Brewlettante

GODLY is next to cleanly, or is that reversed?
LAGER is a beer that takes time.
STEEL wool is what he uses to clean the vats.
GROWLs to himself to try to keep things clean to start another batch.

The landlord inspects

CROSS is how I’d describe myself, looking at the apartment:
STAINs down the walls that haven’t come from any natural process;
TATTY wallpaper – last time I checked it was intact – and the
MOULT of some unfortunate bird left to die in a stinking cage.      

Massacre

Around the time Jesus was born, those mothers who had given BIRTH
to boys of a similar age, saw their precious darlings SLAIN
by Herod, the supposed Great, a man jealous of power, but not hot
on ETHICs;
when it comes to power, corruption seeps in, and makes all vile men ALIKE.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (painted 1565-7)
Kings Closet, Windsor Castle

[So graphic was the original painting that many of the slaughtered children were painted over in the early 17th century so that they appear as bundles, or food on the ground, or even animals. The alterations have been left in subsequent cleanings since they are now regarded as ‘historically significant,’ though they reduce the impact of the original considerably. Notes from the Royal Collection Trust.]

Ethic for Thee

ETHIC: a thing, it seems, describing a system for others.
ALIKE for self? Hardly. Self is under the rule of self. But they? From
BIRTH they owed it to be good, to be right, to serve a higher good.
SLAIN, though, the good for self. Good is what the self wants.

The New Ethic

ETHIC of the cross treats friend and enemy

ALIKE, which is to love, as the

BIRTH, parables, miracles of the one

SLAIN showed, turning enemy into friend.

The other Ralph

The bloke who comes to add the GROUT
is, truth to tell, a little STOUT.
He bends like an elf with RIGOR
Mortis, and tells me that his name is RALPH.