4 Restive New Poems by Geoff Garwick...

                         LIVING the SCREAM
 
                                                       By Geoffrey Garwick
 
Felicitations to Edvard Munch, Norwegian painter, for building wealth, fame and his beloved estates of Ekely and Ramme; and for being banned as “degenerate” by the Nazis – who tried to imply at his funeral that he approved of them.
 
 
On the jeer-stained bridge to no day,
Mouthing off, swallowing the possibly
Krakatoa light over Oslo’s Ekeberg Hill,
Where slaughterhouse hugs his sister’s bedlam;
Bugged by cardboard, technicolor munchkins,
Extracting death’s cowardly canines,
Dance around its fallen hovel.
 

Rinsing fragments of mint-flavored grit,
Chewing on it.  Chewing on it.
Eschewing wit, but still they bit.
They munch and munch and munch.
 

On porous death’s raggedy corpse --
Inwards spilling out, Moebius warps,
Love, beauty, guffaws, music -- joys apprenticed,
Rot’s root canal is drilled by dwarf dentists.
 

Charon’s toothless boss leaps off the Golden Gate,
(Or maybe Brooklyn’s Bridge?) as we nip, nip, nibble.
Flossing Tartarus from that shock-brained wail,
Our every breath robs Cerberus’ kibble,
Scratching time’s heads, folks quip, quip, quibble.
 
 
Little digits plying choirs of pliers...
Though the children died, each descant they sang
Pried painfully out -- one more deathly  fang --
Forgetting the Lidocaine, playfully,
Then we the billions of merciless hygienists
Swarm over fey fate in a Dada gang.
 
 
The Peanut Gallery swarms the scyther’s soul,
What time is it now kids? yells groaning Sheol,
The frozen life:  poppy, absinthe, syphilis,
Grow into chitin for Ramme's chrysalis.
His lover Tulla’s bullet gives the finger --
Middle, nitrous, tricking death to linger.
Pain tempts us all to jumped conclusions…
Yet when tots yell back, death reaps contusions.
 

© All 4 Poems Copyright Geoffrey Byron Garwick.  All Rights Reserved.

© Photo of the iconic painting "The Scream" by Edvard Munch, provided courtesy of Pixabay.

---

SURFACE TENSION

Sleek pebble stands
As pond hurtles
Past it.
Ripples leave
The crash slyly.

---

RICE RAIN

Throwing a hefty
Seventeen syllables
May grunt like a
Sumo match.

---

AUTUMN TANGENT

First snow gem
Glides shyly to my skin --
This glancing flutter may become
Warming rain or drift-sculpting blizzard.

Either way, Sistinely, the touch has been made.
So, if a hexagon shard melts on finger or arm,
Then close-reflected in the air-borne mirrors,
Eve-Adam grazes Lilith-God and
Life, oncoming winter and all,
Is, first of all, a flesh wound.

While the partners may be
Enchapeled in frost-fused crystal
For a newly risen sparkling,
Interlacing thaw drip and ice,
From confusions of finger-thin branches
This mighty now, this flimsy might,
Traces languid channels on my hide.


© All 4 Poems Copyright Geoffrey Byron Garwick.  All Rights Reserved.