Subsistence In Nonexistence Poem by Norman F. Santos

If I would exasperate and counterfeit a smile voided of depth,
Would you surmise it is corrupted by a whimsy death?
Held by brazen anguish and slaughtered torment in ambiguity
Beckoned by subdued wails throbbing beneath an exterior of dexterity
Praying with mendacities at the corner of the dark unsparing lips
Regression quells the fire of anticipation looming over the steepest cliff
No smoke too livid to mantle the rupturing scars and antipathy
Neither heaven nor hell can duly fortify what is and what should never be.

Sealed underneath a calendar with faltering figures and crawling senility
Exhume the squalors of tailored tales omitted of the grandest fallacy
By daylight, the incinerating lances of the sun stabs to bleed a carnival
Festooned with anonymous carousals, gilded with simpers too baronial
And by darkness, the scorching absence of hilarity cradles a labyrinth
An infinite carousel grotesquely attended with the balm of hyacinths.
Infested by one too many scathing pieces of a shattered shabby heaven
Take me in and we will both bleed with self-inflected gash with eyes open

The further you discern, the fewer you learn; the more you have to be stern
In burying the colors of your concern, veiling in the shadows where no one discern
The blossoming sprout of a paramour’s blighted secrets in a sonnet
Lackluster star lights would fade with this yearning in a faint comet
Make a wish as it flutter like the bludgeoning great wide open sea
And resign the phantom with synergizing rue and superimposed complacency
Whilst we perish in every note warbling the eulogy of the pawned amity
Strike to scintillate an ephemeral technicolor firework of a monochromatic rhapsody.

Flimsy hands grasping fatally onto an eternal child haunting in a mirror
A lucid dream of pseudo-valor; ambivalence and fear shrills amongst the furor
These firm city walls have long died with the endless nights’ episodes
A fringe of false hope; a sky line dim and vivid with subtly encrypted codes
Inevitably accompanied by the languid temptations of the sirens’ song
Fracturing the splints of domino walls and buoying the lone wolf along
Breathe and dwell amongst the pits of darkness; exist in nonexistence
Asphyxiate and pass away in the faint radiance; little death is subsistence.