Culprit Poem by Norman F. Santos

Culprit



You are thunderstorms
And I am the faint drizzle
Pouring to moor by little
In colossal fragments
To be taken away
And you took me away
With your quintessential promises
I am inebriated every time
Betrothed to your sporadic gusts
That winnows the opulent line
I drew in the shuffling sand,
If my heart was a hovel house
It would be your commodious home
Albeit, you recklessly swept
The groveling breadth of walls
Now it has gone with the floors
Is this how you decline
Such a parsimonious offer?

You are a mockingbird
The expanse of your wings
Is a continental conquest;
A singsong poetry in a cage
And the entire globe is your confinement
So I had cried for your liberty
And you took away my cry.
Your subterfuge decried
All my caterwauling to the moon
And poured down the southern lights.
I was my poetry once
But you corrupted every line
And with all that was lost
Who then am I?
But a man who was once defined
By the vulnerability of a diaphanous cry
And now defiled in a trifle
By a non sequitur gamble

You are a culprit
With supercilious pliant hands
Of an alluring gilded serpent
Slithering with the echoes
Of a wishing well’s
Unrequited promises,
You are a sapid abandon,
My royal usurper,
My connoisseur conqueror,
In a peremptory crossroad.
I may not have jewelries
But I had once a tall hat
Brimful with shabby shards of paradise
And I am culpable for permitting you
To take it away from me
As you take me away from me
And take me away from you.

I knew how you would become
Cold as the frost mourning
Amongst the morning dew
I knew how you would be
If I cease and withdraw
From licking the verdigris of your wounds
Albeit, the creed beleaguer that I kneel
Abut you as I dab the blood of malaise
Of my servile tongue
Because the nights would be
Just the same culprit
When I am too far from you
Farther than the stars
That you took away
From the nights craning neck;
The stellar beads that I mused
Upon your absence, that you surrogated
With the swaying of your feet.

You took away the heart
And the beauty
Because you are the beauty
In every tragedy
And the heart
Of the beautiful tragedy.

But you will never seize me again
Even if the night forfeits
Even if the clockwork
Would swallow its gears
Because I have gone already
To a place where you have taken me
To abandon imprudently.

Friday, December 11, 2015
Topic(s) of this poem: poetry
POET'S NOTES ABOUT THE POEM
Circa December 2011 - Experimental poetry
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