Peter Magliocco- Three Poems

mind(e)scape

The hood snakes its way through your mind
where effete men yearn to torture you
with cumbersome net principles, no less
patterned after the dismembered
remnants of your pseudo-soul
you wept out some afterlife poetics
while your mother's hologram appeared
until you cuttingly abused yourself before her
we disdained your fully-functional cyber-tool
you insisted be a part of the picture

(or pixel daubing whatever my fingers wove
into a bleeding plenitude of once soft skin
now hardened by ultraviolet scarring
from your tattooed love of jade Narcissus:
where the drunken lizard king still kneels,
before entering your obscene medulla?)

in those dingy troves of the mind's self
you lived & photographed constantly
without seeing the darkness in me
your lens could never penetrate



Teaching My Father to Speak Again

The stroke's blunt force leaves its mark
for his brain's blockade, in whatever
synapses & neurons forge speech.

Approaching his mute presence in the ER
some hours after it happened,
where (in the lobby) his embittered wife
sat with a stolid anger
of complete silence, her face
a mask frozen by brooding lines;

the son -- estranged from her
for so long -- now dutifully
goes through the ER doors
to find the father ignored
(for whatever reason)
by the busy medical staff.

Words to him remain silent,
the son stares back deaf & dumb
like his dad's dead brother Dominick

before the staff descends
to breed
the spark

still extant within
some unknown
echo chamber.



Love Minus Her

Edie you left me
& that wasn't cool, your memory-face
preserved now in dry-ice photos,
your hip/svelte body (gyrating
through the dozen dances of the day -- )
glimpsed through a crooked lattice's quilt
of sun-blanched shadow,
into a composite collection
of sexually diffracted body parts.
All sniffed at by gourmet dogs
human & canine alike, ears up-perking
they listen to your undisclosed
piped-in love moans
drifting through the hallowed zeitgeist
where you tread lightly, now adrift
within a maze of muffled enunciations
for the last fashionable gaze
might disgust you
on this boulevard of unconscious speed
your dark long-lashed eyes peer at
from the other side
of roads not taken by bourgeois babes:

there you gulped the last pill,
disappearing from the viewfinder
& laughing back at the disaffected witness
licking your blood from his eyes,
before your scarf fluttered

up & away
inside Warhol's
silver balloon.



BIO:

-- Peter Magliocco writes from Las Vegas, Nevada, where he edits the lit-zine ART:MAG. His latest poetry book is Poems for the Downtrodden Millennium, from The Medulla Review Publishing.