What Use? Poem by Windsor Guadalupe Jr

I’d feign a laugh in a saturnine avenue -

Where traces of your hair meld with the dried leaves.

The streetlamps, sleeping and never to rise in a lullaby

That I have saved in the time where you decide

To flow stagnantly like white light.


White light, impenetrable.

Unstable like dull, besmirched senses

And the squalor of a pretense

They lie squarely on the pavement, dozing off in the equinox

Where I prance with the stargazers and constellations


A car passed by, with a headless driver,

And a passenger at the car’s engine, looking at me sharply

Crude with her judgment, reckless with his proprioception

If the night is as insidious as your smile,

Then I would enter you like a dreaded carnival


Where I am seduced in the midnight train,

Where the rails lose keen stability in the barren terrain.

A stranger akin to oblivion said, “Nobody would look away.”

My attention has gone far astray,

Enrapturing the petrified trees, and not my own.


I do not own the leaves, nor the street lamps that flicker

As the immense night grows even more immense,

Without her very presence,

I endure the stifling Moon, in a stance as renegade

As glum faces behind smeared masquerades.


To wept for loss is to embrace the eagerly unsparing truth,

That when the roots die, not a single fruit would even blossom

The highly anticipated bliss is halted by such agony structured

By the errs of a man, beguiling in its own tale of peril.

What use is a face, without a heart?


What use is an integument, without a soothing caress?

What use do lips imply, if deprived of the entrancing feeling?

What use stirs in these callow eyes, if not envisaged in a mirror

Where someone behind you would say, “You look beautiful.”

Tell me, in the hollowed night. Tell me with full, phosphorescent honesty.


What use is your gin in a goblet without a tonic,

To rid the throat from the stabbing chemical

That slithers among carnal flesh?

What use is strength, when one meddles with a threshold

That can only endure so much less?


Do you feel as battered as the night?

Tell me, as the fortnight encroaches the futility of my thoughts

Do you feel as accurate as a righteous priest?

Where blood stains are evident on the face of his fists,

Tell me, in your absence, the night is long and torturous.


I feel as good as dead, where a tomb

Would be wept on by numerous of people

Who have labeled me endearing, charming

Only to find out that behind the epitaph and requiems

Desolated, rehearsed eulogies, I see my passing as a gem


Where it glimmers from a far, like a north star

Alone, and talking to me, saying, “I feel the immense night, too.”

What use is a life if abandonment is as certain as

The city that sleeps in smoldering landscapes?


What use, what use?