top of page

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

logo erothanatos
bottom of page