I have heard once

From the lips of some stranger whom I asked

To take me out in the day, and sleep with me in the night

White light took away what promise I held

Beneath the immense twilight and modest equinox –

So I vowed to stay within close polarities

Juxtaposed to grief and other miseries

And I curse the Gods for being harsh, cruel and unsparing

For it would appear that heaven has bearings

If faith could assume waves, then mine would be weak

Upon the shorelines, because there is a portion of my soul

That refuses to seize the Sun that escalates through my forehead

-

To where I wait for the Sun to rise,

The Sun seems to eschew my face,

Is there something wrong with me?

Is my éclair faint and pallid?

Is my soul a maudlin and sordid?

Is my face disheveled and squalid?

Some finicky God dare tell me,

At the very overture of a prose,

Or beneath the thorns of a dying rose,

Tell me, why can’t any of these enigmas

Assuage what clamor my soul holds in between miasmas

Of the Sun, and the cloying debris of the Moon,

The tears of the stars and the shards of the clouds,

-

If my fate is inexorable,

If my wounds should eviscerate every after preamble

Of kind lip after another, every farce word over tongues

Then where should I slumber away from this perdition?

Then I know a place, perhaps to love is a curse,

There, in one silent land

Where no moon sets ablaze,

No Sun singes in a raze,

Where the stars shine in disgrace,

There I slumber, away from all the fancy people –

Do not wake me up just to call my name,

And tell me, “There’s more to this.”

I apologize, if there’s one acquaintance I know,

Then it had to be the abyss,

And its beautiful premises

A labyrinthine collapse of hopes

Of dreams, of make-believe narratives

Yes – there, a moonless sky,

A soulless Sun, heartless stars – all of them weep

For one soul that’s dead asleep