Best Callow Poems
When once a lovelorn callow swain,
Heartbroken by a maid's rebuff
Sought balsam for his heart's deep pain,
Of female wiles had had enough,
Grave listener at the local pub,
Sat Tom inured to pangs of love,
Who spoke as lion to his cub
Or to a chick a turtledove.
"Son, weep not! I know thy disarray,
And I recall that time ah! Long gorn by
When I, a callow youf of Harringay,
Did to my first love like a furnace sigh.
With ardent kisses she the fire would stoke.
Oh how the temperature did rise,
Till one day she give it such a soak
That out it fizzled to my woeful cries.
Nought could relieve my darkness until Alice,
A fulsome wench from Walthamstow,
Changed my gloom into a Crystal Palace.
Bang crash the day she found another beau!
Oh nothing salved my bitter bitter spleen,
No medicine, herb, apothecary's lotion,
Till I met a luscious blonde from Woodford Green.
How she set my heart and soul in motion.
All went well until I met her mother,
Who asked in innocence how much I earned.
My honest answer love's fickle flame did smother,
So once again I got my fingers burnt.
By now I'd grown cynical a bit,
So when true love came knocking at my door,
I lost my nerve and had a fainting fit,
And so she went. I saw her nevermore.
Thus, my son, I live to tell the tale.
Renounce the frolics of thy frivolous youth.
A loaf but nibbled soon is hard and stale.
Let wisdom early teach this hard-won truth."
Cloaked in Their Untruths
By Sy Roth
Behind a cloak their little secrets roved,
Like silent, swishing vagrants eluding the truth
The darkness so thick,
A wall of impenetrable secrets built around it.
Leaving the unclosing to callow youth
Senseless in their wasteful trepidation,
They took no time to explore their truths
Dressed in slim, tight gabardine their desires arrested.
They had no need to validate,
No desires to explore.
Lost opportunities heaped into a morass of speculation
Until the voices of the antecedents were silenced.
Screams of loss as the span between life and death widen
They find in their own selves no validity
Only a vacuity in a tale filled with inconsistencies
That are bungee cords flipping them hither and yon unbound.
No way to make whole the person in a sere fabric
When the stories are filled with imagined realities.
They erect their own corpus on a land of falsities
Left only with mislaid dreams of not taking time with the whole cloth.
Hollow as a crooked pipe conducting waste to the corroded sewer
Vacant and obscure like a Freudian void on a cold lavatory seat
Hollow as a piper’s flute waiting for nimble charming fingers
Vacant like a comatose stare reflecting mindless nothingness
Shallow as a muddy puddle pummelled by boots from wet feet
Superficial like a scratch on a bubble conceding trivial defeat
Shallow as a trickling tributary succumbed to inarticulate drought
Superficial like a crowded scream never leaving mute fears
Fallow as unwanted seeds swirling around into darkness
Dormant like a sleepy reminder of night mares fighting for victory
Fallow as untilled soil longing for cultivated surrender
Dormant like a tired tramp homeless and halting suspense
Mellow as marsh mallows molten on deep cutting sticks
Bitter sweet like a camp fire sending smoke into nowhere
Mellow only in that as it rhymes with bellow and gallows
Sweet bitter and numb like waste in a lone piper’s dream
.
'gainst mine
mine grateful
face
press'd
hern globe'z
thick
admiring hern
mammillea
'gainst mine
chest
oh
how please'd she
seem'd
'bout hern
rest
. yep
just it be
az that in thuh space
'bove thuh
cloudz
yep
thuh ether
though not in full
rotund
hern less than weak
peruse uv me
mine eyne
i
hm
yeah no
pray'd
yet
she had me explicate
non placet
shnap
")