Roth Poems | Examples

What's the Deal with Tarzan?

Tim Roth gets shot, and what emerges? Blood.
His innards act like wrecked intestines should.
Those fifties-movies injuns really suck,
with tactics redolent of Donald Duck!
“The whiteys circle wagons, as we feared:
so let’s just ride around them – get mown down!”
You’d see more bloodshed watching Charlie Brown.
And why does Tarzan never grow a beard?

Tim Robbins plans a prison break. Oh well,
they’ll catch him quickly when they search his cell.
It’s never searched, or posters changed, in fact.
And why was Thomas Hagan never whacked?
And Cage’s “Wicker Man” was just plain weird,
and not remotely scary. I’m at ease
with oddball cops with masks on: “Not the bees!”
But why does Tarzan never grow a beard?

“Commando” – Arnie’s shooting-up a storm:
a hundred dead a minute is the norm.
The baddies take ten thousand shots at him,
to no avail. They’re not from Arnie’s gym! 
You want to know why Rin Tin Tin’s revered?
The dog’s so smart, he counts: he knows when you’ve
exhausted all six slugs – then makes his move.
Yet why does Tarzan never grow a beard?

Spring's Abysmal Guile

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.

Utopia

“If you actually succeed in creating a utopia, you’ve created a world without conflict in which everything is perfect. And if there is no conflict, there are no stories worth telling – or reading”
~ Veronica Roth

How boring could Utopia be
if we all did agree,
and if perfection is all we see?
That’s not a place I want to lee.
.
I relish cultures of variety
in and out mainstream society.
The freedom of unpredictability
is a sign of one’s individuality.

There is excitement in running free.
Or just being here, alone with me,
yields a sense of commonality
surrounding all with sodality.

Utopia is not found in impeccability
but rather in life’s fragility.
We make too much of predictability
when there is no absolute sterility.

Utopia is not humankind’s normality
but rather it’s in is adaptability.
Acceptance without impunity
may well-describe society’s community

Her Blacken Silhouette Has a Harden Heart-

was she unruly, unholy
questions placed and asked
she stood before me blacken
in her silhouette she was dark
shade and shape of black
draped down her strains of hair colored dark
nothing but midnight loss of color roth
absent of pigment color loss
invisible at night
yet at daylight, days she shines
she glows out
her spirit soul is light
as her heart is hard and black
questions placed and answers asked
solid black broken as glass
Her Blacken Silhouette Has a Harden Heart-



12/11/23
Written words by James Edward Lee Sr.2023©

Caledonia

Caledonia her laund is oor laund,
Caledonia her laund is ma laund
A laund wherr ithers ur walcome,
As we haud oot oor hand
In friendship an tak ye aw in,
As brithers fur aw that.

Caledonia we hailse you foriver,
Caledonia the braw kintre,
Whaur fowk ur aye at hame,
Wherr ithers feel richt at hame, 
Whaur affront is ne.er oor aim,
An deceit fur laund wi lea alane.

Caledonia yer nae wanes slave,
Caledonia ne,er unner Sassenach fit,
A laund fu o kemps  aplenty,
Free tae skail guid  rid bluid,
We urny  hinder tae scowth-and -roth
An will fecht tae uphaud oor richts.

A kintre o men free wi lealtie tae,
Auld alba caws tae us frae whiles bygane,
Wi sangs an ports fae the pipes ,
Filling the hairt wi  pride an courage,
An we will fechttae protect oor ain,
An free auld alba frae colonial pain.

Soul Starving In the Midst of Plenty

Soul Starving in the Midst of Plenty
By Sy Roth

Just a slit where air,
Some air can find a way to creep in
Replenish the foul exhalations of the horde
Crammed to the rafters
Airless beings 
Dazed by the machinations of others
Deus ex machina 
To starve them of what is fresh to others.

Clickety clack fly the miles
Unasssuming chorus of the rails 
In tandem with their moans
And groans, seeking some small blast of air
To mollify a condition
That binds the soulless traveler to a fate
Yet unknown.

Little blink of light 
And the hungry molecules 
Bits of flotsam 
Find ways to crawl to it,
To beat a path toward the light
Which may bring air to starved lungs.
Alveoli beg sustenance
But their cries rain down emptily,
Empty against the clicking and clacking from below
And the miles of breathless wonder
At their condition.

Too heady to begrudge the snakes that found
A way to slither to the errant light,
And for brief moments
To catch wisps of smoky air that cleanse
For an augenblink, 
A soul starving in the midst of plenty.

E Pluribus Unum

Carrying worn suitcases packed tightly
with meager possessions, lofty dreams,
bringing hearts filled
with longings
for the familiarity of homelands
and family left behind,
they came to America.

Schowengerdt, Rabun, Mazzei,
Erickson, Keeton and Rausch.
RaGusa, Martin, Devries,
Kaplan, Renfro, Czypryzs,
Morrissey, Hartpence, Colbert,
Collier, Roth, Proia and Ward.
They came to America.

Shining through immigrant tears,
Lady Liberty’s freedom torch
beaconed the way to portals of hope.
Beyond ... the future’s golden glow
beckoned the brave to create a new America
molded out of the melting pot of diversity.
They came to America.

Standing hand in hand at Ellis’s shore,
in reverent silence,
hearts bursting with pride,
a hundred mother tongues
with single voice proclaimed
in perfect harmony,
“We are America!”

They Took Him

They Took Him
By Sy Roth

They took him and squirreled him away.
Those Sophists, 
Deniers of the terror they could construct
Where he no longer saw the human side of himself.

Half man, Quasimodo of the bells,
Left stranded in the bell tower.
No one to call to
Tintinnabulation orphaned from humanity.

Left in his bed only to dream
Or bury his nightmares
Whisked beneath his bed in a heap
Dreams cohabited with the dust bunnies.

Silent, sinister hopes left tangled 
In a macabre kerfuffle--
Jacob and his Angel
In a struggle to exist.

They took him and he saw only this reality,
The ward in which he lived
A husk of humanity blown against a galling wind,
Crushed against unforgiving walls.

And he languished in his diapered world
Waiting for his eyes to heal
And his twisted lips to unfurl
Waiting to greet a new morn 

Away from the cycle of existence.

Cloaked In Their Untruths

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.

I Am Not a Zelig

I Am Not a Zelig
By Sy Roth

If not now, when?
The Zelig resides
Quiet, undefined 
In my dark corners.

Like a chameleon, it rests on the warming rock
Inert, cold-blooded creature
Sunning itself 
As the ages revolve about it.

In the room, they come and go,
All the merry Zeligs,
Awash in their obfuscation.
They blend in so well.

I watch them and my brain meanders,
My colors a steady stream,
While their kaleidoscopes
Are a whirligig of activity.

The warming rock gives me comfort
While their cold stares
Wrap me in a crinkly, aluminum sheet
Preserving what warmth escapes me.

The music of their voices
Play discordant songs about me
And I wonder,
Wondrous thoughts that slither among my dreams.

I’m warmed into somnambulance
Of time, while Zelig souls
Eat them hungrily
And their color fades into nothingness.

I am not a Zelig
And I should be happy about it
But I frown at the intransigence 
Of my spiritless, colorless climax.

Armor

Armor
By Sy Roth

Not a knight
But suited in armor nonetheless.

Right now, I am night,
Shrouded in a darkness.

They see me
Or perhaps just look at me 

Hidden in shade.

A shade adorned in blue and gold
Messenger of nothing.

But what they see
Or are willing to attribute.

An attribute given meaning
Bellwether of the herd.

Language unheard in the fog
Of the tolling bells.

Can’t cipher meaning in this attention
While at attention

Doing the duty of being
Dressed in the armor

Of the general moment.

Spent

Spent
By Sy Roth


Her ears still tremble with the sounds
Shocked into somnolence gasping to make sense.

The giddy bassist a rue of flapping gums missing the flats,
The drummer’s lips moving in asynchronous confusion--
But seem excited
She a carved, lost soul curved by existence.
 
Puffs of Kool smoke rising in O’s frame the scene
Off camera, and she feels dejected
Her voice a raspy concordance of ills
Of the world she just flagellated.
  
They stirred the fatalistic mob into a nihilistic frenzy
Tired arms from their robust gyrations
Oily hair whipping their brows
A spent ecstasy of ejaculated postulations
As the air quieted to a dull roar
And they waited for the next round of guttural pronouncements.

She is bent with the effort,
Grainy hair framing an awe-shocked brow
Unsatisfied now
The quiescent instruments and amps no longer giving voice.

Her voice now shuttered---
Bandmates off to share brewskis and medicinal snorts.
Her song long gone.

Spent, she waits for a comforting hand,
None to be found.
A solitary creature waiting in the never-ending waiting room
Spent.

Morning's Broken Armor

Morning’s Broken Armor
by Sy Roth

 
Squeaky crawls the moon’s light

Falling briskly against the chinks in the window

Uneasy sleep

A voluble accompaniment to

An out-of-work cello.

 

Scooting, crawly insects beat against it

With a frenzy of scrawled brevity

Tattooed on its soft shell.

 

Horns bleat somewhere in the inky distance.

Town criers bellowing news to a somnolent brain.

 

Alternatives roll away from eyes

Cemented closed with a.m.’s dream glue

And the clinkety-clank of Sir Gawain’s armor

Makes its way into the room.

Declaring additional valid seconds

Feet flopping like pimpled pancakes ready for turning

To the cold floor

The morn ready to mourn another day.

All Dreams Deferred

All Dreams Deferred
By Sy Roth

Bilious, they lay there in a somnolent heap
Dreams imprisoned.
Langston toed them, and lethargically they wiggled 
But could not rise from the ashes of their sadness.

The dreams that once took residence 
Wallow now in unfilled, charmless trifles
Like an uncapped bottle of cheap champagne
Its bubbles let loose into the ether-- 
A flat, unquenching drink.

Is there yet a miracle in terra infirma---
A thorned crown, stigmata of pierced palms.
Speared middle 
To awaken dreams from the icy prisons?

It’s a drain to function 
In an eclectic world where all spread a pall over everything,
Hums sad tunes, funeral dirges to dead friends,
Dying in inches 
Toward inevitable endings,
Wishing only for a tranquil pass around the Inferno 

Only to end up 
A wheelchair-bound lump of decaying flesh 
With Nordic icy beaches 
A hirsute blanket for eternity
Listening to the song of the worms
As they paddle their way through the soil and you
Ingesting your dreams.

Tremblors

Tremblors
By Sy Roth

They could feel it
Creeping beneath their feet,
Messaging their sole
Sending tremblors
Up into their thigh

Had to put a stop to its progress
Fearful that ecstasy might make a break 
Through their pates.

It did have a song in it
Song of enslavement--
Dwarves marching somewhere 
From deep in the mines
With a yo heave ho 
It’s off to work we go
A siren’s melody.

A pandemic spread horizontally
A tremblor horizontal
Infects those close by
As they watch the others twitch,
St. Vitus dance to a greater god.

They shuffle lopsidedly
And you shuffle lopsidedly
And the buildings offer no anchor 
As they lopsidedly cavort in congress
With you
And they
And them
To the imagined entities. 

Who knows what to call them,
The voiceless horde who will bend
Ultimately break and become one with the earth?

Silent tremblors beneath the swelling mounds
A corpse gas feeding the air with their fading.

But there’s no one left to smell them
Except the birds that borne aloft
Move the air languidly around them
The species below a fetid remembrance
That would not pay heed to the tremblors.

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