Muster Grace

VERGE of chaos, strife always straining to cliff’s edge,
SHORT fuses and fears ascendant reach for grim logic,
TRIPE abundant, speech measured by edge’s sharpness.
STOIC hearts must beat slowly and muster grace.

Awful

‘It’s offal how STOICs eat TRIPE,’ his
SHORT girlfriend complained. He replied,
‘I think you VERGE on mispronunciation, Miss. Treating a
TRIPE-eating STOIC as VERGE-ing on SHORT of taste.’  

The poet suffers from lack of inspiration

My first attempt wound up in a drastic STATE,
ERODEd my ideas of birth and death and fate.
Perhaps this second try will be more TASTY,
WACKY even, not like a undercooked pastie.

Nope, the thing insists on being WACKY,
a STATE of things I know is tacky.
TASTY it’s not, and hasn’t flowed –
it’s caused my hard-won lines to ERODE.

Gate to the Future

GROUTs peered at in cup’s bottom reveal what future?
SPURT of fateful activity, but where, who, to whom?
TOWEL from Hitchhiker’s I might as well wrap round my eyes.
A GATE to the future is every moment, and all I know is stepping through it.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/grouts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasseography

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/24779-a-towel-the-hitchhiker-s-guide-to-the-galaxy-says-is

Note: Some days you go lateral with the words.

Rage Cleaning

GROUT subject to furious scrubbing in a

SPURT of bathroom cleaning with Magic Eraser,

TOWEL, and loud cursing. Not even

AGATE sculptures in art museum given such attention.

Agate

Doxymo, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

AGATE is a crystalline canvas, a tie-dyed rock daubed with a paint-soaked

TOWEL and fine brushes, streaked with squeezed and shaken

SPURTs of colors from tubes and buckets. Even rock need not be mere bland

GROUT or gravel when in the hands of a Master Artist.

See more at Notes by Steven.