Manqué Bard Poem by Norman F. Santos

Where are you, manqué bard?
My eager ears still believe
And perceive the vestiges of your song
And the plucking of the caustic strings
Of your old sangfroid guitar
And I had besought and sought for you
In the undergrowth of the mantling fog
Of impasse in the gulfing city streets
In every cul-de-sac and even libraries
For every interpolation reckons
The cessation of a soigné epistle
And the drifting ebbs of clouds
Unfurl the elapsed chronicles
But still genuflects and beckon
That your shadows still resonate
In spite of the brusque rapine of melody
Now scant in a senile memory
I yearn for you, in the callous blares
Of the city’s ravenous amusement
And in the abundance of silence;
Of absence in the plenitude of solitariness
I desire to have you back
In the scarce crevasse of my bed
And the inscriptions of wisdom
In the palms of your euphonious voice;
Receiving and accepting all the same
The endless beatings until you are numb
And I do not pity you even for an ounce
For the throbbing sores in your silky songs
Are the grazing consoles of a lullaby
Of my wakeful and weary lamentations.
Where have you vanished?
And when, from my sweaty clutch?
That implored for your token
In patience, as I rupture my wrists
In gripping the absent maladroit hands
From the hill where you stood me,
The horizon was crimson with the sun
And it could have urged you
To write another salient song.
I need a hero now, amidst these endless
Sailings in the great wide sea
Of vulnerable cringing nights
Sing once again, over the frothing tides
To save me from this oppression
For in this times of the month
I am distraught by the sun
Imprudently lifting its nose and brows
Scrutinizing the misery that the trashing
Of the superfluity of his swords
Had brought upon the hollow
Space beside my emaciated shadow
Whilst he heave a colossal grin
To all the other souls.
Who took the lyrical riddle
And left a reckless abandonment
Dangling with the wind chimes?
Why do you have to hide
Your songs, yourself, and your scars
Beneath a macadamized veneer
Far from the city’s conception?
Manqué bard, banished to
The suspended refrain of a song
Emerge again with your buoyancy
As the crickets and cicadas
And the rustling leaves of December
Crafts an orchestra in lieu
Of the remedy in a forgotten song
Of a perplex labyrinth of notes
And of the dexterous bard that was lost
In the corruption of abeyance
And the burglary of voice
From his sole listener: his muted self.