Alexander Witte

Alexander Witte Feb 2014

We were in the eagle's chariot
A collection, all of us
We were riding the eagle's chariot
every last one of us

The earth was a cartoon sphere
With silly farm squares
Drawn there, and drawn here
We were zooming into,
We were focusing upon
hills and hamlets
of my verdant youth.

The Light
The sky was in two. The light behind us. The light of June 21st. The longest light.
The light of 8:46 pm. It becomes antique light at that point, light that should not be around Light stolen from somewhere. Pleasant and eerie.
We were retreating from that light.

We flew westward on the eagle's chariot. "The West is The Best"
Looking westward, The sky was dark and decaying
The bruise of the summer storm loomed in the distance.
Western wind ruffled eagle feathers
A screech went off across the land
meeting and bouncing off the scattered towers
as the storms and their ally, twilight
stake their claim upon the embers
of the wanning year

Three times we circled a stone church
Then on to an old yellow house
The others on the chariot
Were seeing their churches
and their houses

We never met the decay
Nor did we fully leave
The solstice light

We held so fast
That way...till
Half-dying July

Alexander Witte Feb 2014

Old Conowingo

Old prophets ride on balloons
with their noses above their beards
Poking into and stirring around affairs
like my stunted grandfather
with his finger in a pine bush
stirring up the bird that nested there.

The moaning of the prophets became
The growling of a caged cheeseburger
Long snouted, glaring up at me
From its jail cell hole in the floor,
Which was the ventilation grate.

My grandfather hunted him
In full John Wayne regalia
Stalking among the mesas and plateau
Of 1970's afghan covered furniture sets
Which were the desert of his crust.

The bedentured coffee cup fell of the shelf
and broke and shattered, from that
The schnoz'd cheeseburger left,
Yes he retreated down the vent.
Which was the liberation of my dreams

Tobacco stuck to grandfather's boots
It was pungent and potent but
also diabetic and diabolic.
Some family thinks it killed him
Which was the excuse behind my punishment

The prophets balloon's
Their threads were cut
and they crashed into a pine bush
stirring up the bird that nested there.
Which was my grandfather's spirit.

Alexander Witte Feb 2014

Just East Of Passover

I.
I see the basin
The river
The dirt and filth on All

Some look like raisin
they shiver
As their world would shrink so small

I see the Lamb
The Angel
The Hexagram or crossed poles

II.
My mother told me to wear red on that day
Though she wore yellow
My mother told me not to yell on that day
Oh, how she curtailed a fellow

My father wasn't to be seen that day
At that time he was scarce as a swallow
I think my father wore green that day
and so unlike my mother he could never wallow

III.

"Ark.."
Shiver
Sacred Candles
The voice coaxed up from the mountains
"Love...Thorn...Cup"
Purple Tasseled Majesty
IHS They say. Were the others?

Alexander Witte Feb 2014

Albo's Dream Hell

What is it that roars in the distance,
O, mankind who's soul shall be made to weep
It is the bellow of The Lion
As he prowls upon his keep.

The Lion is the comupance of your sins, my boy
His glare the road to perdition
His teeth the the small brush
with which you clean the floors
of the stalls of Hell.

Janitor has one eye and
Railroad cap.
He knows the ropes
He has been long employed

Spitoon laying sideways
Shows the slow tenure.

Rotted tooth teaches wisdom
No comely comfort in
Convalecent Cell of Hell

Men in fedoras
The thought that
There are neons
and noir outside
And The Ghost of Lust

But none produces the tentacle tingle
My geriatric genitals swoon no more
at Turn of the Century Erotica
In that is cheap Irony.

Eeerie green light from gacious lamp
Shows spirits in the curtains
In the pictures
on the tin-types of the ancestors

"It is always about ten in the morning here, Witty"
"That is a nice time to be"
"But your favorite time was eleven thirty, was it not?
and also April and all her tulips and fertile smell?"
"Yea"
"It's March.."
"****..."
Did not even get capitalized because the soul is destroyed.
Beleagured.
Doomed (******).

Alexander Witte Feb 2014

Issac

The statue I built
In the Memorial Gardens
In mid June
By September had turned green

It wasn't supposed to be of copper
But of gold.
I never asked for it to be a fountain
But it was.

The water came out of the eyes
You can see the place where it ran down

Now the park is bankrupt and the water is shut off
His arm has a cigarette burn
and his open hand holds a crumpled candy wrapper
His green liver spotted hand.

There is a ***** word carved into his pedestal
The pigeons indulgently **** on him
By February, thieves will have taken him.
From the gardens and park that lay in disrepair

Man erects plans and monuments
God Laughs
Man builds a statue of himself
God's pigeons **** on it.
His thieves take it
And His good Earth swallows the memory.

— The End —