Sy Roth's Poetry Collection
Sy Roth’s Poetry Collection~
Bio: Sy Roth
Sy Roth is a retired school administrator and has finally found the sounds of silence and the time to think whole thoughts. This has led him to find words and the ability to shape them. He has published in Visceral Uterus, Amulet, BlogNostics, Every Day Poets, Barefoot Review, Haggard and Halloo, Misfits Miscellany, Mad Swirl, Larks Fiction Magazine, Danse Macabre, Bitchin’ Kitch, Bong is Bard, Humber Pie, Poetry Super Highway, Penwood Review, Masque Publications, Foliate Oak, Miller’s Pond Poetry and The Eloquent Atheist.
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Sy Roth
Red and Blue Cowboy Boots~
Red and Blue Cowboy Boots by Sy Roth A neighbor passed today on his way to non-being. A casual traveler basking once in the silky sun of existence. Cells once nourished became his bete noir. Read More...
Door’s Loom~
Door’s Loom Dreamer’s eyes peer into hollow rooms of empty chairs arrayed haphazardly in an echololic world, welcome mat to a terminus of somber expectations; spent caller in a midnight pool of clinging sweat awakens to a somnolent dream of anxious openings and closings creakings and doors bouncing noisily on their frames, doors crossing thresholds Read More
The Treblinka Miners 1946~
The Treblinka Miners 1946 So we think we’re dead And they couldn’t possibly take more from us But there they are Miners in trenches we excavated for our deaths They disturbing our rest Pulling up our bones Haphazardly tossing our skulls about In those skulls resides nothing sentient Our hollow eyes only gazing sadly up Read More
Persephone’s Finger By Sy Roth
It wormed its way to the surface. Pointy finger tested the air, Wriggled in a sensuous Fatima dance Etch-a-Sketching the crepuscular sky above, Shaming the heavens for what lies below, Marking its inky darkness While the tinny tambours played Among the pansies. The veiled earth held the other fingers hostage Like a bundled faggot, Read More
Listen to the Wind by Sy Roth
Listen to the wind kiss the grass. It makes little moaning noises Rolling in its breezes. Listen to the kettledrum chorus of prayer In the background between the trees. Listen to the laughter as they dispatch them In the little soft grasses offering no resistance. They bend to the wind filling the crevices of Read More
David and The Old Believers by Sy Roth
When they came They came furtively with their beautiful eyes– Their beautiful, gaseous blue eyes– Behind them they dragged their black sacks Stuffing it full Indifferently, I, Their long mark, I thought, An exclamation point! Perhaps an infinitesimally transitory Period. They stepped right up to the door. Neither a harrumph Nor a bark of recognition Read More
Holy Curiosity, Batman~
Holy Curiosity, Batman Nothingness wrapped in a ball of neurons, A metastatic cancer, Resides in the center of a fiery brain. Electric arcs dance round it Lathered in sun block—SPF 80— Penning it in, Carrier blissfully unaware Of the superheated magma Hidden in its bathetic folds. Insignificant insects wriggles from dendrite to axon Before the Read More
Liars and Politicians~
Liars and Politicians dissemblers toy with ghastly secrets and cabals those Captain Queegs roll their mystical metal balls between their fingers they bury the imponderables in the mud of the great flood feign answers to questions that sit like dust on their tongues, and like antediluvian arks leave a trail of bits and traces to Read More
Unrecovered~ by Sy Roth
Unrecovered Pablo, have you heard? Your head’s missing. Out there in the ether it floats now only a pixilated memory. Did you have some need for that misshapen Quasimodo? You painted him with that squirrely uni-brow, an earthy worm resting above those shattered eyes– one with a look of shock as if he’d seen his Read More
Smoke by Sy Roth
thurible mesmerizes while it dances chorus-line of swinging wide arcs kicks at the kneeling brood amorphous, spiritual wraiths spook them the peristaltic smoke a bulging stream blankets them in the icy chill metal senser follows its own swinging cadence beats out morbid rhythms of coffin bongo-chords that reverberate raise goosebumps on the suspended son guitarist’s Read More
Damn Fingers~
Damn Fingers Damn fingers want to make music… too old, too tentative, too set in their lumbering, clumsy ways to find the strings to make the chords hum instead of buzz. Damn fingers Want to find the way into the music Without learning the root causes for the sounds That make rhythms, Pleasant dancing rhythms. Read More
Mournful Awakening by Sy Roth
The mournful night is set adrift on unruffled waves Accompanied by a whooshing orchestra, C-Pap cello whistling out-of-tune. Horns bleat somewhere in inky refrain– Town criers that bellow news to a somnolent brain. Jarring sighs from the moon’s, dawn-light Crawls against dappled Mickey Mouse sheets. An eastern sunrise cracks icily through windowpanes Like scritching raccoons Read More
Culloden Kerfuffle by Sy Roth
Each to their own space, With little Room to dodge and weave, Hostile venom spills from her It meanders like a deadly serpent Hot magma wending its way down the slopes A wrath cascading Wriggling upward from a cavernous abyss. The echoes of a breach miscarry To die an echolalic demise, Barely reaching Read More
They Find Salvation~
They Find Salvation Below the stadium, where bestial games begin, They link the beasts – bears, bulls and slaves. Above the crowd yawps desires their bloodlust songs sung in basso profundo waves inky contralto voices mixed in like a tinkling avalanche of razor-sharp crystals to the sand below. Their fetid air, a renegade wagon Read More
A Russian Name~ by Sy Roth
A Russian Name skin, blue-green on the pier of her dewy morning dit-datting hope as a train slips away in the graying mist. tattered clothing barely clings to her withered frame, waxen arms clinging to a squirming, mewling bundle. green lanterns eyes praying to it in her sodden world. she barely keeps pace with the Read More
Peregrine Winds~
Peregrine Winds by Sy Roth In morning mist eaten by an indolent sun, she strode in the west arms robot dancing to the plucked strings of her shamisen. Discordant vowels, followed by non-rhyming verses wrapped in her circling ambulation followed along the path of her. Round the court, porcelain figure, her getas wore tracks scraping Read More
Join Hermes in a Sad Song~
Join Hermes in a Sad Song Like a busy street– cars dash by unaffected by you, a blur, walking shade trapped in a moment a captured malaise, snapshot–a nose pressed to a window Bill Haley and the Comets in the background taking them to a non-place and you to underworld palaces where creeping darkness lurks Read More
Limon sans Merci 2015~
Limon sans Merci 2015 Back-lotted those beings In a director’s cut– Eaten conversely by the darkness, Slogging shadows in a Bethlehem march, Above those inversely slaloming knee-deep in detritus And stagnant waters Green ooze swirling around their bare ankles Swollen bellies burgeoning Fireworks of the new breed. Their beings coifed behind the façade. Silent Read More
The Masque of the Prancing Mares by Sy Roth
The corners are confounding Should you come upon the prancing mares They are rounded smooth When I angle toward them I turn left– The turn right— In a confounding plague dance I stop They spin around to find a way back. It’s a perplexing masque A gothic black masque Dressed in dowdy raiment Anxious Read More
No God for Expiation by Sy Roth
Held in ungodly thrall Their bodies wracked blasphmely dry Loosley held together by the striped cloth. Typhus-infested, David-starred beasts Caricatures of humanity Carved into beasts of burden Only worthy of torture, or Zyklon deaths— Their punishment for existence Work, arbeit, toil, till death, Clock-seconds beating to an end, When they strip their striped clothing Read More
The Prowler’s Reflection by Sy Roth
The Prowler’s Reflection By Sy Roth The mirror ate him gobbled him whole swallowed him in noisy gurgling, burping chances enormous bytes, and transformed him into ragged-jagged edges into a mere reflection of some former self he has imagined. There among Macy’s racks, he disappeared awash in their spring clothing line. He skirts the florals Read More
11 Block by Sy Roth
The red bricks bear the markings Hieroglyphs of perpetual pain Clawed last breaths Etched the walls Their cave dwelling With their last pictures Frenzied wailing and the draughts of death Chill the night air where a Calliope of pain that cannot shatter the red brick of plaintive voices in the throes plays its discordant Read More
A Bowl of Fruit Still Life by Sy Roth
A Bowl of Fruit Still Life by Sy Roth They watched without segue. Longing to understand the idleness, continuous gazing at a waxen bowl of fruit tantalizing, they clung to it like lichen on the underside side of an ancient oak, like barnacles on the underbelly of a ship awaiting a keel hauling. I dared Read More
The Performer By Sy Roth
He brought his own band, poor troubadour, speakers and amps, two twin-tower ornaments for the back wall spilling platonic sounds in a burbling, aphonic stream filling in the gaps in the background noise of entrance while the performer, weighed in heavily in the front row fly casting about for his audience. No grand entrances, the Read More
The Trolleyologist’s Dilemma by Sy Roth
The Trolleyologist’s Dilemma by Sy Roth No embellishments, let’s just jump into it, just the facts wrapped in a sinister conundrum– The problem, first scene. The Conductor’s Question The tracks, straight, narrow gauge the trolley wheels tattoo a distinctive sound Morse code be-bop in time to the screams of a melody of desire to live Read More
Howl by Sy Roth
Ginsburg, you fool, I say Kaddish for you. I ride my camel in a desert full of camels, A restless marauder sitting atop a one-humped camel Led languidly by an infidel on a fusty road And you, bearded Gimpel, howl back at me. How lugubrious of you to dare the beasts To drown us Read More
A Gethsemane Idyll by Sy Roth
Street still-life by Robert Sundheimer What a tangled, jumbled mass of wood– splinters of wood, we gathered from the trash– its discards and from the old factories that lined New Lots Avenue. The piles we carried so lovingly, bundled faggots that we mounded in opposite corners of the courtyard that were to be our forts– Read More
Last Stand by Sy Roth
Do I couch this in nice-Nellyisms? Play games with the words to hide the truths? Or, speak from some depth of heart that questions So, where shall I now go When there is nowhere else to go? Let’s first fire the engines and go nice, perhaps Maybe they don’t mean it Don’t understand it Read More
Der Zug and the Waiting Room: A Tragedy in Three Short Acts by Sy Roth
Der Zug and the Waiting Room: A Tragedy in Three Short Acts by Sy Roth Act 1-The Waiting Game Fire and hunger had a terminus as all evil does, but for her interminable war. She remembered– Sitting stiffly on the bench, the smells of a humanity running hither and yon she waits with trepidation Read More
Worms Who Abide in their Own Darkness by Sy Roth
The soil speaks in riddles, a labial romantic dissertation of sorts conjoined with a frigid sun. It begs forgiveness for its unyielding grey—- scowling lips sings a minor dirge to the moribund who glide fixedly past the barren, arms-outstretched remnants candelabra that once contained promises of fulsome creatures spouting a glut of promises in their Read More
When Words Collide by Sy Roth
Original photography by Robert Sundheimer Grandson’s Trope Write me a poem that takes the veldt like a gazelle. Put the orange ribbons on the fence. Seek peace– He insisted. Do better than Ogden. Grandfather’s Antipode I thought I did. But the ribbons hung limp Unlike Kodiak bears ripping through a verdant forest. It did not Read More
I, Too, Sing the Body Electric Bellevue Blues By Sy Roth
Photograph by Robert Sundheimer I smell them Their contrail of ambergris and lilac essence Whips along behind them And I glide into my own port, Vagrant nonentity, Servile clot on their streets, An imagining, A boogeyman in servitude to their unsoiled world An affront to their weltanschauung. I sing their disdain Scratching my oleaginous head Read More
The Selma March Circa 1965 by Sy Roth
The Selma March Circa 1965 by Sy Roth we are all linked– even the trees observing each other in a surveillance of the crenelated march stepping toward the something wary of warning weary of wanting waylaid by the impediments they put before us until a blank wall an Ahab moment pushes back and we Read More
Moloch Rests on One Shoulder, the Other Waits by Sy Roth
Mixed-media photo montage by Robert Sundheimer We hear nothing with our ears expect that nothing — something– will speak back. One angel silently slithers like a coiled Slinky, slinks away across grassy, undulating plains meets the boundless steppes finally, resting, energy-less in a kinetic ending handcuffed in entropyless chains. The other shouts inanities in a Read More
Deafening Silence By Sy Roth
Photo by Robert Sundheimer Are they going to die like that Buried under the silt of time with it all unresolved? Are they a ribonucleic disaster, a broken string of DNA Deposited in a weary, weeping womb? The sceptered ones planted it in their mission to procreate. Who asked them permission? When did the disruption Read More
We Bleed Out By Sy Roth
Original Photography by Robert Sundheimer Unbroken string of invective– The world deserves it. It blurs our memories. No need to sing its praises When it undoes us, Unties the laces that bind us And drops us off at a station Where work make us free Without a ticket. SSN and its variables cling to us Read More
There’s a Map Behind My Eyelids By Sy Roth
Original photography by Robert Sundheimer There’s a map behind my eyelids. I keep them open for as long as I can Don’t want to see the map and Where I’ve been, And fear where it will take me. It’s a prognosticator, Projectionist’s nightmare Where the darkness hides In the deep, dark balls of space Where Read More
Self Ease by Sy Roth
Self Ease By Sy Roth A calm’s settled in. A field of cloud clover like a soft-green blanket for us long-distance runners to peer at. It wraps itself around an old soul shivering When the clock has taken his time from him. The world looked at with jaundiced eyes stealing what he had anticipated. Where Read More
Ballyhoo by Sy Roth
What’s all the ballyhoo? Just another day of Bali Hai refrains So carefully taught. Leaves the drumrolls chattering in a tingling barrage Calumny against a darkening sky, A tintinnabulation of caroling bells Rending a torn sky with its somber cries. Why mump? Why pine for the interminable Goosestepping mob that beats a hasty retreat After Read More
The Kitchen Table By Sy Roth
Words once slipped lovingly from their tongues Words beyond the newspaper and the sweetened cornflakes Wrapped in Smartphones Where butterflied inches once fluttered lazily across the kitchen table, Where dreams, cottony soft sno’ cones, Lay blissfully in the soft glow of the kitchen chandelier Where the expectation of conversation was met at a Read More
The Last Train by Sy Roth
The Last Train. Original photography by Robert Sundheimer with his permission The train does its bidding Chugging along the tracks At its best speed Bound inexorably to arrive somewhere With its bounty, A gobbled bunch of recruits to nowhere– Packed them in like silken underwear in a women’s boudoir Standard gauge track Iron bound, unveven, Read More
Schadenfreude or Why Banana Peels Are So Funny By Sy Roth
On the silent screen, the inglorious pratfall seemed so funny The kinescope focused on a man eating a banana Which he cavalierly tosses into the road. An unsuspecting man ambles onto the screen And finds himself flipping to the sidewalk quarry of a convoluted world When the sidewalk greets his buttocks, we erupt in Read More
They Hanged Him by Sy Roth
Original photography by Robert Sundheimer They hanged him to get his attention And it worked. His brain, air-starved-ravenous, Sought honor. In his unwhetted dream, He learned – They wanted to teach him And the State, it seemed, had won again. Determined not to fall victim, He fell victim to their god of purging, and like Read More
Scars by Sy Roth
Original photography by Robert Sundheimer Damn thing’s always there. Mound of deformed flesh A cicatrix that never healed completely, Raised blemish surrounded by distinct laughter of the others, Laughter directed at me. Horselaughs that echo from a calcified hollow Find a temporary resting place in the canyons of my stomach Where they circumnavigate Hummed at Read More
Making Entre Nous By Sy Roth
Original photography by Robert Sundheimer I want to cotton to the idea that I am sometimes a writer And somewhere in the mish-mash of the words I wrangle Lies the secret sharer, A mystical, maleficent purveyor of dreams A catcher of the scent of truth Lying dormant Planting markers along a terminus of eternities of Read More
The Balloon By Sy Roth
It wanted to rise Dance blithely along the rim of nimbus clouds Soar above the birds scattered in the sky. Fly overhead away from the heated ground. He hugged it to him Fearful of its escape And failure of its duty. The immense mylar beauty In thrall of the sirocco winds Sated with sips of Read More
Zombie Slide Dance At Shoprite by Sy Roth
Original photograph by Robert Sundheimer Glassy-eyed Rubber eeking Disobedient cart A red-river Slide to the condiment Aisle. Eyesdivergent To the tattood Ladies’ Birds-flying- On gelatinous Skin overlapping Above her latex pants Too tight. His leg askew March of zombies Hand fighting The cart Steering it In a last remnant Of sanity. Bird stops midflight– He Read More
Homo-Erectus or the Man and His Crooked House By Sy Roth
Center of gravity lies somewhere between my head and the earth Dragging my shoulders inexorably inward Shoulders like an antediluvian bridge, Twin spans of an armless mannequin holding back a spawning river Belly billowing outward from the middle Aping a six-month pregnant woman. Completing the picture, a sad-sack expression Sits atop a swanlike neck pushed Read More
The Platz Piazza of Dark Dreams by Sy Roth
The afternoon ablutions To wash away the daymares of reality. She sat across from me adrift on her own Congo River I, like Kurtz, a sphinx with eyes of Gilead. She dark mirror Eyeless beneath her deep-set eyes. We both blindly dance the dance of the voiceless Dunking our Oreos in tall glasses Read More
Her Riant Eyes By Sy Roth
Original photography by Robert Sundheimer with his permission 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, Read More
Quiet Moment Set in a Dusky Morn By Sy Roth
The hearing aids haven’t gone in just yet I linger sometimes on the quiet that the morning lays out Like a picnic blanket spread on a dewy grass And the tasty morsels of the day Fill it with mouth-watering expectation. And the CPap has been quieted into soft whirring rivulets of warm air Signaling Read More
A Barroco Fantasy Stirred in A Baroque Broth By Sy Roth
You appeared in unpredictable form, Misshapen Quasimodo, With twisted arms bent in elaborate rococo form Plies of limbs twirling in a raging river like a tumbling home Swept beneath a tsunami of wayward genes. You promised to run away. Scream your difference, Mutated invention wrought from inventive silence, A smoldering concoction Roaring your melancholy Read More
Like a Silence by Sy Roth
Simple Simon had a voice Time silenced. It lay on the ground Moldering, Hissing against the taut earth And the tromps of the foot soldiers Trampling the message. Goose-stepping hordes Fill the air with tempestuous noise Time-stopping ormolu clocks In their march to the wasteland Boxers without matches Belts hung round inelastic waists And Read More
Panegyric To Our Own Self-Destruction by Sy Roth
Our own words Or discomforting lack of them Slices like Ice-Age cold; Makes short shrift of our intent. We watch the black blood drip inexorably from our broken veins Hitting the ground with a thunderous clap. These words are just a burp in that time Obeisance paid before Har Megiddo Where the ort of lives Read More
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 Read More
Sonata for a Somnambulist By Sy Roth
Looking for a name. Nomenclature can be so difficult. A somnambulist’s dream Buried beneath a cairn Without monument Dropped into the darkness. Rested elbows on a somnambulist’s chifforobe Laden with the stuff of life– Mismatched tchochtkes– And tightened eyelids Waiting to see what might lie there beyond. Red blood cells became visible with the sunset Read More
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 Read More
A Bedood by Sy Roth
Metropolis automatons shuffle to their homes. A bedood of self-imposed acclimatization As the roseolaed sphere wreaks havoc Hacking at the plague images that riffle through them— And like innocents confined They whine and cry As the watch their wealth swirl and eddy Along the filthy gutters Glugging down drainage pipes Buried beneath their city. Read More
Another Eve by Sy Roth
So, the clock ticks Its ormulu hands Sweeping clean the face. A dial awaits nexus Suspended in the dark void of space Where the temporary inhabitants Hopeful, wait for change In an unalterable universe, Wear newfangled raiment, Where volcanic explosions rend the night sky, followed by quiet anticipation when the truth lies there beneath the Read More
The Rabbi and Her Flying Machine by Sy Roth
Her sermon—partings– A whirling dervish gyring around an unplugged drain— Played with those who listened, Those who tried to hear. “What,” he asked, did one say when they knew That a parting could the last one?” What would those words be? A challenge posed to those who considered only nows– Felt the tremblers of recognition, Read More
Theft by Sy Roth
Black, woolen cap readied For its midnight mission. Conceit– Read it all over his face, Churlish vagabond-etched. Sits in his regal chair, Awaits a verdict. For the innocent, The death of innocence, Abides at his side. Makes amends Without absolution. A cage once rattled Only contains a viper While the harem waif Resides in Read More
The Streets by Sy Roth
Original photography Robert Sundheimer with his permission Twilight departed unwillingly, And he fell to his spot in preparation for the shadows. The late night draped him, With his few possessions bellied up to his side, Darkness a shroud. The street gobbled him up. Cold seeped into him, Its frigid caress that blankets could not warm. Read More
Hobos REM #10 Dream by Sy Roth
Lennon’s wish, bagged in a green-briar patch facepalm of giggling vagabonds rattling surroundings with their tinny songs lost in a fitful dream— They wrap themselves in downy comforters against a brumal night choking off the light feeling gusty, somnambulist’s air roaming a frigid bedroom They dream of longing– dreams preserved in bindle stiffs crafted in Read More
Sabbath Bride By Sy Roth
Original photography by Robert Sundheimer with his permission Welcome Sabbath bride Doors are open for you. Yet, he could not avert his eyes. Instead he bowed low Could hear The wind whistle through her vestment. Queenly strutting his streets She passed by– She not stooping to acknowledge him. Enveloped in her presence– Her shroud of Read More
Another Newsy Day by Sy Roth
Another newsy day. The air is brisk with the flashes– Insights, outsights Veritable potpourri of opinions. And the drumbeat rolls on– Twittering nabobs Volleyball players spiking the ball Resting at times with ad hominem diatribes, Filth wrapped in their truths Both sides warring against the middle Where there is no middle. , Wars of Read More
Hanna and Her Sons by Sy Roth
The blank entity stares at them from the distance. Waiting to see how stiff-necked they are. His breath blew out a white-rimed blast, Frozen bas-relief of the moment To see if their sealed contract would yet stand Against earthly, royal forces. The Lord of the Manor demands They not drink from the ancient wells Read More
Last Stamp by Sy Roth
Julius Caesar’s essence became a stopper in a wine cask And I have ambition as well A veni, vici chorus of spine-tingling lyrics. Virgil led me through the door Inscribed– welcome all ye who enter. I want to become Essence exhaled into the ether Then inhaled To take residence in the corpus callosum. Become Read More
Beyond the Black Fence by Sy Roth
The land lay fallow Beyond the black fence. Growth once dressed in a white blanket of hoar My winter landscape, Or lush with summer growth in solstice, A deer-speckled backdrop Where they munched all day Behind a scrim of lush camouflage And black birds rested on the undergrowth– All coupled with the land and Read More
Are You Missing Anything, Galgano? by Sy Roth
Allow me a presumption to guess. You may not be missing anything. But in the seconds that preceded your demise You thought there was so much, So much more. You could swear with the last of your living brain cells That there was a whole host of things That you were unwilling to give Read More
Sour Mash by Sy Roth
Life’s a complicated mash Of unjustified inches, Scalded reasoning Fired in a blackened kettle, Unsavory mash of bits of this and that All twirled about by cackling harridans Into a steamy brew of their own invention. You know what? Perhaps it’s not so complicated Truth is We’re only a failed misstep into that world Read More
Three Stones on a Headstone by Sy Roth
Put the apron on and set the pot to boil. Splash the barest elements of life into it And cook it till parboiled, Wait for the clawed chicken’s leg To flounce to the surface Afloat on the giggly bubbles A gallimaufry of memories. Boil it down into a mash An indistinguishable conglomeration Of the Read More
Façade by Sy Roth
original photography with permission by Robert Sundheimer The curly swath of color Draped my bier Festooned it in saffron Christo color. Despite being only a minute, A jot of a being, They pretended my importance, They regaled me With their extemporaneous exhalations. Soft breezes of the mourners Shuffled the diaphanous cloth Until it spoke Read More
