By The Lonely Streetlamp Poem by Windsor Guadalupe Jr

By the lonely streetlamp,
I sat down by the curb
That grimaced as the pavements
Folded in a ruptured intrusion.
I lit a cigarette
And let the night bleed
A persnickety fire
A flamboyant madness
And the moon respired
Only to tell me that
Underneath the harlequin,
I am but dead
In all the verve that these
Inanimate things,
Sleeping trellises,
Remorseful automobiles
Parked in the tranquil blue,
And the piquant flush
Of the stars have.

By the lonely streetlamp,
People passed me by
In a mad rally of jovial entities
Only to remind me
That I am alone in this
Stiff sordidness.
A truant muse
Passed me by and said
That she loved me
Only to remind me that love
Is a flaccid empire
A fastidious quip,
And an ephemeral flambeau.

By the lonely streetlamps
I am reminded of all
The little deaths that I have had.
I long for the acquittal of the gods,
The sequestering of my lucid soul,
And the rapture of my sullen face
Heavy with somnolence and demise.

I let the fires eat me
In a plenitude of smolders
A whistle of the vagabond wind
That held the panache of an ocarina.
I let the shadows encumber me
And sometimes they sculpt
The moon into an uncouth eye.

I have lived to breathe,
And breathe to lose life
Underneath the same lonely streetlamp
As the people entwined passed me by,
The planets that slid into their inert states,
And the ineptitude of the moon’s dour howl.