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Best Poems Written by Ethan Klastaitas

Below are the all-time best Ethan Klastaitas poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

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Details | Ethan Klastaitas Poem

Sludge Behind the Dishwasher

As the weather chooses its flavour for the hour,
Stubble-ended wood shaves itself on the layers of unseen ground.
Synthetic puke seeps through pores seeking to devour
Every tiny, curled hair floating in the murk around and around.

Pool party skies reside a millimeter higher than the tallest fingertip:
Leftovers infect this mass of last meals passed on.
A spindle of cloth runs out with time enough to graze my lip
And still no locks of winter-lived years could sink a single talon
Into the darkest dark of fleeting moments taken from a fork.
Shall this be all that has come from years after that first unscrewed cork?

Copyright © Ethan Klastaitas | Year Posted 2023



Details | Ethan Klastaitas Poem

Kill Me In a Bed of Grass

Kill me in a bed of grass
To avoid any bridges that come to pass
I’ll lay in wait for an eternity
If you promise an embrace with no pity 

These blasting lights send me underground
Give me your forest to create a shroud
Neon floods will exist no more
Smother me with vines please I implore

Sprout trees taller than skyscrapers
So I catch myself falling through a thousand branches
Let leaves don the concrete drapers
For if you do all this I will have no chances

Copyright © Ethan Klastaitas | Year Posted 2023

Details | Ethan Klastaitas Poem

Choose

Choose unironically ripping off a film to be ironic
Choose now because then will never be enough
Choose puff puff puff puff puff pass because you’ll never have enough
Choose feeling guilty in the morning because it’s better than sobriety
Choose watching the movie instead of reading the book
Choose a diet of coffee, fags and alcohol so you die before you remember 
Choose a t-shirt with a design on the back so you can have a personality
Choose a McDonalds breakfast because the ad told you to
Choose a rhyming couplet to be traditional
Choose the right party to be constitutional 
Choose voting for the fox in disguise because the wolf bares it’s teeth
Choose third wave feminism because you need an identity
Choose bringing down the patriarchy because there’s nothing better to do on a Sunday morning
Choose loving a random person because you hope they love you too
Choose pretending that everything’s alright because if you admit it’s not everything will fall apart
Choose falling deeper because it’s easier to fall than to climb back out
Choose a life of desperation, regret and pain because everything else is two dimensional
Choose being pathetic because nothing else will ever work
Choose a random guy to be spontaneous because everything else is planned
Choose an iced watermelon tropical passion fruit and kiwi vape to get you through a day of absolutely nothing
Choose a five bedroom house with two bathrooms and an en suite with an open plan kitchen-dining area and a kitchen island with little stools around it that will never be used because they’re uncomfortable and are there purely for aesthetic purposes
Choose colour changing LED lights because your mood should be defined by the colours around you
Choose a death bed of poppies to pity the victims of their creation
Choose being sarcastic because humour is all there is
Choose optimism so you have more to drink
Choose an eclectic music taste for all occasions because you must be accepted
Choose sex with a person you love because you ed everything else
Choose God in a vacuum-packed ready meal ready to eat in two minutes (in bite sized pieces) because you can’t jump into believing all at once
Choose artistic robbery because no other robbery is as fulfilling
Choose repeated techniques and extended metaphors with personification and assonance and consonance and sibilance so all the English teachers have a job
Choose recycling because the environment is important and you must feel good about something
Choose protesting so you matter to an undefined united utopian organisation
Choose alliteration because it’s taught to primary school students
Choose an electric car because you can and will save the environment single-handedly
Choose a hybrid car to satisfy Greta
Choose a gas-guzzling Ford because the power and the people of the United States are most important to those who own it
Choose cycling to inflate your ego
Choose walking because you need to be important
Choose  human ing beings because it’s all you’ll be and we’ll be and I am and you are and how do we and what do we and why do we choose
Choose to continue 
Choose the pause button when you go to the bathroom 
Choose a TV show with an archetypal male character that struggles through life with uninspiring repetitive originality and a love interest which never starts and never finishes and a friend or two and a cheap car with a faulty engine and a vague meaning which applies to everyone because everyone has to feel something and art is a collective mob
Choose a double bed because you enjoy sleeping next to a ghost
Choose an iced oat latte with two shots of espresso and three pumps chai and one oat with organically processed coffee beans that come from fair trade farms in a town far far away in Columbia somewhere because it’s socially acceptable to be addicted to caffeine
Choose a weekly shop at Lidl to organise chaos until you realise everything is smaller and everything is bigger
The universe and the stars and the earth and the land and the people and the dust and the atoms and the neutrons and quarks and everything came together to choose you
Choose believing that you exist in this world
Choose forgetting this world forced you to exist
Choose writing so you can tell the world to  itself for existing 
Because on the nose and blatant is choosing to continue on
Choose convention 
Choose repetition
Choose choosing
Choose metaphorical miscommunication 
Choose abstinence 
Choose nothing because something is really nothing
Choose please oh god choose
Choose freedom
Choose passion
Choose kindness
Choose beauty
Choose for s sake
Just choose
Choose life

Copyright © Ethan Klastaitas | Year Posted 2023

Details | Ethan Klastaitas Poem

I Saw Your Portrait In the Face of a Stranger

It was in smudged oil pastel;
Soft to the glare and rough to the delicate brush of flesh.
In your eyes were the starry night skies that Van Gogh never let go.
But above all: your gait, your stride, your purposeful amble held the life I used to know.

His face moulded like clay;
And how I remember the faces he pulled,
That could even make Mona Lisa give us a smile.
Now that I see his profile set in stone I realise da Vinci can't ever resurrect a faint hint of the face I used to know.

It's just like he said - the melting clocks.
Dripping, gathering, forming into black pyramids of every thought he ever had.
I wonder whether a face saves the user of its past life;
Or is it like Picasso always said?

The portrait split into a million faces of every person who wore it.
One in chalk, one in charcoal and a luminous one blotted by a felt tip pen.
In every one of these is the face of you that passes in the streets and carves a river through my cheek.
I know only one of you exists in the portrait but I have to say, from far away, in a world that I cannot view,
I spied on you and swear I glimpsed the face of the man I used to know.

Copyright © Ethan Klastaitas | Year Posted 2023

Details | Ethan Klastaitas Poem

Milky Fog

The milky fog of an afternoon glass
Seeps through deep trenches 
Amongst the rubble lies a reflection
Mystified and vaporised with poppies all around

Golden ichor is not for the faint of heart
A bomb fired years ago
Finds itself down your throat ten years after
The everlasting headache always soothes
But spirals infinitely till it reminds 
Of the glasses smashed
And screams that crashed
Of the men who thrashed
With there guts all bashed 

Shots send shivers down your spine
And in so little time a firework becomes a mine
The engine of a car is the tread of a tank
One more blowout and you’ll forget your rank

What friends are friends who forget names at a sip
They are the ones who remember the most
But must force a drill to there brain
To forget all that happened and make nothing new

It’s the golden syrup of gods that gives impermanent healing powers
If only it was had during the metal rain
If only you didn’t look in the eyes of the greatest pain 
For now the soul of death lives within you

It will create the headache which you drown
It will tell you that you wear a crown
It will tell you to suck the life out of a glass
For it will thrive at all the power it has

Please remember the heroes you fought for
There blood drained with no gold at all
The enemy is not there to conquer you
But to show to you that you still stand tall

Copyright © Ethan Klastaitas | Year Posted 2023



Details | Ethan Klastaitas Poem

Dear Death

Understand one thing and take it to death
Tell him of it’s worth and show him it’s tears
He will drench it in darkness and tell of nothing better
It is pathetic that no one shall ever see that you never mattered

Cosmic passing, gone to the galaxy without a blink
All that he never touched will know nothing 
His hands could not reach light years
But his thoughts reached further than deaths ever will

When you meet deaths loving inescapable grasp
Stare him in his black hole eyes and tell him
Tell him you never mattered
But don’t forget that he is there forever
An eternity in shadows 
His only power is inevitability
Feel the jealousy in his intimate hold for he cannot think beyond the light 
In our last dying breath we still hold the might

Copyright © Ethan Klastaitas | Year Posted 2023

Details | Ethan Klastaitas Poem

Events That Have Not Happened Yet and Other Feelings of Anxiety About Impending Doom

In three billion years the sun dies, Earth with it and the ring around Saturn too.
When will the apple fall?
Will it fall close or roll?
The apple rots eventually, the tree forgets and fly’s brains are too minuscule to understand at all how to mourn.

Grey hairs mean death.
It starts with the milk teeth twisted out, in blood and pain - experience is necessary for the end, I suppose.
How feelings infect the stomach then implode in a cloud of stardust that consumes Neptune’s ice cold handshake.

All this inevitable, repeatable for a few billion years.
And yet we worry of what is to come in the next fifty or so.
A death in the family - dominoes topple.
A spanner in the gut that wrenches and pulls and ties in knots all coherent thoughts.

A language of dashes and dots rattles with haste before the soul, mind, brain, spirit, heart and living tissue rots.
All the while pulsars rotate with a common rhythm but how beautiful it is that we must do the same:
To live and to breathe and to walk amongst start dust we must all just be dying stars.

A second in a black hole bends to a year.
A neutron star collapses a decade to a minute and we worry when or why or how the future may proceed.
As does Mars when his soul settles down and he marries, starts a family, then worries of his daughter’s daughter’s marital status.

The apple that hit the nail on the head rolled down the hill and was kicked into space to orbit, forever, Gaia’s deepest woes.
The same dust that it conceived flows through our veins today.
The pulsars vision of a continued rhythm is humanity’s constant dream.
All cosmic terror and dread, worries the same as an apple that is used to be bitten, a human that is conceived to indulge themselves in a pool of lifelong anxiety and a pulsar dreading the next time it beats.
That beat may never come.

Copyright © Ethan Klastaitas | Year Posted 2023

Details | Ethan Klastaitas Poem

The Sea

sand falls sweetly down
clambering over and through
in waves of the sea

Copyright © Ethan Klastaitas | Year Posted 2023

Details | Ethan Klastaitas Poem

Instruments

Keys pressed ignite hope
Random order permeates
Souls are touched tonight

Copyright © Ethan Klastaitas | Year Posted 2023

Details | Ethan Klastaitas Poem

Fields

the beating sun slips
everything that is green grins
frost has disappeared

Copyright © Ethan Klastaitas | Year Posted 2023

12

Book: Reflection on the Important Things