Forlorn Riddles Poem by Norman F. Santos

On a piece of brown paper
The wild zinnia splattered
Among the porcelains and silvers
Like an ankle splintered
Of a once feral danseuse
Now embezzled by age
With the sun conquering west
The paper befallen a cage
Where the dribbled ink blots
Dangled like a hapless bait
And the sun punctures in a blotch
Eroding the scar with the faith
And the myths and the spellbound
That has never been found

On a desiccated ink blot
A grotesque silhouette incarnated
Reeking with a sanguinary plot
Of carnage that had sculpted
The stature a gilded sphinx’s repose
The head vanished and garroted
Stolen by the vulpine onyx crows
For the chances are unpremeditated
It moored and towed and versified
Inebriated by the undulating patios
Groveling to be rectified
The sage’s head rolled with peccadilloes
Of cursive scripts on a thread
Another poem left unsaid

On a hollow poetry
From the concluding drops of life
Rises an eccentric cypress tree
Envisaging the abeyance of strife
With the lacquer barks unsullied
And the bristly leaves gone
A farcical scene of the sapid
Frame of filth under the sun
The wind winnows the emaciated
Boughs and it stirred a tantrum
Darting trough the firmament’s spread
Extemporizing in a hum
An enameled juvenile demise
Perched from where the moon pries

On a putrefying cypress tree
Entangles a swollen moon
Crooning with the luminaries
The northeastern winds swoon
In a violent gust of colossus deluge
That stirred the maladroit clock
To gyrate more raucously and fiddle
To send rapids in the perennial rock
Of Luna’s frail cradle
Her phosphorescence wobbled
Staggering to be consoled
And the night had toppled
A spectator felt culpable
As she fell on the slithering pebbles

On a shattered Luna
The lights flickered in serrations
Rolling with the aurora
And slivering in the incisions
Of my palette’s oppressed hue,
I descried a lily on the fragments
With leaves of laurel in lieu
Of the rowdy cabaret’s redolent
Scent that always prevail to cajole
Yet, I plucked it from the concrete,
Threw it in a boiling casserole
And drank the venomous solute
Until there was nonentity
But a riddle on a poetry

On a labyrinthine verse
Was a fraction of brown paper
Banished to Stygian, the effect: adverse,
An origami bloomed in the river
While the looming trees watched
And my poetry skewed piercing
Deep in the burls of their latch
But they are benumbed and stifling
With apathy and nonchalance
And in that moment, the poem was gone
And you don’t even lift a muscle in askance
Perhaps, to reckon the lyrics done
And it will never be found
Hands down, you have won