Beasts With Tender Bellies, Beasts With Starved Hearts Poem by Windsor Guadalupe Jr

To be awake in the sleeping town,

Where the streetlights gleam the palest

With its galvanized arms of steel, they paint

The streets with dreary hues that contrast

The shadow apart from the vespers that squander

In the night, and slumber in the morning’s clemency,

This, to be conscious enough to remember,

But then vie into oblivion – the fortnight embraces

The skyline symmetrically as if an architect poised

With his nimble hands, his dexterity aligned with alacrity –

But not so much that he paints the lush verdant,

The sky, tangerine, and the night pallid

Only love can paint the sky tangerine,

Only anguish can colour the noon time obsidian

And perhaps, neutrality can paint the lush somewhat between

Ambivalent plush green and somber auburn

-

Here again, with a palette of sentiments,

I drain half of the sky’s vitality,

And amass the Sun punctuality,

Displaced the stars in the sky and their truancy

For in the nights that I search for them, I get lost

Seemingly, endlessly, torched skies do not speak

The least of what the stars have come to notify

In their absence, and so when the Sun comes,

They will be safe from vindication, they look so

Stellar in repose, and I meanwhile, deposed as if a king

Without a throne, and the scepter coiling like a snake,

Writhe from one gem after another as if to look at the stars

And colour half the sky white, and the other half ebony –

Alas, could we humans be fooled by mere silhouette
That veils the being from the moniker covered in a

Dull soubriquet and that is to waste an entire existence

With cheap wine and even cheaper cigarettes?

-

If only winter fell, then the skies of white

Can much complement the concrete, as its perpendicularity

Instigates a lapse in wavelengths of time and seasons

And so I say this once again, that there are seasons

For change, for color, for effacement, for renewal,

For mirth, for sobriety, for inebriation and continual

Where are we in between life and death?

Are we fools who believe in purgatory?

Or are we alive – though trapped in a mortuary

Where the stench of the corpses do not differ

From our ways, from our words, from our lies

And from the deadly air of a viper?

What are you grieving for?

A lost lover, trapped within flaws?

Is it that the exuberance in grace stems from

The heart, and not from the sharp, flagrant eye?

Or perhaps, impoverished by a corner,

Where the exultant people walk by,

And you, by the corner of one, pitiful road

Where economics, physics, romance and religion do not meet,

Lay still, with a cardboard on hand and not stretched for alms,

But for existentialism!

So answer me this, what are we hungry for – as insatiable beings?

Is it that we need wealth – oh, opulent dinner and sumptuous feasts

Or perhaps, a wealth that is enough to forget about the Gods?

I do not know about you, but I know one thing that I starve for,

And that is to fit one of my hands into another’s creases,

In the spaces of one’s hand, and maybe, the creases would form

An image not foretold by palmistry or the science among and behind stars.

That is what I am hungry for, and I will never repulse this belief,

Because repulsion, is a plague, a cat-like thief

In the dark, tatterdemalion in appearance and deceit:

I know what I am hungry for, and that will not be changed by any season:

To live for one, and to die because of one being, that be a good reason

Apart from fools who consume themselves in the destructive process

Of being better than themselves when they can become wholly,

And holy – the rapture is found within one, and not around one.