Spring’s Abysmal Guile
By Sy Roth
A vapor rises, rank as the charnel pit,
a corruption of a miasma vast,
as though some sepulcher, long sealed,
split its stony jaws to breathe.
Vile exhalation of a corrupted world.
The reveler, unwitting wretch
treads the decadent fields where verdure writhes,
each blade a hostile tendril, squamous, cold,
glistening with ichor
No earthly fount its progenitor.
He deems the shade of evil vanquished,
trampled beneath his hobnailed boot.
The soil heaves with malefic will,
its roots, like veins of some primordial fiend,
pulses with a rankness older than the stars,
a stench that whispers of aeons lost.
Spring cloaks itself in verdant pall,
no bloom, but scales of a vast, unuttered thing,
its thorns a raven’s beak, evermore to rend, to sow, to bespoil.
He quaffs the tainted zephyr,
proclaiming triumph over a gloaming moon,
Swept in the season’s unseen talons,
fathomless ennui
creeps through his sinews,
entombing his soul in an abysmal cleft unshriven.
Deserving all deserts and worth all worths,
My love is admiration’s mirrored whole,
A shadowed shade whose forms do form rebirths,
I’m boldly uncontrolled in her control.
A burning nymph who’s in all fairness fair,
My love’s accounted without frankness frank,
To stress distress she counts my bareness bare
And burns my ardor with a rankness rank.
To hold and not be held is wealthless wealth,
To see and not be seen is sightless sight,
To cure and not be cured is healthless health,
To love and not be loved is lightless light.
A crisp and charming cat sans coyness coy,
My love’s a lifeless life and joyless joy.
ECSTASY
A kaleidoscope of life swirls,
Rising and retreating,
The aura of its abundance joyously alive
With honeysuckle rabbits
And the pine needle sweat of children.
All animate, a scent in the air,
Breathed on a lightening wind
Of creations God intended
But never got around to.
Rankness ascends to rhapsody
As freshly turned fields
Of soured milk and socks
Stoop to mock the dead fish
Floating by the docks,
Because it stinks of cheap cologne.
These sharp, shimmering images,
Their dance becomes diffuse.
Then disappears.
With the
Slowing
Of the
Car.
Miraculous visions
Lost...then forgotten,
In the instant of my ecstasy
At the familiar scent of home.
This poems origin sprang from curiosity about why dogs seemed to like hanging their head out of the car window so much. It occurred to me that their sense of smell is so developed that they probably form mental images from the odors in the air and that the rushing wind must be like looking through a kaleidoscope to them. Colors on top of colors or for them, perhaps, smell on top of smell, forming a rush of images until the car slows down - at home!
*Did you know a blindfolded dog can still identify individual rabbits?
Reflection injection,
I can’t do time so I bear the erections,
like bad economies and serious rejections...
They have relations of stations upon the masters of fakeness,
roaring awakeness,
upon baseness
upon rankness,
...I try hard but hear blankness,
waiting on makeshifts,
I live for the lie,
even if my body falls off of my mind,
just in-case I have to try-
I keep myself wide,
but creep slow otherwise,
beat up the wrong boast-
with character in my eyes,
ride motorcycles to the coast,
act rich,
and not even take a dip.