The Night's Maw Poem by Windsor Guadalupe Jr

</>Someday, when the stars are through
With their lives as sentries that guide
Lost tourists such as myself, I will take their place
Among the vertical abyss –
Two superfluous feet dangling,
Two insipid hands burgeoning as I muster
All of my force to exude vitality;
If I were the night, I would be kind,
I would be gentle upon men who are lonely.
I would be intimate with women who are destitute,
I would be motherly to all the orphans that sleep,
Clueless of their identities,
And if I were the night, and if I ever found someone
That resembles me:
Broken inside,
Whirring like gears,
Spinning in vertigo,
Chagrined,
Dragged behind a grotesque chariot commandeered
By memories – a servile one among the past’s nuisance,
I will be kind – kinder than soldiers bleeding themselves
To death as if rivers of pooling blood;
Moreover, I will be temperate to ragamuffin children.
I will be emollient, as a silver moon should be,
And I will take each heart woe away,
And transpose it into ecstasy;
Only if I were the night, that is.
But I am not; I am only one of the victims
Of the night’s dagger-like attributes,
I am the captive of the night’s terror
I am a slave to the night’s clamors,
For the night is fastidious:
It demands that I forget,
That I become oblivious
To all the things that drift like open sails
In vast seas besmirched in the half-opened mouth of
The night – I can never change the night –
The night alters me,
Transforms me into an abhorrent son of distraught,
A metamoprhing impoverished soul.
There is no hope here;
And even if there is, it will be swallowed wholly
By the night’s now broadly open orifice
Festooned with blunted fangs and brash pangs
Not of the moon’s silk-veneered and silver-veiled heart,
But my heart – for the pangs of the night,
I own them, as much as they own me.