Humpty Dumpty Couldn't Be Put Back/Kristalltag/Three Hags Content/Scent of Mothballs/Napalm Would Smell As Sweet - SY ROTH

Humpty Dumpty Couldn’t Be Put Back

Powerwash the pronouns from Mount Rushmore.
No theys there, only men.
Unveil the symbols to a Gypsy Rose Lee striptease.
Bury them in grandiose similes like
pomaded hair, golden epaulettes, auroral idols
in Grand canyons of poetic flourishes,
miles of dentile Cheshire-cat smiles.
Personify Alliterate Assonate Consonate them.

Drown them rather in abstergent waters.
Hammer the accolades into a necklace,
albatross to be worn about the neck.
Lei them without aloha.
Sing sim shalom to their frozen narrative.
Hide aufwiedersehens in the shadows.
Toss their stories from skyscrapers.
Watch the splat on the sidewalk below,
Humpty-Dumptys never to be reassembled.


Kristalltag

Space exhaled a puff of air.
Caught in its stream,
pathless terrene thought it appropriate to cleave
a fresh path,
form a new road,
unzip the miles-thin protective layer.

Airiform meteoric hand swooped in--
glass jugs exploded in a grand cosmic plie,
windows shattered, crystalline light show.
Creations crumble, heavenly chaff in its random wind,
clinking chimes in twenty-part dissonance.

Cataclysm in its whimsical wake until
the bagmen seek bits to sell on eBay.


Three Hags Content

Three hags watched
their pot boil and bubble. They
fabricate an unbridled brew of

thimbles full of pricked pinches of this and that
newts’ eyes and ravens feathers, form
bucking bronco pate.

Brutish darkness dwells there.
Beelzebub’s dreams, aboard a snorting steed,
exhales iniquity, an
ape throwing  his feces at his jailors.

Bifurcated-genome-sequenced beings
recently erect after bare-knuckle walking.
Consumed by stampeding desires
yee and haw for control.

Starry-night stars shoot against a blackened sky,
Seeds they bred gnaw through their heart,
roar to the surface with wooly ambition.
Willful disintegration,

turns all into a crimson river,
hoodoos of inchoate admonitions.
Pot boils over.
Three hags content.


Scent of Mothballs

Mopheus lazes on his
green, wharf –fading eyes,  an
enervated flame fizzling windless.

Charon rolls the oars silently
barely slicing the inky water,
Styx turgid waters thumping the barge.

Charon’s unreflected.
The passenger licks his arid lips
searches for words—

any words--
beleaguered in a desert thirst
Styx cannot slake.

Lilacs dare not bloom,
willows sway awkwardly in a Macabre Danse,
turtles arhythmically flail on their backs.

Watchers grieve at lost possibilities, where
Only chaff and wilted flowers
scent the room with mothballs.


Napalm Would Smell As Sweet

A war is a war is a war
by any other name, Napalm would smell as sweet.
Cannons hurl their guts
like drunken sailors’ on madcap shore leave.

Uncivil matters begin that way,
silent anticipation before
explosions rip the night red,
kick morning-puffs of earth into
guileless mushroom cloudlets.

Rubicons crossed
songs get sung in hollow chest barrels.
Fodder girded with anticipation follow,
unfurl flags, signatories of sides
rights to defend
rights to abolish
wrapped in crimson brocade,
festive omens of what has to be.

Motley dressed for immolation, they
warble war songs to shout down the barrage.
Fields purged,
their red towers support the sky, beneath
swampy marshes for grim reapers to plod through.

The hurly-burly done,
ragged pieces remain--
blinded eyes,
memories etched behind them,
dough faces piled upon dough faces,
war in their nightmares.





Sy Roth: He comes riding in and then canters out. Oftentimes, the head is bowed by reality; other times, he is proud to have said something noteworthy. Retired after forty-two years as teacher/school administrator, he now resides in Mount Sinai, far from Moses and the tablets. This has led him to find words for solace. He spends his time writing and playing his guitar. He has published in many online publications such as BlogNostics, Every Day Poets, brief, The Weekenders, The Squawk Back, Bareback Magazine, Dead Snakes, Bitchin’ Kitsch, Scapegoat Review, The Artistic Muse, Inclement, Napalm and Novocain, Euphemism, Humanimalz Literary Journal, Ascent Aspirations, Fowl Feathered Review, Vayavya, Wilderness House Journal, Aberration Labyrinth, Mindless(Muse), Em Dash, Subliminal Interiors, South Townsville Micropoetry Journal, The Penwood Review, The Rampallian, Vox Poetica, Clutching at Straws, Downer Magazine, Full of Crow, Abisinth Literary Review, Every Day Poems, Avalon Literary Review, Napalm and Novocaine, Wilderness House Literary Review, St. Elsewhere Journal, The Neglected Ratio, and Kerouac’s Dog. One of his poems, Forsaken Man, was selected for Best of 2012 poems in Storm Cycle. Also selected Poet of the Month in Poetry Super Highway, September 2012. His work was also read at Palimpsest Poetry Festival in December 2012. He was named Poet of the Month for the month of February in BlogNostics.

The Cure Place for the Soul - Sy Roth

Once a comely palace

Where word Lords pranced and jiggled their wares in that someplace

ingesting mind-sounds and finding soul-curative shelter.

They crammed it to the marble rafters with ideas

shelves pregnant with rolled bibliothekai

spilling from Dewey-decimalless niches

creating a satisfying gourmands’ meal

of grand idée and philosophical meanderings

seasoned with boisterous textual argumentation.



Ptolemy nurtured it to grandeur;

Julius Caesar burned it;

Mark Anthony looted it for love,

and bedraggled pagan soldiers

blew out the lanterns returning it to darkness.



Ptolemy’s dream now a succorless meeting place,

Crammed with yeahs, uh huhs, and yo-yo!

Dressed in baggy pants-landscaped cafes,

red-nosed clowns in oversized shoes,

numbed Xbox game players reign

interminably watching racing cars and killer soldiers,

these acned teenagers ogling screens

fingers nimbly recording techno ones and zeros.

While adults mine for jobs or to escape nagging wives or unruly husbands

while Shakespeare sits dustily on shelves

languishing there waiting to be fondled by anyone, someone.

No words or ideas glide through these halls

no intellectual integument,

only a colony of fusty Martians on a deserted red planet

the cure place replaced by glossy laser shows.

Ennui is dressed in piquancy by unrefined automatons.

Lost, only a footnote.

Sy Roth is a retired school administrator and has finally found the sounds of silence and the time to think whole thoughts. This has led him to find words and the ability to shape them. He has published in Visceral Uterus, Amulet, BlogNostics, Every Day Poets, Barefoot Review, Haggard and Halloo, Misfits Miscellany, Mad Swirl, Larks Fiction Magazine, Danse Macabre and The Eloquent Atheist. Recently, he won a poetry contest sponsored by Newsday.

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