Ignoble Castigation Poem by Norman F. Santos

A raven perched atop the hinges
Of the world’s revolving doors
Whetted the desire of his skeptic vision,
Stroked the bristling fabric of inflection,
And masticated the subjugated souls
Stifling on their sordid meat-suits
Debauched by a malingering insentience
Of the psychasthenia in their palms
Clutched in a boulder of their riling fists
Hungry and desperate but would not receive
And the raven had reduced and educed
That world is a hunting ground astride
The stretch of fastidious bewildered beasts
With diadems, and canes, and bibles
And quill pens, and cinnamons, and rifles
Sympathy and apathy wedged on porcelains
A tangled maze dwells on their sequins
The astute spectator traipsed in a blather
Of angst and irk upon the slapstick picture
For every beast is ignobly castigated
By another ignobly erring castigator
And so he flew above in circling pathways
With maladroit wings and adroit air
And beckoned a superstitious flair
Guffawing, cowering, sniveling
Because the town’s veins are emptied
And the radio played the exequies
In a cordial imperial trumpet hymn
So the beasts would tinker on their feet
To a raucous salsa with their ghosts
As they confound each other’s blemishes
And bleed upon their own exacerbations
They raven had hauled out from the chagrin
That the beasts unsheathe dishonor from scars
Not because they were painful once
And not because they do puncture
The soul castigated in a meat suit
But because the whole town has vision
Upon the injury and the trauma
And that everyone is preyed
By a chauvinistic utopia.