Blood streaks down her grace
The face of a faun freezes
Amalgamations of war murals
Pains taking the mother’s birth
Breath of heaven’s light crystals
Eyes buried coal-black demands
Marching toward the ether’s ovum
Writhing in charcoal caves
Ivory missionaries smile
Webs of woe and mendacity buckle
‘Neath night’s timbre tottering
Into the behemoth blast of sun-
Rise into your Honor’s brass tomb
Made of glistening psalms splitting
The children of Earth into the chasm
Born of law and invisible fire
Wintering sounds of coalescing sins
All day long lone lunatics leer
At Aphrodite’s curved whisper
Mending the garden racked with cries
Feeling gnawing and gnashing flies
‘Til tornadoes of dust blow ruins ‘round
The universe in its epileptic gaze
Housing moments of our days
As Sayings Ripple
Clear clichés glisten in the water as frogs listen laying eggs
Snakes lie in reeds feeling vibrations of lions’ deeds
Soldiers march in perfect time weathering their weary legs
Until primitive pangs of powerful desires sow seeds…
Jesus’ voice morphs into brittle parchment
As Nietzsche’s echo burns scattered skeletons
Decaying in obscure crypts mute as hieroglyphs…
Crucifixes shatter and splinter piercing hearts of armies
Glittering in golden pages produced by plundering icon-
ography mimicking syllables of salvation…possessing…
Echoing Harps Accord
Invisible defiance
Interpretations of puppets
Dance sing marauding
Arts of the arc arming
Juxtaposed lingual congregations
Within gusts of spirit
Tornadic revelation ravages
The universe of concentration
Multiplies archetypes tilling soils
Fermenting yields of fever
Catching infernos in torrential lyrics
Splashing serenades in limbic
Modes made by marooned martyrs
(Within it the masque of red breath ex-
Hales holographic despots screaming
Humid vibrations of death schools cull-
ing sentient implements elucidating dust
Before infinite versions of a visage rising
Out of the black echo…)
In Mists of Mind, Mounds of Soil Cover Graves
Unmarked and alone, in the lyrical quiet
(the rambling poet’s pastoral prattles
Into the air of eternal echoes) unseen pupils
Widen and wash us in secret narratives
Of one-act, fragmented tone-poems
Bleeding keys and hues in vulgar descriptions
Curdling in crypts of limestone polemics
Washing day into midnight’s great maw
All ways are rats in the maze of time
Unwitting vectors of soul diseases
Exhaling existential miasma tulpas
Born of technicolor trauma scenes
Willed beyond willows and warriors
Dammed by damned king’s sick sweat
Reigning eons of etched law displayed
By chiseled saints of bellicose braun
Bathing dawn’s birdsong in metallic blood
(far… further… among the lies, lie rusted swords
Forged from freedom and rumors
Of glowing crowns atop
crumbling parables)
Viva Voce Spreads like Woodbine
As the fruit rots upon the vine
Blackbirds bask beneath the sun
And squawk at the wind gathering
Force majeure…death is the cure
The judge shut his penciled ledger
Aging and fading as years degrade
Into the earth where life is laid…
The Celtic bard intones verses
His voice smashes silence
Like a wave of rocks crashing
Into the icy ocean growing
And dying…the widower wit-
hers…the last light of dusk…
Within the Book of Life
We awoke to the sound of plunder and mystery within the language
Born of fire and desire—wicked as wraiths fading into darkness—
The taste of flesh fueled the need to hunt
Life living within fences and war…
…the mist pours into our souls and angelic scripts etch hope into our hearts
and parables into our minds…we decode the body of magic…
junk bonds and increasing divorce rates…
all we love is born from hate…
In the meridian a jungle teems with jaguars…
Mystic and simple—corporeal and carnivorous—
Muses wait inside thick vegetation…feeding a nation…
The horror of jeering Roman soldiers…
Christs’ cry and a darkening sky…
Diminishing Integrity
the slow leaden gloom of a dark sun in a quiet after-
noon…the zenith of existence fades and ghostly spect-
rums intoxicate leaving remnants of revelation within
the sentient darkness of night…
wandering in a desert
a soul morphs
into an eagle and a snake…
the human stage is infinite
voices ablaze marking hours
and days disintegrating…
a startled eye beams like a sun
in an uncharted galaxy…concentrating
its atomic energy…the codes uncoil…
on a park bench
a bearded bum
screams at crows
flocking and dispersing…
In Amber Hued Dreams He Confessed
laughing like a father at a feast
of Easter (His eyes strangled replies)
His is a symphony of flies swarming rot
a wake in the cool bleeding of dusk
the rigid face of the deceased blushed
cheeks of his cold facade look alive
as tears of ghosts irrigate fields of time
strange in its garbled wound spoke
mental anemones bringing forth foam
to appease a hued medley of a mesa
hewn from sands of swirling sensation
hooking into the worn skin of a lone man
screaming obscenities toward memories
no orator can opine on this creature
eating the meat of his sentence sent
to all infections mating in the trance
A Bleeding Eye Portends Disease
after her tariff a hand shakes maracas
mascara trails smoky streaks of black
heart failure concrete echo winter’s snarl
imbued with slathered ice sheets of sadness
marketed smiles blanched ivory all
Beings monitored by Arachne threading
the web searched by blind engines
eyeing our eyes with consensual lies…
trembling gossamer narratives
screaming beyond windows
and walls barricading us
from obsidian skies
of dead stars burning…
As its Bevy Bursts
(in a hallmark of the powdered king) within marshes
We march to ward our tarnished talismans
And spit on the bones we toss into Fate
Clicks and scratching thoughts
Crack our minds flaking lead
To mercurial rivers laughing
Rage brewing intoxicated law
With this ring of mystery guilt blinds
The smiles and trysts of bled wrists
Spurting crimson cursives in Time’s
Hollow language soiree internment
Beside the corridors of calculus
And beyond the gate of physics
Shadows recite sensual sigils
To pull us like marionettes
Near the bloody, darkened, velvet curtain
Closed across eyes in unending rest
Poetry By Alex Roth 