PHILLIPE VICENTE - POEMS

Phillipe Vicente was a well published poet ten years ago who went to pursue a career in finance and has just returned to the literary world.

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                                                  Siesta
 

The last gulps of thought
softening against spine
through our stained eyes,
backdrop Miami’s narcoleptic sun.
 
The bled-dead sexy noon malnourished,
the hex of grandfather’s snore,
the unloved stove of grandmother
between the lingers of the sighing grandchildren,
the thorns exile has crowned us with.
 
There isn’t much grace left
to the starved couple under the digestion‘s broom,
the bow from the factory lines in their posture,
a bunch of dried-out flowers taking up the space
of the left behind memories and friends.
 
This hour we recline and pause
through existential pains absently,
then babble the language of curtains,
until the clock slaps our faces,
wakes the contrite tears
that will wash off the gratuitous sleep.
 
In the nascent moments back,
a startled sense of hearing
withering away from us,
disfiguring everything that greets us.
 
*
 
                                     Silent partner
 
 
A nocturnal splash, vector and hip, animating
currents, hauls woken with sudden curves.
His mustache and growl stretch economically obtuse.
Dancers taken aback by his boldness
retreat behind the console of drinks,
from the prying fist &
Bald crown of the deafening partner.
 
The signs of escape don't insult him.
Marijuana butts & pills, the splash
of limbs at play in a demulcent noise.
Only the capitalist bartender and
bouncers loiter, caught in the tipper's ennui.
But even they are shocked
at his presence, three hounded pounds of diplomacy
padding down the floor before them
as they hurry to stand in line.
 
Solitary at his booth he eats
unfazed by the meek semaphore
announcing it is last call.
He lifts the entire table at last.
Only to promise to the petrified owner
he will come again some day.
When the crowd is a little less shocking
& the welcome carpet is as red
as the palm he extends in warning.
 
*
 
                            Singing, comes up short
 

Her wilder curves,
the ones soon to reach burn,
is all she will have left
to hold on to.  She sighs
into the shower and what she feels
is the trestles of her youth,
in their numinous clarity,
splitting under the torrent
of nauseas meditation,
a brief but essential nomenclature
constellating her watercolored body.
The genocide should have woken her
from these sundresses, and allergy fissures,
at least punch out the veil of teeth
with which she still welcomes
each and every sun bouquet wielding
bridegroom.   Yet her numerously altered
forearm keeps it like a constant itch,
and that is what makes the crescendo
flutter just as it’s about to fill
the vacuous blood of this woman
so what she can’t erase with the amnesiac
perfume of time, she denies by her quality
of herbal product.  The dirt the drain
claims is the legacy of the oven
that evaporated equally both flesh and guitars.
Hotel beds for the survivors,
and their star plucked eyes.
She leans against the flood of foreign
water her back embracing the cathedral
stuffed window.  They sway
like a couple of blossoming angels, falling,
if not toward flesh, then the confessional
signatures of imploded air.  Their shadows
are minimally entangled, frigidly layered.
Memory, whispering like bare feet
walking over broken glass, a wound per step.
Her breathe breaking, her voice
and its blackening spirit rotting toward
the aroma of death.  
 
 
                                           Singing it
 
 
She has put it in my face
like a smiling pearl
and I that can’t sing,
has to lip synch to melancholies
of families sliding past their houses,
and crest myself like a high note
above the zero quo to reach them,
the ancestors I act in private,
away from the moonlight,
beyond the bitter tumors of revenge.
The thin majority,
rubber and wires, is coiled
for a departure from their lips,
those prisons of choice
lucid on the limited folded keys,
the flawed oracle undervalued
by the excessive readings.  
Is it any surprise spectators of plunder
and norm have never been mistaken
for a rising star.  
Redemption and discovery for all.  
The room blows up in gauze and frisson
when I raise their words,
raise their necks and rehash
the wretched armor of safety,
shake up the entire brood of napping emotions
about conceding, and makes them free
from the triumph they have soured.
The way a blackout of media unravels
when a lone pen like a scalpel
cuts through the darkness,
opening up the guilty tears that salute
after being given their pardons.
 
*
 
 
                                                single toil
 


Many servants will reach hell.
In every soil flight elapsing through
stunned face projects a grizzle of excuses.
They gnaw toward the rages of the appliances
and to the tips of the frontier of absolution.
A call, more like an order, of the washed things
sinking in their boxes below the value
of the appliances, the priests ripping off
the frayed, stained collars that defy reason
but evolve from the crooked necks of the godless.
Its children punctuate the gorgeous greed
and liberate the fat candles.  Hint many
impulses in the robbery, all clean and scared,
from which lunches come and the promise
of suffering.  So simple a wish can only
be appreciated in its exit.  The peasants
combust for the forbidden ailments
of those living the full life.
 


                                 Skinning dipping  
 
​
Natives of Portugal skewering the moist breeze
now fiendishly groping the streets with sonnets,
pause for a sangria pitcher.
Actually it’s an ice tea pitcher,
for the woman is carrying
her belly in her hands,
her legs around the man’s wallet
at unsure ceasefire with it.
The man wants to make pure
the bulbous skyline overshadowed
by the lactating mountains,
unbridled and today bowed down
in orthodox night prayer,
assassin prayers,
finding their pleasure
in the pitcher he is ordering.
They are sitting between
their swath of the cliff and a soft earth
cooling the footloose thinkers
who have taken cover under the stars
because their affair has risen beyond thrifty.
They are old-fashioned,
desiccated in monotones,
but the would be names
are played on that piano of restraint
that once was theirs by upbringing and status.
Leisure, they had planned while the fluids
chipped away stuff about parasailing.
The dimmed down lights covering up
the nervous odors and bunching up
near their mouths like cars
that have been piled up after being crushed.
They try to chew a new title of their own,
cutting up a broken condom into a dinner,
a lock of a dream’s hair,
a bottle’s swing,
and name it the witch rump
or the condor alibi
because this is a fantasy,
sin silly in tonic and lime.  
 
Or they blame the weather,
 
the one that tastes of éclairs,
chocolate covered and sweet,
supporting a candied sun for the lovers
liberated by white icing.
Limbs starting forward or outward
when the icing melts and muscles clench,
and the weather flops in front of the television,
red streaks jiggling,
rum oozing fun,
and they finish to swish in their arms
in their own cocktail world.
As he eyes over the stomach
his worry is that it’ll echo him,
cavern,
and bounce his voice against the walls
until it causes them to collapse.
Intimacy is the twitching nerve
and the inferior warmth of skin.
So the voice chipping away the child’s face
would never calm the man’s mortality.
The woman, now slumped
against her reflection on the glass,
can’t feel the terrific lunacy
of the palm fronds swaying,
hyperactive juveniles,
Elizabethan ladies in waiting laundry lining
the eating and waiting with chastity belts.
These will be the last hours of caring,
and the fitted bathing suits feel expensive after all,
bestial hoodlums,
regurgitating frequented saloons,
because their pressure on the genitals
gets her ready for the metallic pinch
some men later.
Comfortable for a while,
caught in the burgundy basket of moon
between the fickle web of widows like bugs,
then gradually refined to take on
the discretion of mimes made from them,
like dark moles growing along the slope
of their privacy’s shoulders.  
 
This place, relevant with checks signed in pidgin
 
and other codes of perjured folklore.
Coughing with pretense,
toppling over the marina’s deck of yachts
named after their mistresses.
Here there are problems
because there still can be found a story,
secluded yet among them,
in the biting kisses and the obscuring fires.
Those are the whistleblowers of the place.
Pens scribbling in the dark recesses
of thighs spread by failed promises.
The stolen is the pace.
They and the rest of them are here to burn
in all this abundance.
Their indulgence charted like on a map,
or maybe buried beneath the hollow smiles
and forgotten weekend trysts.
As if all it cost them is the few dollars
they tip each member of the hotel staff
to keep their opinions not even to themselves.