Scathed Child: Finale Poem by Windsor Guadalupe Jr

It was just one of those days that never make any sense at all.
The sages were sleeping at some semicidal heaven, or a cheap hotel
And they weren’t holding any books, nor collections of poetry
While I am holding a vast anthology of auburn locks, French-tipped nails,
Ballet shoes, withered tulips that whittled away in the silent, mocking night,
Songs that were once wailed from a distance close enough to drive
A dagger to a chest and still feel no pang at all – we were such alloys.

Take for instance: I am on my way home from an obligatory idiosyncrasy
Destined to save physiologies but never to twist a trepidation into stillness
I am like a marksman with an old, rusting rifle – and all the adversaries were
Wily and controversial as they cradled long assortments of rifles and weaponries
It’s like, I am a frail flower in a dashing garden of perfidiously wan trees.
I slept everywhere: The hospital floors, the bus windows, the windowpanes,
The aperture of an eye, the dais of ascendance to some farce heaven,
In front of a doorstep of some badly-lambasted establishment, and right
At the pages of some book that reeked of classic autumns and despicable winters.

Sometimes, I sit on a bus, and thought of paying the wary driver all of my money
And ask him, “Please don’t let the people in.” I wanted to freeze in the bus,
And I beamed the blustering orifice of the air-conditioning unit to my sallow face
Besmirched with the loneliness and squalor one finds in a cavalcade of tyrants
But they just wouldn’t heed my plea at all, I pleaded and genuflected on the
Tremulous floors of sympathy and what struck me with no remorse was the
Cold shoulders of the driver, bobbing his head to either poles of the blank spaces
And dejecting not my entreaty, but my calloused states of desolation.

I reached my destination but I felt as if I needed to venture more,
And so I traipsed all across the streets with the passing cars blaring their horns
And testing the velocity of their lights – the speed of light and what could defy
That speed light holds, but then I thought, solitude can pick the pace of the
Sliding planets, mar the speed of the wind during the yuletide season,
And scathe the flamboyance of the pyrotechnics during the shabbiness of
The new year’s eve that give birth to another hapless year – such painstaking
Chances to take in this mad carnival of defeat. We are soldiers in this, aren’t we?
Loneliness can be anything – the thick smog walking with you, the shadows
In furlough during the obstreperous opulence of the Sun, the candid vultures
That dart athwart the sealed lips of the heavens, anything – loneliness can be
Anything or anyone – a dead father, a chagrined mother, an avaricious kin, or
A sepulchral marauder cloaked with the thin fabrics of the night – even a lost
Musing. But what hurts the most is that, it hurts to know that loneliness
Has swathed you with its body, as if making love to your anatomical features,
And blinding your proprioception until you do not know where the tedious
Hands of soliloquy sundered your soul – where loneliness hid your heart, or where
Loneliness fragmented your sanguinity.

I arrived at home just before the Sun sank into the background, ensconced
Accurately just beneath the shrouds of the eviscerated skies and I thought,
Where in this woebegone place can I hide myself? In the bathroom? Underneath
The kitchen sink? In the cesspools of forgotten love and slivered dreams?
Within the gossamer body of a pillow? Inside the cabinet that held such trivialities?
I am left with no place to hide – yet I never recognized that I can hide
Inside myself. It’s like, I secrete myself and when one quintessential touch
Seduces me into clarity, my excavations would widen like the immense night
And just pour unto – like passing one’s self acquiescently to death, to life,
To any kind of feigned purgatory or destination. But I never did, because
I am the enigma in this picturesque cavalcade – a riddle not one dared to pry
Hard enough. They were never starved enough to know a thing or two about me.
They were such reticent, miserable beings with much more miserable lies. It’s
Like I live in a world where a certain maudlin in a crowd is destined to drown
Underneath their rancid waters of helter-skelter idiosyncrasy and gory bliss.
The ebullience is lost, and I am encumbered like the deep, imperforated moon
With impalpable ashes.

The rain cascaded madly on the rooftops and it made a mad clatter,
That drove the dogs inside their abodes, inside their skin festered with
Such carnal pests. There is a plague that barricades convalescence and I am such
A thwarted blade for profuse killing – I am a fell blade of sorts, and I am a shadow
Scourged in between the rancorous glades of time and evanescent ebullience.
I’ve not had any lust for nostalgia, or life. I just want to eat and sleep – slumber in
My skin and wager every reality I have to the bottomless pits of my dreams
And maybe I’d be lucky enough to never wake up and live in one of my fancy dreams.