Sala Poem by Norman F. Santos

A quaint sepia photograph reckons
Of my deceased old grandparents
In their cordial nuptial palpably soaked
And cloaked in God’s veil and covenant
It perishes amongst the ghastly cobwebs
And the dusts in the wailing lifelessness
Of the immodest muted living room
And in my somnolent and castrated vision
It had painted another mawkish picture,
A concrete memoire of the absence
Of love, of death, and of love in death
So I refocused on the sala instead
With the scraped pastel wallpapers
Toppling on the cold floor parquet
A catastrophic finagling that reveals
The abused skin of my genuine home:
The arms of acquiesced oblivion
Sprawling on the threadbare divan
And watching the midnight sitcoms
With my levity, and purging the ecstasy
Of my the escape in late night episodes;
Cradling my aversion and diversion
To dance with the perfidious moonlight;
Or read the hideous diffidence in my poetries
To the overwhelming nonchalance of the sparrows
Oblivion is here, in this juncture of the sala,
Furnished with such ludicrous fantasies
Almost accenting my brusque reality
That I sew upon my lifelong starvation
For love, for death, for love in death
For romance, for heaven, for that which will never
And the conservative chandelier was dimmed
From the stark brightness of the glacial fire
Burning in the patios of my forlorn mire
Fluttering with the barricading shades
Of these heavy carnation pink curtains
Like a colossal shadow in the dark
A surreptitious phantom lurking
And scheming on its feet, to devour
My harried refuge in this sala
Oblivion, it could be too arresting
That the lampshades thawed in fragments
Oblivion could be bountiful in fragments
But then again, it could probably be not,
Oblivion could be harsh; it could be very harsh,
When your oblivion is a puncturing memory
That only ensued in the insipidness of the sala
Not on its dark corner nor on its garish floor
Rather, in the sala where you are alone
But fixated with the company of a scent
Similar to the morning dews that never came.