Empty Mirror

a literary magazine

  • About
    • About Empty Mirror
    • Get in Touch
    • Support EM
    • Colophon
  • Submit
  • Contributors
  • Essays
  • On Literature
  • Poetry
  • Reviews
  • Art
  • Interviews
  • Beat
    • Beat Generation
    • Ted Joans Lives!
  • +
    • Fiction
    • Music & Film
    • News
    • On Writing
    • Book Collecting

A Different Inspiration: Poems

Sam Silva

Blue Plateau. Image credit: Denise Enck
Blue Plateau. Image credit: D. Enck

A Different Inspiration

Flashes of epileptic light
induce the brains
of the spiritually dead
to turn their thoughts
from blood-drunk Hades
and the muddy rivers of their sleep

…and to inch their eyes
somewhat skyward
beyond the life of earthen dwellings
toward banquet tables
which the stars and planets keep

…And this way the Son of Man is born
breathing fire and life
into our prayer full tragedies of rose and thorn.

The Soul of the Emigre

Gershwin bubbles in the lights
of this computer screen
where words and images flash lyrically
in a gush of jazz atonality

for a thousand dreams on a thousand nights
in this backwoods no place
U.S. southern army town

where I lie down
sleeping to dreams
of Paris
or waking to the same.

Either way and none the less!,
huge music
by any other name.

A Certain Randomness

Pathways are made of stone and flowers
in this cracked garden
which hangs on days of Summer
wrinkling into Fall.

And soon the leaves will amass
in a dance toward piles
of brittle oblivion
cool as an old jazz riff
that drifts from a fifties horn

And we, all of us, will lie awake
haunted by promises that we made
or should have made
in this lucky life, this grave mistake
which cheated its rational abortion
and looks out on a city
like an ocean.

What Judgement for the Mad

Prolixum is a coldly burning drug
injected in time release
…every schizophrenic!
…every lunatic and thug
needs this
to find his peace
in the constant smell of piss
or in a spoon of lunchroom grease

that such nerves could turn to a fire
cold enough to cancel every yearning
and desire
except the one to sleep.

An antipsychotic made to make things sane
so that once there was nightmare
and now there is a hole
…once there was a brain
…insert a boiling vegetable instead
…such hell might suffice as sanity
…such mindless dulling pain
among the likewise dead.

Oh Lonely Unrepentant Heart

Oh lonely unrepentant heart
…a throb within the deep recess.
Those lips of an outsider
which squeeze and blow the saxophone
…atonal hugely colored art
…those stick figures of our undress
…those notes and words of irony

…the meeting place of fleshless bone
broad in the nights computer glow
because of shadows lingering there.

Illusions on the telephone
where friends and strangers puzzle these
and those
words
which fly like birds
aloft
as if a poet’s pen had coughed
again, again,
in deathlike throws.

Fetching the Holy Waters

Cool and drowsy downer of a day
…the witches stir the herbs of earth
…the angels pray
for winter children of heroic means
and virgin birth
against all odds
to come in poverty of immeasurable worth
and bring the cleansing waters
born as well of blood in distant Springs.

The witches and the angels both
…they dream of this in Fall!
They stand as one united hope
and lash the bucket to the rope
and plumb the depths of such a well
where wisdom comes to call.

Share on X (Twitter)Share on Facebook

Sam Silva

Sam Silva has published over 150 poems in print magazines, including Sow's Ear, The ECU Rebel, Pembroke Magazine, Samisdat, St. Andrew's Review, Charlotte Poetry Review, Main Street Rag and others. Has published at least 300 poems in online journals including Jack Magazine, Comrades, Megaera, Poetry Super Highway, physik garden, Ken again, -30-, Fairfield Review, Foliate Oak, and dozens of others. He is a frequent contributor to Empty Mirror.

His chapbooks have been published by three small presses, and his work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize seven times. Bright Spark Creative of Wilimington published his first full-length book, EATING AND DRINKING.

He now has many books and chapbooks available at lulu.comsamsilva54 and as books available at Amazon. His spoken word poetry is available at the major digital markets such as Apple iTunes. Follow him on Twitter @samsilva1954.

Author: Sam Silva Tags: poetry Category: Poetry November 3, 2016

You might also like:

the path
Poems by Heidi Williamson
2 Poems by Craig Kocij
2 Poems by Craig Kocij
Current
birthday by William Bortz
forest path / credit: de
Four poems by María DeGuzmán

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I accept the Privacy Policy

 

DONATE TO BLACK LIVES MATTER

BLACK LIVES MATTER

The EM newsletter

Receive fresh poetry, reviews, essays, art, and literary news every Wednesday!


Empty Mirror

Established in 2000 and edited by Denise Enck, Empty Mirror is an online literary magazine that publishes new work each Friday.

Each week EM features several poems each by one or two poets; reviews; critical essays; visual art; and personal essays.

Subscribe Submissions Support

Recent features

  • My Father’s Map
  • On Waiting
  • Seeing Las Meninas in Madrid, 1994
  • Visual poems from 23 Bodhisattvas by Chris Stephenson
  • Historical Punctum: Reading Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia and Native Guard Through the Lens of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida
  • Panic In The Rear-View Mirror: Exploring The Work of Richard Siken and Ann Gale
  • “Art has side effects,” I said.

Books

Biblio
© 2000–2025 D. Enck / Empty Mirror.
Copyright of all content remains with its authors.
Privacy Policy · Privacy Tools · FTC disclosures