Secret Places Poem by Windsor Guadalupe Jr

I envisage myself sleeping in
The fringes of the world:
A desolate park bench.
A defunct carnival.
A grotesque cabaret.
A sinister synagogue.
A murky cave.

Not everything did good to me.
I am riveted to the subconscious
But never to the aeons.
And I can hear the sound of the drizzle
As they hit the floor
Dead, slivered aqueous crystals.
The quintessence is lost
In every moribund rain-dropp demise.

In the fringes,
I cultivated a serrated, flower head
And long kept it there,
Safely tucked inside my regions,
My integuments.
I can feel it breathing inside of me,
Metamorphing into a whole prolix liaison
Of truths and mendaciloquence.

Such a storming blossom.
Receding into my viscera
Slowly whittling away
Towards a rapture
While I trifle with abstemiousness
Within the fringes.

It’s as if love battles
But not so much a warfare.
It’s as if enmity hides
But not so much of a concealment
Has been made.
It’s as if lips were made
To twine
But not so much a twining
Only slicing through vestigial veneers.
It’s as if love knows where
To find us
In our secret places
During dinner,
A festivity
A night out with tigers,
During sleep
Bath
Or in dying even
But not so much of a finding –
We stray long enough.
Such pestilence.

Only if the environs
Of love
Told the tale of squalor
Then I should have
Searched elsewhere
Perhaps in
Secret places.
In secret places
Where I’d be alone
Eschewing the tides,
Clambering over the waves
In secret places.
A clandestine plot.
Where the people
Do not stink of frigidity
And nonchalant riddance.
Where I could sleep
Soundly.
Where locks and keys
Do not mean
Anything.