Emaciated Shadow Poem by Norman F. Santos

The sun ballasted searing aloft
And the emollient equinox escalated
The taunting ladder of schism
Upon the bequeathed garden
And, startled, everyone erected
Shifting legs and reloading guns
Never realizing the core of the brunt
Each one, feigning to be the only begotten son

Naked are the clandestine hedonists,
Clad in silk are the quaint sybarites,
And the ignorant martyrs were repelled
Into the flueret floors of the chasm
Where the light deemed barricaded
From reckoning the mantling shade
Meanwhile, the shadows were casted
Upon the vexed and judged ones

I mused on the cantankerous catastrophe
As the others transgressed in hubris
From the sycophancy of their shadows,
Dishabille in the mistral dearth of light,
Or perhaps, the dense veneer of darkness
To incarcerate the squalid phantoms
Inhospitably emancipated from the erratic
Flight of the aeon’s shoddy orifice

While I pry and veer from side to side
Languidly probing for the stoic incarnation
Of my fears in the faceless silhouettes
The stoic scant of my void frame
Of two layers: stick and stone,
Was caught in the fangs of chagrin
Illuminating that I have but a single line;
A taut string of a shadow

Whilst the other’s loom loftier
Than their own lambasted carcasses
Mine was a sole stroke of graze
Of Apollo’s superfluous blade
My vessel was, perhaps, beleaguered
By an emancipation more profound
Than the ineptitude of the bassinet
Of carrions and amorphous crows

For I have been breathing whilst regurgitating
The gift, or curse, of Mnemosyne
And the iron mask may be scathed
But it was wedged in a profound depth
And the cicatrix is not dabbed with hoping
Rather, in a plethora of fear and repression
I had bled with all the sorrow
I had lived a vociferous shadow

And this is not aggrandizing the tales
Of my consummated defeat
And there is no exoneration
In the heraldry of shadows
For in the final grains of sandman
I have only awoken to find
That I have been sleeping awake
And when the sun bursts, I had gone first.