Three-Three Time Chutzpah Dance
Sam was not a large man,
Perhaps fifty pounds heavier than his wife.
She, a half-inch taller though, towered over him.
But what he lacked in height,
He made up in petrified chutzpah
Hidden behind his bafflegab, she so detested.
Chutzpah shambled along beside her
Stiff-legged, round the fringes of her existence,
A darkling hovering beneath her voice,
Murmuring, deep-furrow-browed simian
Laid low among stygian stars.
Mired in eternal evenings,
He, a grumbling miser eaten by the moon’s rays,
While spirits shuffle in like dowagers on midnight errands
To stand at rigid attention
Until he hears her squeaking steps approach.
In the waning a.m., he wakes,
A lonely iceberg afloat on a frozen sea.
He dares not wake her.
His warmth oozes from his bed
And he supposes, silently, that she might hear
His morning’s bubbling waters.
His head bowed low,
He seeks pennies that litter his bifurcated roads.
Left adrift in the dry darkness of a sandy desert
Endless,
Alone,
Enshrouded in a blackened blanket,
And the rising morning’s orange sun does nothing,
But kneads the back of his neck, unlovingly.
Chutzpah carries on.
He follows the day’s lead and routines
Unfurls like a muddied flag before his dazed eyes–
Trampled limp, then
Hung to dry in a breathless zone of muted days.
He skates past the days in a dance of daring curlicues.
Figure-eights helter-skelter,
He skirts around them all,
Shakes off the bugle trumpet of each morning.
That plays taps for his waking.
Clarion calls echo a death threnody
That bugles his silent brain.
Chutzpah waits in the trembling silence of all lost causes—
Zyklon B sheep.
Crossword puzzles assuage
Seeks ephemeral moments to stimulate his tired neurons.
The morning’s cryptoquote hides
Scrambled, a camouflaged secret
He keeps tucked away in a bag hidden
Behind the green fronds that sway in his sunrises-to-be
When lily-white suns dangle mysteriously in a burnt- orange sky.
He lives in those moments for the seconds–
The seconds, ticking time bombs,
Interminable seconds of an endless chutzpah.
Forty words when terseness if not his forte. So, Sy Roth writes whenever he can with verbosity.
Copyright © 2016 by Sy Roth
Randomly Accessed Poetics 