Somniferique ((Love In Retroactivity)) Poem by Luke J. Holt

While perched upon a paisley arrow she sleeps. Like a hanging dream upon the jowl of day.
All souls parched by wind and rain may quiet
A mirror twined in its own slow fog
An amorphous illusion of sad beauty.
Air as white as the castles that wilt like lullabies ending before sleep
I cannot build you a statue without a pound of flesh,
I will contribute your offering, as my skin is made cellophane, and my tissue is apricot meat.
These torrents of naked gales take me to the clearing where empty air becomes rusty machine; groaning until midnight and boiling evil earth in its bestial stove.
The ancients level their scepters to the fool who sifts through ponds of wishing-well pennies
Alkaline fingers and teeth as brown as silt
Until today
Until today
No figure to this path that was never built
The lunar milk is hot as wax
The skeleton is anxious
and wants to swim.
I was created to create you so that you may create my enemy
such hungry clouds, perhaps they would deign to drift
had they the option.

II
I awoke to find that I had become three balloons, the cold blue, the faint, sickly yellow, and the Martian, screaming red; two were sold to a lover, the other to child at the fair who in hours scream in confused agony; sequestered in the ebbing sea of bodies; the carnival swallows all who have stopped dreaming
Small particle machines will assume the new stem of mind and mammal
Creating cities between ancient eyes and touching thoughts emerging from the crystal spires of yonder
These shores have never quivered upon the feather of seafoam cowlicks
Like tendrils of blue massacre
Making jokes of bodies and stars of waves
Until the hemisphere shatters like the green glass of the tides on the morning where all but two sleep.

III
The pages of our story are swathed in rotting sugar
The words are smudged in the slime of sweet decomposing love
The Babbling gusto of hysterical romance and its silly siren
Screaming at shriveled whispers beneath tombstones
Happy and hallowed
Anointed and squeamish
Slapped mad with dizzy kisses and left to sweat and breath heavy beneath the billboard
Telling me of sleek, pulseless machine-toys I cannot afford
I can't sleep until you're glass house deflects the stone
Making it a floppy failure
As a bullet clasped between the teeth of an impervious cartoon god
Evil noise…..lack of….
…scold the wasp for dying for autonomous war…..
Tears. Scents. gimpy angels begging for blonde hair dye
Lapses. Colors. Banners and sleep
You cannot float beside me
As I am surrounded by humans
This final fragrant morrow
It was barely a spin of the earth hence
And was barely a notion till past tense