
Listed by Duotrope
a peer-reviewed quarterly journal on literature
E-ISSN 2457-0265
Poetry
Peter Magliocco
Volume:
3
2019-04-01
Issue:
2
Exposure of the Narcissist
& Life is like
being inside a Helmut Newton photography,
yet the glamour of nude femmes
is sometimes intangible: I grope anyway
for objects film-ennobled
licking the candied crimson high
heels on feet of his braless dancer.
Is this kinkiness or the beginning
of aesthetic freedoms? The night
bathes itself with insinuating radiances
cast by our ubiquitous city lights,
so that each hour dulls the silvery
sheen of incomparable skin.
I do not suspend the sexuality
of the tripod, but uphold it
against my groin, splaying nuts
in the negative entrapping me
into a frame’s sudden blindness
as I take my umbilical walk
through the dark vacuum, Time
like an evanescent nothingness I covet
brings me to tranny flashes
of strewn bodies, doll-like, in
proverbial glistening blood-pools
interspersed with starkly twisted
& detached car metal, still smoking.
Don’t moan with whiskey
or the half-dreams of cats
when (out of Poe’s one crepuscular orb)
you sense my biomorphic presence
in the makeshift Halloween costume
resembling the horny Green Hornet’s
on methamphetamines. Squeezing hoary gas
from your last good orifice, Helmut
comes the wheezing truth-of-ages,
an apostate paparazzo
in drag
crashing your last party.
Non-Parable T.V. Enzyme #02
there in the ultimate truth
of psycho-genetic restructuring
deep in the spiral of ordinary night
where laws disbar freedom of speech
modified by policalese & new-speak
X-Presidents in Mar-a-lago must testify
you casually comment
(during the talk show commercials
while we nervously waited,
surrounded by a conservative audience
chewing on government bonds & bones):
“now onto false gods
do I swear
amnesia
even now, with the court t.v. reporter
slavering over me & Stormy,
recording all the sordid facts.
There is nothing left
of the media truth
after it’s been married to daily agony
-- & like the plummet
of stone birds
from the hyperion’s bent galaxy,
my love for her
still breathes in crevices
of dead memory
the witch doctors
program”
as we listened to a homeless man
tell the talk show host
that bums made great Presidents
poem for my mother
and the sea crosses the dreaming woman’s back
before she drowns
in interstices of my fantasy,
before I steal her embryonic reliquary
where my other life lies
the unborn one conceding
a brotherly & sisterly self
nature miscarried with its zeal
for perverse presentiments
like the musing woman’s bare back
turned towards me as she dresses
slowly, deliberately, before the mirror
reflects her cosmetic applications
for the waking ritual of femininity
is hard to perfectly cultivate,
even for her small son’s eyes
wondering at her adult largeness
while she swims in our shared narcissism
my eyes become her mercury
prolonging each attention to detail
devouring sweet infinity
as my impatient wisecracking
impels her to angrily grip the hand mirror
before tearfully throwing it my way
& severing the thread of our attachment
no desperate love holds fast
to part this spell’s sad longing
imprisoned like animal silence
in our new born breed undying
About the Poet
Peter Magliocco writes from Las Vegas, Nevada, where he has been active in the small press as editor, writer, and artist for several years. A multiple nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, he has written poems in “I Am Not A Silent Poet,” “Poetic Diversity,” “Midnight Lane Boutique,” “Word Dish,” “Literary Yard,” and elsewhere. His most recent poetry book is Poems for the Downtrodden Millennium from The Medulla Review Publishing