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Sy Roth Poem
Beyond the Black Fence
By Sy Roth
The land lay fallow
Beyond the black fence.
Growth once dressed in a white blanket of hoar in winter landscapes
Lush in summer months
Deer speckled backdrop
Munched all day behind a scrim of lush camouflage
And black birds rested on the scrub
Coupled with the land and each other
A fornucopia of perpetuation.
But like time
It marched in to war on its own turf--
The cranes, yellow tractor-footed creatures
Tore at the soil and formed mountains of dirt
That wild (plants?) draped over
And the long-necked (?) concrete spreaders
Filled the gaping foundations with its gray slush
And the deer fled
And the black birds had resting places on the open rooftops
And the last trees crumbled to the diesel monsters
Where future houses will stack itself with the firewood
Of septuagenarians and those who aspire to end that race.
Incessant noise of change
A cock-a-doodle-doo alarm
On the other side of the black fence
My side where I find comfort in a book
And a drink to whet my appetite
And conjure up the images of the verdant green that once was
And the hoary land that once was my winter vista
Copyright © Sy Roth | Year Posted 2021
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Sy Roth Poem
Two Dogs at the Gateway
By Sy Roth
They slurped their saliva,
huge globs,
big, barking mouthfuls
dripping from their jowls like milky icicles
Teeth-bared lips,
They guarded the gateway.
Pleased by their vacated spittle,
their noses now sniffed the air, and
like a marching band of electric ants
they ogled the nearing invader.
Anew, the soppy, conglomeration of spittle
wells at their muzzles
forming a frothy milkshake
determined to expel the approaching trespasser.
His hands stretched out flat in peaceful kindness,
prophylactic, heavy-breathing
moseying him to the gateway
wraps him in a pulsing eagerness.
A satyr’s blessing upon him as he approaches
Where the two dogs growled ominous presentiments--
Twin Cerberuses,
Headache kin of dashed wishes.
Evening shadows stifle all desires.
Lips part in anticlimax.
He rolls to the other side
away from the yapping hounds,
away from the uncomfortable pauses,
away from the anticipation
onto a sterile, flattened field
where done yet reeks of a flaccid fantasy.
A grotesquery of mordant imagination
content to sleep on the other side of the booming roar
away from the slurping beasts,
he drops hands down to his side.
Tomorrows march on and the gateway,
a finale wrapped in the twins’ slurping,
slams shut.
Copyright © Sy Roth | Year Posted 2021
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Sy Roth Poem
A Stolen Memory
A Mirthful Chorus
By Sy Roth
We surrounded him
Asked to let go.
She stared at the misshapen face,
Unshaven sandpapery skin
Eyelids a tabula rasa
Fluttery sere skin
And we could see the humor blossoming in his ending.
He would enjoy her singing.
Bent over him, her breath a morning gust of air
Drifted across his face.
She sang him Old Man River
As he lay dying,
At least the first verse,
Loud enough, she hoped, to wake the dead.
They stood transfixed
And smiling,
She invoking the spirit of Robeson
Hoping to steal his baritone dirge
Suck it into her whole—
White-haired matron singing:
“That ole man ribber
He mus' know sumpin'”
She began
“But don't say nuthin',
He jes' keeps rollin'
He keeps on rollin' along.”
She warbled.
A moment’s pause as they gathered their thoughts.
While the second verse escaped her,
She hummed it instead
Expecting him to waken and fill in the missing verses.
Lips inches away from his eyes
Her breath only an Oreo-memory away.
They were prompted to join her
Her arm a swirling carousel
Pointer finger aloft circling, their signal--
“You an' me, we sweat an' strain,
Body all achin' an' racket wid pain,
Tote dat barge!
Lif' dat bale!”
They mouthed in unison
A chorus of kindred words for her and him
And smiled their best Caucasoid Porgy and Bess.
Only, he met them with his silence.
Ashen ghost of the man
Head set against the white, sodden pillow
Hissed his last.
But they sang him their dirge
And filled his room with their laughter--
“Ah gits weary
An' sick of tryin'
Ah'm tired of livin'
An' skeered of dyin',
But ol' man river,
He jes'keeps rolling' along.”
No tears immersed them in the absurd.
They just kept rolling along
Cheerful for their last serenade.
A Mournful Awakening
by Sy Roth
Sleep’s voluble accompaniment,
A C-Pap cello out-of-tune,
lazes restively like a disturbed sleeping hound
usurping the quiet of the bedroom.
The night set adrift on its tidal waves.
Squeaky crawls the moon’s light
Slap-dashing against dappled Mickey Mouse sheets,
cracking through window chinks
skritching raccoons seeking entrance.
Horns bleat somewhere in inky refrain--
town criers bellow news to a somnolent brain.
Morning options lift a truncated sleep
the ceiling ablaze with promises unkept
traipse from eyes cemented closed with a.m.’s glue.
Clinkety-clank of Sir Gawain’s armor heard plaintive
wrestles mightily into the room
and empties Lethe’ dreams from the brain.
Feet flop like pimpled pancakes ready for turning
to the cold floor.
Crawly insects text the day--
chopping them into frenzied scrawled brevities
tattooing them onto their sloughing skin.
Morn readies itself to mourn another day.
My Umshlagplatz
By Sy Roth
OK, so where does the story begin?
My option I suppose.
I could start with a note of victory,
The victory of having overcome adversity
And rising to the top of the pile.
But, of course, that would simply be bull.
Instead I choose to start with the nadir,
Thinking perhaps that it would be far more engaging
Perhaps it might help to point out that we all have a choice.
So, this is where I choose to begin---
With the image of a man running away
Finding safety somewhere else
Perhaps not safety entirely
But certainly, away from a point of origin
That was or could have been his demise.
My tsunami.
A bit of melodrama never hurt anything,
Right?
Indulge me as I mount the steed
And hurtle over the reality
To spawn the creation of something
As I struggle not too mightily with the truth.
Ghostly images of an old non-digitalized film
Rocketed a steady stream of images
Of shrunken men and women who had acceded to their victors
Their right to exits
To make them bereft of a place on this planet.
I watched them in their umshlagplatz eat their wishes,
Wait out the victors
To cipher out their place in the grand scheme that was being played out
With their flesh and their frozen minds.
I see them in my mind’s eye
The family gathered in their placed on the ground
Surrounded by baying dogs
And shouted, spitting hatred iterated like a broken record
A flapping, broken filmstrip nipping at their collective unconscious--
Waiting.
So this story begins with the distant pop, pop, pop
Of imagination and the burden of parents who survived
While their siblings were immolated and erased from memory
And I sit there among those spilled dreams of family,
Working diligently to erase the knowledge of being a victim.
But they invade my thoughts and I struggle to make them less voluble.
From them,
Their screams were a silent film,
The reality to powerful to voice
To bring heads to thank the heavens,
Only chagrin.
The now wrapped in shiny gift wrap
And wonderment at having survived,
Yearning that the new generation
Does not hear the pop, pop, pop of annihilation.
But, my choice,
Fully expecting only be warding off the inevitable.
Original photography by Robert Sundheimer with his permission
Her Riant Eyes
By Sy Roth
Bedeviled by the finger pointers
She stood slouched against the red-brick ruins.
They saw a blankness
But her riant eyes spoke of other things.
Her eyes marshalled their energy
As they passed her by.
In their ambling to nowhere, she saw their decrepitude
And the swollen egos, flabby globs overhanging their belts.
Her rods and cones, stood in military parade rest behind her heavy lids
In a colorful array, arranging themselves
With their rigid shoulders and tucked, droopy chins
Marching in goose-stepping cadence, gliding to the music of the street.
And the wind whispered her trials
In soft susurrations of heated breath.
In her ears, the tintinnabulations of bells
Caroling dirges in the darkened spaces of their lives.
Their deus ex machina machinations
Could not stifle her riant eyes
When she swept away from wall
To step off the curb.
She last-stared at a blue sky
Closed her eyes and whispered
Shema to the bleating horns of traffic
That gasped but did not grasp her goodbye.
Copyright © Sy Roth | Year Posted 2021
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Sy Roth Poem
Sy Roth - 3 Poems
12/17/20130 Comments
Picture
Silence
I’ve dreamt often that she crept deep
Into my cellular structure,
Some time in the nightfall of my being
And planted deeply into my mitochondrion,
A magical silence pill,
Drowning the kittens of speech
Cloaking the vocal chords in invisibility.
Erased all thought of sharing things with others--
Silenced me in rooms filled with people;
Silenced me in rooms with only my self to bear witness;
Silenced me in a world
Where silence is intolerable noise.
I inherited her silence,
Beet-cheeked princess of a dark world
Where inhumanity ruled
Like a thick quilt smothering breath,
Where midnight flashlight reading
Transported me to other worlds
Where people speak volumes--
Where men in prayer shawls do not beg Elohim to spare them,
While they giddy yap on fictitious camels
Carried along on whispered prayers
In a hip bouncing fornication ride
Wafting hollow messages
To ears that cannot hear the din inside a parbroiled brain
Where I drown in silence and isolation.
Sojourn to a Gravesite
Sojourn to a gravesite
Visit marked by miniscule stones memories
Whipped by time’s breath from their perch.
Reminders of their once having been,
Lie in a sepulchral pile at the base.
Headstone etched in alone symbols
Miles traversed with others,
Then got in the way of larger plans.
Commited a meaningless sojourn,
Raped into submission--
The end uncovers another end.
The living kneel at the edge of eternity
Find only a reflection of being
Perched on a ledge,
Ready to swan dive into a shimmering darkness
Wrapped in a black-velvet vale.
Denotes something, anything,
Cain’s mark to distinguish him from others,
Ultimately extinguished.
Survival,
Microsecond mirage
An end to travails falling, kerplop,
Into the arms of a vacant mob
Content with their part
Of putting an end to this iteration.
Conundrum sits like a magpie pondering eternity.
Fall, tumble into the vast abyss
Punctuated by an exclamation mark
Ending in a meandering interrogative.
The Land
The earth’s taken a vacation from its
Pristine verdant, forests and almond star speckled skies.
It’s sailed off to alpha centauri
To admire other stars in their infancy
And pine for their future.
It needs a rest.
surface, a gelatinous brie,
oceans liquefied into thick, brown bile.
For its sea legs
Wobble on shifting tectonic plates.
The mountains have stopped growing.
It searches for a life boat.
Time to row like hell,
Salvage what’s left.
Enveloped in briny air
It brandishes a magic wand,
Rips at the albatross about its neck with its crooked fingers,
Exhales fading dreams into the air.
While the lifeboat’s boards shrink beneath a desiccating sun.
Loose the mizzenmast, it screams,
Dream of a wind that will whip it to a safe shore.
Slack sails do not prick up in the worthless wind
Heavy with the weight it carries.
The shore shrinks away with each curling lick
That slaps the sides of the rotting craft
in rhythms set pounded out
by jingoistic drummers beating it to a pulp.
No life boat.
Only waylaid pirates reside there on the shore,
Black-bearded Rumplestiltskins, prancing wildly,
Their scabbards hoisted moving the murky air.
The land is theirs.
Earth, a shabby grandmother,
Lounges in the wings dressed in mourning clothes.
Copyright © Sy Roth | Year Posted 2021
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Sy Roth Poem
Dreams in the Bunk
By Sy Roth
An aching tired eats away,
Slurping at his soul
Yearning wakefulness from the darkness.
He heaved.
Sigh in a soft world of crimson-waving flowers
Dancing away to his numbers etched on him, his scales.
The others turn, he with them
Intemperate mob
Waring in fisticuff frenzy with the bedbugs.
Their odor wafts in on the breeze
From the chinks in the poorly built walls,
A pig-sty pen for the downtrodden.
And their snoring, a milk-curdling vengeance
That threadbare cloth could not mask---
A chorus of caterwauling madness.
With it the dawn, still somewhat dark outside,
When permeable reality, aloft on a black steed,
Clip clops them off their boards, swaying under their weight
They disassemble themselves from the nightmare
Like nano-robots clicking off their nerves and senses
To march another day
To the tune, an assembled cacophony of scratching
And hats sweeping from their brows as the others jackboot
About them in their own jocular way.
Drink and ego made them bold,
And they could pretend to die through their night,
Their own snores a tuneful melody.
While the others dream of respite on their feet
Their muscles scream of the daytime terror
And the beasts feed on their determination to live.
Copyright © Sy Roth | Year Posted 2021
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Sy Roth Poem
The Boys in The Back
By Sy Roth
The right hand turned the waters 360 degrees
Then another willful rotation
Until the bubbling chicken-fatty waters splashed over the sides
While the boys in the back did their algebraic calculations
Considering the enigma of a minus two yellow eggs
Then jouncing on the waves of her stirring.
An arthritic chicken leg made its way to the surface
Its death-claw clawing at the chunks of flesh swirling amid a flotilla of vegetables
And with it redolent steam captures the air of the kitchen in its garlic thrall.
She continued the rotation in the silence of the eddying water
Resting for brief moments in the minutes of her remembrance
Embracing the time when food was ersatz
And the act of eating became a chore.
She held the dreams of her survival in that ladle
A galumphing oar in her packed chicken soup—
Shabbos wonderment to stir away the remembrances of things past
While we played behind her back with imaginary numbers.
Her front, a no-access vestibule
A sodden wall of sorrow against a world
Where we did our algebra and plumbed the secrets of numbers
Away from her horrors.
No words—
A simple sometimes brief shake of her hair
To bring her back to reality.
No left,
No right.
No judgment
Just the temporary aroma of living
With her sons scratching their numbers in the background
Thumping the depth of calculating incalculable numbers.
Copyright © Sy Roth | Year Posted 2021
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Sy Roth Poem
Resting in Benign Pleasure
By Sy Roth
They watched me,
Waiting for a segue.
Continuously gazing at me
A waxen bowl of fruit
Tantalizing,
Clinging to my every move
Like lichen on the leeward side of an ancient oak,
Like barnacles on the underbelly of a ship
Gasping expectantly
Awaiting my keel hauling.
I dared an idle life,
I am a blushing-red, waxen apple resting atop
Single yellow banana,
Erect among the pear and globular-red grapes.
In my quiet hours of an armchair
Sitting idly by a window overlooking a waxen-western sun,
Humming a lilting song to the juicy, tangerine-soft rustle of grasses
Dancing among the ferns
A mambo to a sirocco wind.
Cochlear serenity
Settles in.
indolence writes a silly book filled
swirling in the brackish waters of their existence—
as I, a rotund Macintosh, rest niggardly and escape.
They Google frantically—
add apps to their already long playlist of useless ventures,
having spirited debates about my latitude and longitude.
They bide their time awaiting their own frenzied End
As I, afloat in the bowl of fruit, revel in my indolence.
They die in their fashion astride fictitious, snorting steeds,
Their backs bent, arms laden with Sancho Panza spears tilted downward.
And I dwell in my own painting, red-ochre in lethargy.
Their frenetic activities justify their existence.
Firehouse-red exit arrows guide their exigencies
while I, un-bored, rest in benign pleasure
Confused by an un-need for the trilling loons.
A blue, velvet drape of Victorian-prim frames the bowl.
Mindful of their confusion, I settle into my page-turning frenzy of non-activity.
Beneath a rainbow sky, cloudless, crammed with endless thoughts
painted on the rime of morning mist.
Guides my exit.
Copyright © Sy Roth | Year Posted 2021
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Sy Roth Poem
The Director
By Sy Roth
The directors--
For want of a nail
They were not wanting
So many nails,
A cache of nails
To drive into their coffins
Paid in jiggers of vodka
They would slog the miles
To the pits.
Surround them,
The innocents,
Choreograph their end
A Twyla Tharp ending
Accordion accompaniment
Played to a defunct Mahler
To keep them mollified.
The nails see only vermin
In their intoxicated vision
Smell their fear
Before a lightning crackle
Marks crescendic endings.
Poor naked souls stack themselves
like cordwood
On top of yet, still-warm bodies.
Melodic line met--
Last look before the darkness enfolds
Those who will entomb them
Lamblike creatures align at the flag
They queue from right to left
A Hebraic arrangement
To a two-shot tango--
One reserved for the child held aloft
By a resigned dame who sees no exit—
Child held aloft
Limp in naïve trust
To be followed by the second crack
Then hustled into the pit to join the others.
Swim in their own river of blood
The stagehand obeys the director’s cue.
He rolls them into the abyss
New cast assembles
Take their place at the flag
Unclaimed trash
While the director trods on their backs
To dispatch those who dared to live,
Souls forgotten
Sinners in the hands of an angry god.
Copyright © Sy Roth | Year Posted 2021
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Sy Roth Poem
In the Confines of a Dream
By Sy Roth
Their skin touches mine
Hair on end in the cold, tickling,
Vibrating with amoebic fear on an endless loop.
I could not look.
They braved separation from each other,
Buttock to buttock, fearful of the trap
Where shame brays an insulting reality
Nascent scents buried in their catacomb.
Then a quiet and God’s name echoes in their canyon
Hear me. Hear me!
And the eye above peers, a blue orb.
If it could smile, it did.
The dream is long, an arduous journey,
Skins now cling to other skins
And long grooves are etched in it
Hieroglyphs of people predisposed to perish.
In the darkness, they find Jacob’s ladder
And the angel offers no consolation, wrestling with words
Hear me! Hear me! He hears not
And the screams are a balm to the others.
The azure eye above seals fate in their catafalque--
In brief remembrance of the host and their parsec of loss,
The conclusion, an electric denouement, a splash of exhalation,
A remote offering to the gods of fire.
I saw them, the cleansing men.
I parked above the heap
In sordid indifference to their bestiality
Clinging to the apex of our nightmare.
Copyright © Sy Roth | Year Posted 2021
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Sy Roth Poem
The Front Window Cogitation
By Sy Roth
Observed the others drowning in their tears.
A pasty rain inks the front window
Sad remnants of a broken sky in Kandinsky splashes
Marked on an ancient, bubble-blown glass.
Outside cars distorted,
People amble in sodden abandonment,
Shuffling along with the meanderings of their misshapen dogs
dragging their owners, who
clutch white-plastic bags filled with their
tick-tocking seconds off their tick-tock lives.
A mushroom cloud of moon splashes the sky white,
As they galumph slowly by,
These sloths in inches of time,
Their microseconds stretching to breaking.
Inundated by an invasion of seconds,
Gestating in a mitosis of time
Set to implode—
Or explode in a parade of Krakatoa rains—
A burst breaks the sky in half
Remnants of rain drip off bent grasses.
Along the slippery, bubble-blown glass
Smudged to icy, crystalline imprecision,
Thoughts melt into a frothy latte foam
Consternation of the other on the inside.
Looking out.
Brief quiescence returns, when
The bleating window screams of malformed ideas
Converted into dormant, spent lovers.
The quislings wither,
Mesmerized by the swinging bags of ,
Overflowing in a Mauna Loa of lava laved
And the inside begins to die in the fog.
Copyright © Sy Roth | Year Posted 2022
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