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

Once As a Child and Long Ago: seven poems by Sam Silva

Sam Silva

pining / credit: em
pining / credit: em

Once As a Child and Long Ago

Once as a child and long ago
I was in love
with the idea of junk
with Peter Pan and Cheerios
and the sacred high of the great TV
and blue songs
which Bob Dylan sang
…the morning! Mr tambourine
…to be lost
beyond such hollowness
and cold
in places wet with smoke
in tropic places sweated clean
like Juarez is in Mexico

…a daydream this…a day dream that
…the closet where you pet the cat
and the sixties first announce themselves
…that decade of the childish elves

and winter settle with its snows
and evening settles with its joke

and we are dwarfed
and we are small
with little reason for it all
…our coffee cigarettes and tea!
…our opium in a bubbling vat!
…our caldron like the deep blue sea
….the wine we taste while we must die
once as a child and long ago
like a cold tear in my mother’s eye.

One Small Thing Among Many

Even a hundred years of history
shows the dramatic rot of the soul’s metallic layers

…thick rust for the nails in the railroad ties
that serve as steps
to a house settled in the thirties
and slowly built upon
with sunroom on the side
and a slew of landscape windows.

The Haymont though is built from over a century
as a suburb of the down town
where the railroads meet to transport passengers and tobacco,
soldiers, slaves, and what like
as far south as the highways reach these days
or more likely
to some northeastern harbor.

To decorate this beastly drive
into soulless modern oblivion
one needs impressionist classical music
piped in free from an online station

….the explosive jazz of Gershwin
or Debussy’s slow musical landscapes.

The Poet Himself

In late life
a booze-oh born mid-twentieth century
….and awhile beyond
the new century’s turn

has learned to swim
in the dizziness
of anti psychotic pills
late at night
where computer light
flickers
the way candles might burn

and music fills such a burning sight

and paintings glow
from a labor of love
on the walls where they show
a meaning like blood
on some beach
like snow…!

Holy Porcupines

The sound of the ego’s sin!
chattering rain
on a mound of tin

outside
of the mortal sleep within.
The voices tell me that sleep is evil
…the sharp pain equates
with the orgasm which elevates.

Such is this new religion of ours
blooming black in Spring
like mushroom-flowers.

Those Who Love the Artist

Rachel is an epoch soul!,
a hero of the heart
in places where the muse has gone

…those places that I choose to go
or gazing on her art
ablaze with summers won

….for summer has the truest song
and Rachel’s heart is always young
…I worship it in wintry ways
and listen so such journeys done
with longing dense with fire and prayer
as only comes from wintry days
which love that warm internal nude of summer
on which those who love the artist
choose to gaze!

What Communication Means

He liked
being dead
and quiet
like all rhythms untouched in their grace
…found a work of art,
a poem, and song, a dream

more of a blessing
and more of a mule
to haul the cart of life

than what the God head and its power inspired
…along with killers
and the punks turned out
in any filthy prison
which makes the same sense of sex and money.

Bigger than an orgasm!, these easy days
of art and meals
devouring heart for heart
nature and the raw hips of a woman
in the lazy slow burn of any artist page

learning and forming
the essence of the age.

Signs of the Times On Every Street

A mild summer
amid the floods and melting glaciers
of our current age.

where the seas shall rise
and overcome us
inch by inch along the shore

…money is the means!,
of such a wondrous suicide
succumb to baking sun
or the deep brown oven of the air.

I am the dog of your heaven
…the hound of all of your spacious skies.
It is enough to say that I lived and died
beyond the modern curse of global war
and into the disease of corporate religion

…this poisoned dove! this sickly pigeon
sent along the Internet
…its planetary wings and wires.
Oh pornographic terrorist!
Oh Jesus and Mohamed
of a million floods and fires.

Share on TwitterShare 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, Sam Silva Category: Poetry October 22, 2013

You might also like:

skagit & cedar / credit: em
Two poems by Cali Kopczick
Photo credit: Joybot / CC BY-SA
Ginsberg at the Grey
Ship (detail) by Carrie DeBacker
Little Spells: Poems by Maya Jewell Zeller
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volumes 1 and 2
Taking the Poet at his Word: Editing the Poems of T. S. Eliot

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
© 2000–2023 D. Enck / Empty Mirror.
Copyright of all content remains with its authors.
Privacy Policy · Privacy Tools · FTC disclosures