Mind The Gap: London town

Mind The Gap: London town: "The Gang at the British (I stole it from another part of the world) Museum Things are looking up on the London Underground--Mind the Gap ..."

Mind The Gap: 'Ello Gov'na!

Mind The Gap: 'Ello Gov'na!: "'Ello from your foggy London-town travelers! All is well in the UK, especially now that we've recovered from our jet lag. From the very s..."

Dilemma in The Garden

“Es war ein perfekter Garten, voller Unkraut.”

Then, should I reclog this wilting bower,

For shame of nothingness sways the flower;

An ink-spilt contempt veins the ember’s fuse,

That no garden e’er blew such gaudy ruse.

Still, by some shunt weed about this field o’erlooked

Should sprout like Snowdrops as Earth’s foreign crooks

And stand anomalous by th’surmised foot,

That tramped its neighbour by its guilt-borne root.

But, some plots grow and by ages deed

Ne’er a Catchfly to produce from seed;

Or a Bishop, a Blanket, or a Foxglove—

Who, by her siren’s song, assays above

This incorrigible bouquet of wilt and wane,

That on dead leaves no splendors rest,

Save, by its cloaking tinge and green-sleeve fame,

To survive the winter in the hornet’s nest.

Yet, by a coarse and dubious restraint,

Should grow within like a rough formed jewel,

Without, against this troublesome stain,

Which repeats and stutters to no avail;

Then, should I reclog the wilting bower,

Or with a plow dismiss its flower;

Should I endure this devolving deluge,

Or whisk ‘way what weed’d dreams have wax’d to lose?

Perhaps Formaldehyde

He is an ancient man,
Machined by mangled trends, and ends
Abridged in some other lesson,
Pinned to a board still fluttering,

Held on display for scowls o’ critical faces—
Meticulous cuts and cross-glances,
Glassy smirks, perpetual by his penning—
But, now He does not fit into her bedroom.

It must be a woman who dies second;
For man cannot cry and dry
In loosing such hoary…youth;

Still, I believe I taste the tears
In this chicken just now fried,

Maybe, she left for good;
Maybe,

Or perhaps formaldehyde.

The Battle of Poet’s Tree

I

Bound in ivory, some in gray;

The old in yellowing dress:

They tramped in gaits of paginates,

Imposing grim duress;

It rung us clear, their quiet jeers

Had spoken for our flesh!

With sarcastic wits and wistful whips,

We held back our tears to cry,

For our little Race of scribbling haste

Chose not ourselves to die,

But Time’s little clicks lent closer ticks,

That our grave shall not pass by.

The Pages flipped and stood there crisp

In their ivory clad cloaks,

Staring Blank in an awful shank

That pierced us where it smote,

And the angry stone Medusa shone

Were the Pages’ gaze to note.

Each one bounding, each one counting,

Tempting us to write;

But in each chance we fell entranced,

By their great and perfect light;

For each blank Page had fought with age

To keep us from the Fight.

Irony was on our armor,

In a twist and fancy way

It glints and gleams a crystal sheen,

In a mock of shining Day,

It mocks the Light in leer of Night,

For nighttime’s when We play:

They then advanced with a cold steel lance

To brand Us with our doom,

With acts of fright in clever fight,

My Sabre struck aboon

The end my thought had aimed to fare,

And left the Page to swoon.

Ink black blood dripped from my Spear,

And my scribe upon the Lace,

Beneath my rage, and paraphrase:

A poem there be lain;

On th’blank grotesques I made arabesques

Like old age upon a face!

Within a dark synecdoche,

Found the scattering of Leaves,

That caught the wind of a hurried Sail

Speeding ahead the breeze—

For a Page blanked with faultlessness,

Is Metaphor in disease.

II

We met the Page with fettered doom,

In a bitter, tranquil fit;

We lock’d our grip to shroud with care;

Our lantern’s burning wick—

And like Seraph swords our Pen did bore

Our tongues in mighty writ:

We took the Tree the Poet sows

Splaying pages, spiraling—

Like string quartets of marionettes,

We draped them from the leaves;

We made them dance and watch’d them prance

In a Perfect mangling.

For what we lead a Poet said,

“Was the bitter of the sweet,”

What we had, our Pen had laid

Beneath our Nose and feet,

Some in rhyme and some with lines

No Man would care to read:

But some flashed Hate, and some more Great

Than the living word of Man;

Some had Span, and one held a taste

Of a ripe and tender Orange—

Some were stark and woke the lark

In a rhythmic saraband,

Some alone became as Stone

And fell upon the Grave,

The Epitaph—the Elegy,

Wrote us there before the Knave;

Lo! The Fool did pin Us all

Within a Poet’s Masquerade!

Ethan Grothues (2011)

The Ghost was She

The ghost was she who crossed the Dewpond fain,

Tho’ my New love didst not hear, nor question,

Across the Channel, through mist and rain;

This remembrance spears in recollection—

For it was I who found the gentle Grave—

The fresh dug earth in two hearts lie as one;

I watch’d the last drop of red Passion leave

Like tears the Night doth smear a face alone;

The Smoke is a sad place love doth wander,

For when it rains all Grey buildings weep;

Morose cornices like death drip yonder

To embrace a ghost Mem’ry treks ‘cross th’sea.

I glance a view athwart my chamber-bed,

And t’see her ghost, know I, to Love am dead.

Love is not worth a lifetime for

Love is not worth a lifetime for;

Only Death brews lifelong—

To the lips, coursing drunk, wherefor

Have all the daft lovers gone?

Love lost Her grapple for;

For the grope and the throng—

For the Great Lamb in Paramour

Hast raped the muddy Swan!

Why not lust one life evermore,

Than allow dust t’prolong?

Till Nature’s thrust comes nevermore

In Love’s blinding singsong—

Man’s propensity t’score;

To steal and have a proclaimed Prong,

To flaunt hither and thither for

Coiling Women’s diphthong—

They do lie well in double-score;

By speech, divides the tongue—

Emotion purged in loss and lore:

Love’s tale doth best Her song.

Love is not worth a lifetime, for

Life’s but a world furlong—

For living passion is cocksure

T’surpass in gobs among

The maid and the maiden’s door—

Through in and out, along

Slinky moans and a silk contour

It’s Lust in love’s sarong!

What is love that was not lust before?

Mayhaps a word, or a strong

Odor exuded from the Core;

Or A-night stand oblong?

The misconception lies, therefore,

‘Tween Love and Lust’s erelong

State is not a hair-splitting roar,

But the placement of Tongue.

Silence

Silence is more, or less, superior

To three thousand thundering horses;

Three thousand ages vividly depressing

Gold, metallic life to just know another—

Wanton of poetry’s frugal Coursers,

Three thousand SCREAMED!

And were Silent.

Dead Men

Dead are the sleeping men,

Dead by their marching drone.

Awakened bare by a bare word--

As a bare Fruit of a seasonal branch

Bare of it's yellow leaves--

Bare is the shrilling word

Of Death, frozen silent on the wind;

(Lucid men sing of dreams,

Sleepers dream of singing;

Lo, Dead Men do not dream at all,

Nor sing within dreams for it cuts their tongue.)

Wild-eyed, bare sabres, land

On bosoms made from Lust,

Glint Silver in a wistful hand:

"Make ready the cannon!"

Cries the Noblest of Muck,

Scrounge to face'em when rest'him dies:

A trial gun and the saving crumbs pluck,

And the naked ape sighs

On the World's crank, "Yo! Ho!"

As the call of Death wakes the cock.

Economic cannons

Blast brigades of Dead Men,

As a sabre splays reddened mead

From a grayish globe spurting steam, laying

Dreamers beneath as seed;

Scythed weeds for a crooning plot,

Though, Dead Mean sing no Songs:

…And the dead men are the lost men;

The working men of Nature's slumber;

These irate men with pirate gin

Grow cold in their waste and plunder.

But with a wistful grin and wishful eye

They throe and take for Pride,

And the wistful cringe is a fleeting Sin

Upon the beggar who's ready to die...

But dead are the sleeping

Men; heaving more debt for bread.

Their scaly yearns as sorrow's clash

Dismay; lost by lows of a deeper rung,

And with a croaking lung

On an awkward bier,

They speak, "Silence," and no one hears.

With a dying tongue they speak their greatest word;

Of Dead Men dying, no one's ever heard.

Sometimes a red-garden grows

Sometimes the moment lies

And sometimes with lament' eyes;

Sometimes a wolf bears its teeth

And a fire’s like a romance be.

Sometimes these moments cast away

That time so catches life to say,

Sometimes love's rosebuds do not grow

For lovely rose seedlings grew too slow.

For love like growing roses rest,

In chlorine and sometimes zest,

These reddened shapes seduced and sexed

As morphine and most-times vexed!

Oh, my love by sweet garden’s light,

Thou but hold this stem e’en by fright,

That livened stamens rise to treat,

Thy inner pistil as thighs unmeet.

And dost thou gentle fires burn,

Alas! Fresh that sponge red-fluids churn,

‘gainst ravish, that thou may not begat,

Permit this throb betwixt our love’s contract.

Sometimes the moment truthful dies,

And sometimes with whitened lies,

Sometimes a leopard rears a beast,

And through the mud for one at least.

Sometimes a red-garden grows,

But youth passes too swiftly too denote

Thy beauty’s spring-shape into autumn,

For love grows sometimes in the bottom.

Lip-String

There is a stretching from lip to a lip

Like a rope-bridge from the hearts to the hip,

And swings of the weight from spirit to limb;

That betroths the love-drip, a lip to a lip.

To hold such a Peach to the teeth and rim,

For the gushing o’ flavors abreast to stem—

The golden ravishing of the limbs to feet;

For the long-hour comes a moment too grim.

The tight-ropes to those bridges compete,

As the blood in flourishing stands complete.

That Love ne’er tends to know of the living,

For one must in his heart of lusting deplete.

Oh! Gentle caress o’ her silver lip-string,

And mine eye so closed, now of all seeing,

The sal’vation on Her softened lips state—

Doth twine with mine own spi't and wellbeing:

"Love-knot of Our lip-string like threads of the Fates

Through fickle, shall tie Us together through Hate."

The Mad Satyr

I wrote this because

I forgot that it didn’t matter;

That I wrote this to destroy

The unanimous spatter,

The clatter, and battered,

For the batch of mediocrity

I choose to shatter

And tear to tatters.

Mad, mad, mad, mad-hatters

Might think me a bit madder,

From the height I blabber

To the depths from a ladder

Borne from entrails of the nagger

And it’s nagging.

I wrote this to fill a void,

A blank page too much destroys,

Like Death’s silence louder than noise.

Have you dyed the coffin splatter

Black with the make-up platter?

Are you too shook-up to look up

From the words and page-up

To the definition, a fuck-up

With the red squiggle;

Is your page filled-up…

Yet?

Have you crushed the norm,

So it clutches the morn,

Enticing the storm,

And the Dawn borne

to night too close to the morn-

-ing star?

Be warned…

I wrote this page as a mentalist;

Fundamental and existential;

Archaic damnation on a scroll

Too quick before the Act, and the troll

Beneath your bridge

Rewrote this page

To near the ending of Earth’s menstrual

Cycle, bleeding from its Magna Carta

Clam; seeding new life, Constitution-ally

Devoid of righteous seething,

Breathing out, exhaling gold dust

For oxidized iron manacles;

Dig on X the skin-map says:

On the mark painted bright

By a stale breeze of the laughing drunk,

Told by the Miller daft before a Knight;

Calm by the fire, forged to quill-pen writing,

From third-word tongue and two-cent

Lung, equivalent solidity

Of cigar smoke rising from the lips,

Warmed by improvisations that

Black-balled humanity far from the oyster’s

Pearl just around the corner, how Sailors

Think in secret and in push, to whaler-

Obsessions and those great white collar

Delusions of happier finds,

From a polymer moral to the plastic

Conclusion; pewter as silver,

And silver are all dreams buried

Tarnished and decomposing.

Dig on the X the Earth-map says:

Can you dig?

Can you dig?

Or is the shade to dark

For the growing tree’s bark;

Stark in the plight,

And a lark blots the Sun.

Where did it go—Life—?

You dug to long;

Low, but not deep enough

And blotted out the Sun!

There is no treasure left,

There’s no pleasure left,

There is no measure left,

Or cleft notations to subjugate

The silence left

When the Music quit ringing,

And now the mind is reeling,

For reality and death grows

Closure and out of Nothing

Grew lament for a living Done;

What’s left of you, what's left of Man,

What’s left of All when you blot out the Sun?

I wrote this to interrupt a page,

To disrupt perfection and mock

Its colonic indifference:

The Mad Satyr, sings for his fare,

His wage for a boat ride’s sage,

To pass the journey’s foreboding way,

Oh Fate; that delivered the Great Papyrus,

I give it back for the Fire, and the Pain,

For the wretched and depraved,

For the purity, the knave and the fits—

I interrupted God once…

When I shattered the clay pot,

He could never fix.

The Day of The Drone

This Day is growing for the serving drones;

The time of empty homes and worry stones.

Apollo’s ember now burns here colder,

Ragged by Hephaestus’ icy hammer

Humanity’s renowned virtue belies Hope,

Vanity, ousted by a crueler note.

Rung from the un-tuned Bell Tower,

And hung from gallows in the Arty Bower!

Death’s gentle irony affixed pleasure—

Let the Meek take the lead measure;

The hive is ridden of plastic followers,

The Queen has died; the nest is hollow-er.

I Recompense

I reciprocate with recompense

Your racial tone and free two cents,

With idle hands and pallor skin—

I recompense, I recompense.

I recompense for being trite

For all your Hate and all my plight;

To do a job and do it right—

I recompense, I recompense.

I recompense my German-look,

The Dutch last name my Fathers took,

My bloody hands your Devil shook—

I recompense, I recompense.

I recompense entitlement,

Reparations from the Government;

My entire life in sufferin’—

I recompense, I recompense.

I reckon Hell and reel your slack,

As sweat and Pain run down my back,

Pardon me for what I lack—

I recompense, I recompense.

I recompense the Crumbs you drop,

Your Crystal Stair that I ain’t got;

To feed, as you just waste a Crop—

I recompense, I recompense.

I recompense the Laws you bent,

My tired back, my angry vent;

I’m held like you between Their splint—

I recompense, I recompense.

I recompense for being White,

‘Take care of me, no room for I.”

You can’t tolerate my Bitch and gripe;

I recompense…

I recompense this dirty glass,

This depleting drink, the worthless Flask,

This worn-out speech, your tit-for-tat,

I recompense…

I recompense your money stack,

Your racial brand across my back

Fuckin’ A’ that’s where it’s at

This recompense; my recompense.

Amethyst Grave

Her Moonstone Jewel shined nothing like the Sun;

Festoon'd remembrance as the maidens reap-

Cool Jade mind-struck, her ghastly pen did stun,

And pricked my awful finger’s ancient leap.

Mauve—betwixt the Flower’s idle stemming,

I beheld what thieving gems did lie with aim!

And stayed before Time had found me swimming,

About Her stolen pendant all the same:

I said, “it’ll sleep,” anon dying mem’ry,

That hast swooned what Life the Mirror bade;

Beyond my reminiscent Ministry,

I’d betrothed her mourning, amethyst grave!

In the Shadow of Man

Complexion in the Early colors' rift,
Burning, arid climax of the present
Hangings; divided by their Numbered Lift,
That by being, created their presence—

The lamb lies calm before the parting stream,
O’er the mead by the thunder ascending,
Thou made Thee of Thine owns temporal scheme,
By that ember now coldly descending—

Is it not by this Sum weave arrived;
Divulging the illusion into being,
Relating the Myth our Shade contrived,
To cure Us from Its irresponsible-sting?

They've taken us away to come of Age,
Severing our Pistil-bonds and haven,
Introducing foul, the toxic pollen Rage;
Dwarfed the Lovers to suckle the Stamen,

We've the Circles of nobler critique;
The Snake to a Rabbit's finer mergence,
And We draw of our mean's antiquity
Within the drift of those Ancient currents;

The tinge of obscurity shaded White—
An ebb and flow of Plastic existence—
Pines the dirty creatures and dingy Night
In their inability for persistence.

The sword that didst cleave Lust from Love,
Smote in twine, the clay-mold: Mother from Child;
Didst stain cheap its Manhood reeling Above,
Castrating all of the Beasts in the Wild!

What is the essence and greatness of God;
Or the vastness and grandeur of Its brand?
What’s the Nature and splendor of a God
But a fraction in the shadow of a Man…

“Are You Still There?”

(A tribute to Jim)

There are no more spectacular words,

No more Giants; no more Curds,

From the Ancient Towers of Bone,

They left and built their Gods of Stone:

“Are you still there?”

Where have you gone? Is it time?

By the grain that turns an hour; where?

We've been, to do and gone to fly.

There are no more evidential moors,

Tied to the docks Mem’ry erased,

Across the transparency through the doors—

They ne’er existed; created to be debased.

“Are you still there?”

Behind the blinds of Origin

By the pound, the dust of Angels—

Smooth-winged fiends foragin’—

And the clowns blatantly fake,

They shake and they tease, and ask,

“Are you still there?”

We’ve gathered here today to wait.

Wait, the dead are all silvery songs,

The tongues find the night to speak,

And the glory that hast been and gone;

We’re fed from hands that clean our beaks,

The artist’s paint brush,

And the tenor’s voice;

The strummer’s guitar,

And the drunkard’s choice--

Where’s the innovative; the unique?

Where is the pioneer, and the novel?

Where is all the Originality;

Sickly, dying in its infancy.

There are no more spectacular words,

The envisioned minds have killed them all;

There are no more independent chords,

Simply nuances in their fences and their stall.

Demise is clad in mediocrity,

In the lines of a confused maelstrom;

Nature’s besmirched by idiocy,

In the cool Winter spring’s kingdom.

The burdened beasts we have consumed,

The nature of our distant light; fumed,

Here plumed like the mountain sheep’s horn,

Now fading the embers that delights the Morn,

“Are you still there?”

A writer to a reader wrote,

“Are you still there?”

Death, the poet, alas, hast spoke.

A Friendly Voice

I heard a voice so distant, yet so fair,
Not gathered, but sing’lar beyond compare;
Somewhere, not too far from here, somewhat;
Too staggered, half-spectral, be gone, but here.

What this chant possessed; from my ear distraught,
And I ought not to stop this being-not so wrought,
Now mine own stutter refrained eerily,
How in me this disembodiment has caught.

I’ve never heard such this spoken medley,
“Light from off the darkened foreground!” said he,
“Spite the ruffled gravitas, and vague tweet!”
I’ve ne’er heard such this ravened melody.

T’was but on that solemn day’s lonely street,
What so fair a day this voice to me did greet,
I, but some wayfaring stranger, wholly poor,
Was out o’ my superstitious head to meet.

Th’wind wafted wearily anon before,
Like through ancient trees on a windy shore;
Or the blunderings in a farewell to lust,
Wonders twisting to be heard nevermore.

Ghastly-toned from across Nature’s crust;
That which Time has buried in the rust,
This voice, friendship so long ago forgot,
Yet, on a Frequency playing through Dust.

A Toast To The Imbecile

I have diverted syntax in the way of

Drinking; that ‘round the dull’d climax thereof;

Thinking in the way of repetition,

As the Elephants of Inebriation,

Simple-small afloat the daft deluge,

Pining in a refute of discourse;

Justification in the bottle's refuge,

As the ample bite of the Serpent's chord;

We slur obvious ambiguity

With the pleasure of a fiercer burn,

Dexterity in measured levity,

Like Human ash, scorched and weighed for the urn.

Let us go, that we may no longer see,

Cool out of a draft's amber desire;

Within the comp'ny of the Lesser Key,

And Hark the tune of the Stool and the Lyre:

A toast to many a drowned imbecile,

That the Dead may go with such luck,

Out o' Life's tormented spoke and axle,

Let us drink to the comforts o' the muck!

Prophesy

Shall we not take heed this Visions’ call?

Of the lost sons and the dying tree,

In the missing girl and the Great Fall;

Shall we not take need o’ this Prophesy?

Procure the skin-shed as We stand waiting,

Longing for the truthful bones to return.

The sky ties back and juts the clouds raining,

All the peasants call for the Flood Urn;

“Mother, sweet Mother, what hast in time done

We?” they cry, “Mother, o’ Mother, spare Us

Please!” “We know better than to stand alone.”

Adolescent lint denotes th’sandy crust,

Great psyches reach from Forethought’s collective scheme,

(Diverted Mass shall catch the furious deluge);

A Mystic calls through a reed fence meme,

Peckham’s Prophet hast lent a ported rouge:

Alas! Deliver thyself from Thyself!

Canst thou not lie bawdy-faced to the Muse?

Dance the Trickster’s dance; celebrate in stealth,

The worship of the Noble ones’ Virtues—

Naked as the Maenads in ritual,

The Wine sours into turpentine;

Make thy Sacrifice habitual,

Seraphim gestures have turn’d Serpentine;

By all the Nature of things Above and Below

The maiden flower breathes Life’s last breath;

As a token of the Lord’s false control,

Hast put all Beautiful creatures to Death!