endeavor to sleep
sleep, an endeavor,
difficult things require preparation,
living a requirement, for proper dreaming

styles change,
in everything,
can no longer
catch your passing fancy

I am Gap,
says the sign of the four,
no interest no more
for what's behind the door,
just samo samo variations
on a four note theme,
been there, done that,
khaki is just so blah

you're H&M;,
four weeks, in store,
then gone,
no more, no returns,
ever,
edgy, trendy, and usually
quickly, careless made,
with haste cheap manufacture

words are like clothes,
patterns, cut, style,
oft looking ridiculous
a season later,
it's the readers taste,
ever seeking out the newest face

the man's words,
reversed alchemy, ha!
golden-into-leaden,
potpourri of variable seasonings
from gardens of  ancient seasons,
lol, stale, lacking efficacy,
now ready for a burial permanent,
deserving a small museum exhibition

too long, too long,
so wrong, so wrong,
for quick and the digital attention spanners
the easy riders of today

these words, these words,
so wrung, so wrung, so earned,
from a life's stories reservoir
an accumulated dictionary,
now shared with
modulated crafted care

labelled by the new zoo review
archaic, obsolete, old fashioned,
worse curse,
too **** long,
hot ****
if that's
exactly not,
how the man feels
his days, these days,
exacting and extracting,
too **** long

so drips and drops,
will yet be
canvas spotted and plotted,
for those among us
who
taste the music,
tingling skin with words,
cherish the artistry of
caring, workmanship,
buying the best of
what didn't come cheap,

stuff that can't be bought
in any store,
in any style,
the slow pleasure
of taking care...

gotta go,
new store in town
UNIQLO,
hope there is in that name,
maybe a chance, something unique,
something that will glow

for Marshall, the straightest arrow, that when airborne,
ebbs and flows, with air currents that take him to where he was intended to go*


Old Son

you call me that,
semi-factually correct.

though technically,
now an orphan.

perhaps
you meant,
old soul?

semi-factually correct.
the old part.

Proposition:
He is an Old Soul

the soul part,
t'is yet debated
back n' forth,
in the Senate of

every breath

every word

every stray thought.

numerous amendments
to the "bill" proposed,
but afraid of failure,
the sole sponsor of said
proposition,
does not call the House
"to order,"
for a final vote

the endless debate,
he pontificates,
is way too pleasurable....
and no passage, failure,
way too displeasurable,
a likely outcome

Knuckles

Caressing your knuckles,
Without a doubt the least pretty part
Of the body human,
Even the word lacks grace.

Yet, I'm pleasured by these hillocks,
Where your veins come to rest
From their long journey up from the ground,
For
The spaces in between those knuckles are where
The words hide that I mine,
A mine that will n'ere be shuttered.

Words needed to create another love poem for my beloved,
Nose and toes, ******* and eyes all regularly poetically,
Cherished,
Now I have knuckled under
And competed a full poetic body scan
And have paid tribute to each n'every part of you,
Even your knuckles...which I am busy kissing
While writing this poem in my distracted mind.

June 1st
Just now.

"five minutes,"
Edda answers,
"five minutes is
all you need to know
if someone is kind"
(dialogue excerpt from
Tales of Red Vienna^)

and I'm thinking
snap!
let us rephrase the question

how many
poems
does it take to know
if someone is kind?

One, ten, a hundred or this.
my six hundred and thirty fourth?

the play continues without me,
the debate grows vociferous bitter,
the voices of My Disunited Nations Mind
all ignore the Rules of Order,
each crying out
"just one, just me"

then a little one,
from way in the back
soft and small,
therefore commanding,
to the podium comes:

"Two
Any two
Pick any two
In any order
The first to know,
The second to confirm"

All voices stilled
as the proposition
passes unanimously
(by silent voice vote, of course!)

take two
pick any two
then call me in the morning
tell me how you're feeling
and if the answer to the question
is satisfactory

back to the play,
the 30 second intermission is over

First Boat


first boat off the island @ 5:40 am,
the sun, savvy and knowledgeable
makes sunrise @ 5:14 am for ‘late’ is
not an adjective extant in its stellar lexicon

a safety check, sunlight invades every crack,
pilings vested & secured, ferry engine hums a
warming, morning cranking tune, a sailors
favorite from the global ******’s hymnal

those early morning voyagers, who are exchanging,
one island for another, note their coffee steaming up
coordinates with haze, burning off, all to see the first
waves come to rock them voyagers to “all awaken”

sunlight then slow spreads its envision, from the Heights
over to Mashomack, rousing, disturbing, nudging the
remaining, for there is work, living aplenty, we who stay
to tend to the most appropriately named isle in the world

6/12/21
Silver Beach
Shelter Island, New York

there are the moments,
the F times,
far, few, fleeting...
fine.

when words do not fail,
but are not needed.
when the present provides presents,
preview glimpses of intertwined
futures.

when the children laugh and share,
the babies giggle out loudly because
the simple joy of being alive is
fascinating.

overused, even abused, I select
le bon mot, au courant
as all mine, reserved,
this singular time, preserved,
a summary word defining,
fantastic.

twenty words should suffice.
but let us compress.
can ten arise?
even three survivable.

I need you.
two?
need you
one!
We.

“when down dreaming ups” (Pradip)

a mysterious phrasing he sent,
the meaning devolving, beyond the obvious,
but slow like, as the mind turns and tastes
these words in different places, ways

when I lay me down to keep,
the dreaming up-ramping, the poems,
don’t know of absent muses, inspiratory lacking,
tongue tied eyes, all banished from the dream world,
where the poems come more than regular,
uninhibited and restless,
begging to be easy birthed,
oh please, oh please!

when down we lay,
up tempo do the brain’s creation ports
turn fiery red, agitated, masses of
tired, poor poems, yearning to be free
disembark all seeking a touchstone statue
to set them free to liberty

my speaking eyelids rapid typing,
placing whole writings in cracks in
the wailing wall, on my own temple mount,
where Hindi letters become stick figures
dancing praises to the lord and  stars and
crescendo crescents interlock their tips,
until one dream complete is downloaded
to moistened, ready lips, for I am up, up,

from my down dreaming





10/20/19  8:54am

~
There is no truth
That my name was Dr. Seuss
In a prior life

Signed
Ogdiddy Natsh
~
No matter that plain words
are my ordinary tools,
with them I shall
scribe the small,
cherish the little,
grab the middle,
simplicity my golden rule.

Write they say,
about what you know best
surely in the diurnal motions
the arc of daily commotion
do we not all excel?
~
me, just a poet poseur extraordinaire,
street urchin, word merchant,
all my verbally,
worldly goods expropriated
from the wind,
where your scattered thoughts
lie about, carelessly, unattended
~
Scout the competition.
Then,
Weep,
for you and I will never surpass
the poet giants who preceeded us,
and yet,
Laugh,
cause they thought the same as well
--
So I spend my cold, hard time
laying down cold hard verse,
can't stop, cause
it's my daddy's dying curse
~
Addict and dealer,
a ****** poet ******

when the celestial judges
organized and codified the
planetary laws, the moon
appeared online but
only in the month
of June

it seemed they,
the judges,
were literary bent,
and had an an
affection for
simplistic rhythms and rhymes

yet the moon,
feeling slighted,
demanded an audience,
asking for redress,
demanding a larger share of
the celestial apartment complex

"Why do the sun and stars
appear nightly,
and I am kept on ice
for eleven months?"

the august bodies debated,
orbits examined for
interstellar larger consequences,
and then concluded and
herein responded:

"Tho the sun appears daily,
it is dismissed and tucked away,
like a baby for a good night's sleep,
to survive its infernal heat

the stars, give light too,
a special twinkling,
but it is a cold, dark one,
that only arrives after
being in transit for
millions of miles,
thus exhausted,
they are many but minuscule,
and many invisible to the
untelescoped eye

But your wish will be granted
with conditions thus:

"nightly you will appear,
and your beauty will be
magnificent, celebrated, and
duly poetically recorded

but for this boon, moon,
you will supply the gravitational
push and pull for poor cousin
Earth

drag its waters to and fro,
an exhausting job,
unglamorous, even by
Earth's inhabitants cursed
who will see you as
a plotter, meddler in their
global and planetary voyages

but like the sun,
your portion, but half,
like the stars, your light,
will be white, cold and hard,
but lacking in sparkle that
makes the stars so delightful

even your appearance nightly
will be occasional incomplete,
sometimes you will be quartered,
even halved, even slivered,
and once a year
the sun will eclipse your  
entire lunar glory!"

the moral of the story,
if you think moon and June,
make a good poetic rhyme,
you gonna end up
working a lot harder,
pushing and pulling,
dragging your best good stuff
from where the sun don't shine

~for my naturalist, Victoria~

the poems all end up in midfield,
yellow carded, the game a *******,
0 - 0 unsatisfying affair, all the shots
way wide of goal as I search
for the perfect phrase to capture my

twiddling and twaddling,
fussing and haranguing,
harrumphing and bemoaning,
my very own Brexit,
postponed, the hard answers terrifying,
the soft ones, humbug and *******

incapable of lifting a mighty pen,
or a fully worn down pencil scrap,
seen better days, but now,
all leaden ashes, all fall down,
my natural pointer taps only gibberish

in my plain manila actuality folder,
the cut off dates, ignored, so they
cut me off too for good measure,
plenty good bills to due in there,
plenty good ‘orrible poems for company

the pile of to do’s forming a party,
social, democratic, and
anti-septic or skeptic or semitic,
perhaps all three, as they are two jowls
or two cheeks, too many to the windy

all this shilly shallying, or is it
dilly dallying,
is quite simply to say that
my rooted U.K. naturalist
a Sherlockian moors, traversing specialist
cuts to the shortest quick,
by jove, there it is, succinctly red beeping,
in my garden, awaiting a good boiling

I too exhausted from all the
“scrabbling with the day to day”
she so easily summarizes,
though my poetic ego demands an
Ameddican textual emendation

“hard scrabbling with the day to day”

or

just an all encompassing globalism

“ditto”

ah, Victoria

~dedicated to Robert Lepage^, a master at remembering~

~
we enumerated our days thusly,
each one was commenced with skyward glance,
eliciting an epithet, a blessing or a curse,
none passed unremarked, the plainest even,
acknowledged with an indecipherable glancing
mmmm* from the chest cut or purred,
quick withdrawn and quietly shared

thus recorded, our history disordered,
who can recall if it rained or snowed
on the last Sunday of July of 1998,
or even the sunset fabulous
that was its global signature signing of au revoir

of course, agreed, we remember the great hurricanes
as if they were births or deaths of our most intimates,
but the vast attended, unto mounds collected,
the ticket stubs of dead leaves, sunburns,
rain showered soaked ruined silk blouses
and pairs of good shoes, are not recycled,
but forlorn forgotten condemned men in
a life's imprisonment of an unmarked grave,
with no epitaph possible for no one knows what here lies

~~
written on Sunday March 26th, 2017  9:08am

I keep telling myself to take a break from poetry
loving,

But then life
And you, insert yourself
Into me,
Pincer and Fist,
      
I am ****** once again.
I am broken once again.
Poetry patches me up, sometimes....

But any addiction is bad, even poetry, even caring.

so Olson (#2), Honorarium

around here,
poets have been advised and disclaimed
the genuine praise of others get repaid
in kind, in k i n d

no, nope, not in
succinct pithy praiseworthy commentaries
that pays the quid pro quo bills

no ******* it,
a full blown poem is your honorarium,
you have torn open that envelope, and gosh ****, golly gee...
debts must be paid for the scales can not exist imbalanced,
until pieces of me equal pieces of you,

and I hate owing (for one never can be owning) poems...

Honorarium

this lonely business, never paid the rent,
at best, I hear them whisper, leave him be,
he’s entranced in other galaxies, breathing
words of nitrous oxygen, which has oft
produced excitable effects, copious weeping, hysteria,
and uncontrollable hyena laughter and
a sadness so deep, we fear for his retrieval

while
conversing with others in his head,
but when he writes of honor & love,
beware his bewitched bewitchments,
when all flu-like symptoms starburst all at once
the words are corded and stacked.
for fiery consumption in a hearth hearted fireplace,
word fries with aioli spice tendered in repayment

not a one lost, for those poems, though up in smoke,
lung imprinted, and breathed out into the clouded atmospheres,
dragon exhaling, poems roaring, stored and restored
honorarium in the crematorium of word debtor prison

an “the end” sigh dot dot dots the bitter end,
the anchor resting on sandy bottom,
at last, the last word, debt paid, honor restored

this, this
he loves best, when the beast released
and then returns to rest-in-chest and
await his next self imposed commission,
immolation in isolation...

The trouble with glass
Is that there is none.
Though crack'd, distempered,
From either side, you see through it,
Indisputable, the other side.

The trouble with love
Is that, even though like glass,
You see it clear and through it
Into your lover's eyes, yet,
Love by definition, cloudy, starry,
blinds.


August 30th 2013

they write me:

You know,
when I wrote my 1st poem,
at age 16,
didn't 'Love' it,
just felt it,
had to be said,
was the best way,
to write,
what I was feeling...

Today,
breathe Poetry
like its the only breath I can take,
physically hurt
when
I can't write...

cry, laugh, sigh, gasp
when read others works
but bleed internally
with words
that only make sense
inside a head that's
been bashed
against a wall repeatedly...

funny how emotionally
you can choke upon
a million words that
have no sound,
that can't speak...
It's funny
how you can't say the words
but upon a page they leak,
like a broken pen
in a pocket of a white dress shirt...
funny how the stain hurts...
for it's really not that funny


Reply

Take your message in both hands,
twisting it this way and that,
to the window,
to the spring morn light's clarity,
then to the mirror,
held to my chest,
where it's reversed,
murmuring 'hello old friend,'
this same message
in my files,
written when a
laddy boyo of sixteen

oh how came this message
back to me
so many decades later?

the answer simple,
some stains upon you
are bleach and time resistant,
for who you are,
decades later,
never changes,
and for
some stains,
I am grateful
that this is their,
and our nature too...

One whole extra
Hour of life.

What matter it
Be a mechanical illusion.

No, make it real,
No delusion.

Write us a happy poem,
Extend our lives further.

To those that good eve
Be more apropos,

When you awake,
Bid you good day,

Long life and hopefully,
Some new no tears poetry to read.

The answer it appears,
Not.

For this exercise,
Of filtering life thru eyes poetic,
24/7, is an equation, with a single constant,
Eyes wide shut.

They would sleep,
If they but, could record their dreams,
Precisely, securely.

Absent that assurety,
Without that guarantee,
Sleep verboten, lest a single poem
Escape unrecorded.

“of late, I have been falling in and out of love with words.” (Pradip)

Dear Pradip,

yeah had them symptoms too, pizza and penicillin, lost my sense of taste and smell, but neither helped, guessing gets tougher, when older, all those associated, assorted, amazing never ending, abracadabra, baptismal-bathing-broadening, buttered-up jobs & responsibilities when your suddenly taller by a new generational addition to the family tree, which means much more concerning, burning worrying words, you dare not say aloud, cause Shiva is too interested, and has too many arms, in interfering with your many small pieces of composure in pandemic days.

Sorry, buddy got no solution, maybe rubbing alcohol, maybe hard liquor, prayers on knees to a 57 variety of deities, try a different temple, start the week on a Wednesday, learn to rhumba, practice meditation way out loud, be annoyingly concerned bout everybody else, offer to do all the kids homework, buy the wife a new dress so you can have an argument regarding wasting money, so you can kiss and make up, heck and ****, you could even write crazy words in any order your personal dictionary commands, reorganizing them in reverse order, and then slapdash them together and call it stew,

don’t matter as long as you got the jaw jawing, the eyes winking, the people looking at you like you gone cuckoo mad, tell your children how much you love them in the middle of day, wave to a neighbor across the street, the gossipy one who always spying on you, sing some cowboy ***-on-little-doggie lullabies, interspersing a Yellow Submarine, croon A Long and Winding Road, and Do Not Forget to include Let It Be, preach with a whang damnastic fever to the street peddlers, then ask for a better price, by now your not-so-well repute will precede you, everyone be offering a cool drink, or hot tea, fresh paneer, really big discounts, the most comfy chair, asking what else ya need, tell ‘em a pen and some paper, please, and everyone will be relieved! cause you back to merely, plain, ordinary crazy, simply composing that wonderful poetry you love to
w r i t e
and everything is
r i g h t
in the world.

other than that, got no consoling words. Sorry.

Sincerely,

The Natster

I lie with you,
But do not lie to you.

I lay with you,
But do not lay you.

I love you.

Should ere death's day dawn come,
When we lie imperfectly alone,
I lay this poem beside you
That our love once and always perfect be,
Even if the body that lies
beside you is no longer me.

Wherever, whenever,
Good night,
Good man.
Ship to shore,
Send out the message,
Never complain,
Never explain.
Keep the demons private.

Sometimes, impatience is a virtue.
We, your circle, await the horn blast,
Announcing your return.

It is ok to be impatient,
Awaiting for the return
Of a virtuous man.

through grayed streaks of white wet cumulus,
over unpretty rooftops of a metropolis,
study my windowed
winnowed airplane reflection,
imposed ‘pon a worldly-wowed perspective,

set task
before me to:
define
delist
analyze
in the very simplest terms:
the best of me,

~<>~

‘tis the littlest things,
the kindnesses,
the slight grazed touch of hand and lips,  
the recognition of thanks
genuinely tendered,
well received,
in the ilk of all these alike
minutatie

in all these, and
the summation thereof,
these gestures,
their accumulation
so mini-sized,
so great-empowering,
that they go nearly
unnoticed,
but I notice

and it makes feel holy,
nearest to my tiny embers
of godliness that within my
container,  my spark,
and nearer to thee,
and thine,
and our mutual
sparkling


nov 26 2024
@ 30,000 feet
AA #2039

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/15/books/review/what-is-poetry.html

an excerpt…

“From time to time I’m asked, with bewilderment or derision, if this or that poem isn’t just “prose chopped into lines.” This idea of the free verse poem as “chopped” prose comes from Ezra Pound via Marjorie Perloff, who quotes Pound in her influential essay “The Linear Fallacy,” published in 1981. The essay encourages an oddly suspicious, even paranoid reading of most free verse as phony poetry, as prose in costume. The line, in Perloff’s view, in these ersatz poems, is a “surface device,” a “gimmick.” She removes all the breaks from a C.K. Williams poem to make the case that a stanza without the intentional carriage returns is merely a paragraph.

I find this baffling — as if chopping up prose has no effect. It does have an effect, the way putting more panes in a window changes the view. The architect Christopher Alexander thought big plate glass windows were a mistake, because “they alienate us from the view”: “The smaller the windows are, and the smaller the panes are, the more intensely windows help connect us with what is on the other side. This is an important paradox.” To state the Forsterian obvious again, adding breaks to a paragraph is not always going to make an interesting poem — but most poets don’t write that way. They write in the line, in the company of the void. That changes how you write — and more profoundly, how you think, and even how you are, your mode of being. When you write in the line, there is always an awareness of the mystery, of what is left out. This is why, I suppose, poems can be so confounding. Empty space on the page, that absence of language, provides no clues. But it doesn’t communicate nothing — rather, it communicates nothing. It speaks void, it telegraphs mystery.

By “mystery” I don’t mean metaphor or disguise. Poetry doesn’t, or shouldn’t, achieve mystery only by hiding the known, or translating the known into other, less familiar language. The mystery is unknowing, the unknown — as in Jennifer Huang’s “Departure”: “The things I don’t know have stayed/In this home.” The mystery is the missing mountain in Shane McCrae’s “The Butterflies the Mountain and the Lake”:

the / Butterflies monarch butterflies huge swarms they
Migrate and as they migrate south as they
Cross Lake Superior instead of flying

South straight across they fly
South over the water then fly east
still over the water then fly south again / And now
biologists believe they turn to avoid a mountain

That disappeared millennia ago.

The missing mountain is still there. As for what is on the page, the language that changes the shape of the void, I’m of the opinion it can be almost anything. One of my favorite books that no one has heard of is “Survey Says!,” by Nathan Austin. It’s just a list of guesses ventured by contestants on “Family Feud,” arranged, most ingeniously, in alphabetical order by their second letter, so you get sequences like this: “A bra. Abraham Lincoln. A building. Scaffolding. Scalpel. A car. A card game. A cat. A cat. Ice cream. Ice cream. Ice cream. Ice cream.” We get the answers; the questions are missing. “Get a manicure. Get a toupee. Get drunk. Retirement fund. Get out of bed. Get ready! Let’s go with manuals. Get sick in there. Let’s say a pet. Let’s say shoes. Bette Davis.” The poetry seems to perform hypnosis, the found rhymes and assonance and anaphora enacting an enchantment, a bewitchery; it seems to be giving subconscious advice. Get ready! You must change your life.”

when god heard Lennon sing "Imagine,"
it/he/she filed a complaint
with the Human Rights Commissions,
a grievous hurt claimed,
needing omission,
hurtful words, the spirit opined,
his repute, civlly defamed

a direct attack on his divine permissioning
and though his unverifiable existence,
a poor excuse for such a
sid vicious exercise
re his persistence,
he needed humans

the song to excise,
punishment suitable be arranged,
to assuage his hurted feelings,
canons of political correctness
demanded it be whiteout erased
as if history did not matter,
those visible  tracks of his trade

no atheist or agnostic here,
having had too many disputations,
face to face confrontations,
about the damnable ironic games
It plays upon "his" human dolls,
by this manic~depressive curmudgeon,
from up above & his vapored flighty humors,
sans rationality,
for god was supplied with omnipotence
but too minuscule an impotent allotment
of the untold power of the
sensibility of the five mortal sensible senses,
the all-in reasons or rhymes,
the electric grid
making humans superior, the ability

to imagine

Imagine a power
so wonderful,
an all-in everything

I am God of myself,
when I imagine

Imagine I wrote this


and then,
         I did

imagined that your crinkly eyes laughed
when your read this,

and then,
         you did.


imagine that

https://hellopoetry.com/poem/3983306/who-by-fire-after-leonard-cohen/

https://hellopoetry.com/poem/1844090/for-leonard-a-man-cleaning-up-after-himself/

https://hellopoetry.com/poem/3319252/never-lament-casually-leonard-cohen/

https://hellopoetry.com/poem/2714710/for-leonard-cohen-two-and-a-half-years-on-11716/

Aug 29 2020

https://hellopoetry.com/poem/2187204/all-ive-learned-from-love-for-leonard/

http://hellopoetry.com/poem/1833538/for-leonard-cohen-the-musicians-minyan/

https://hellopoetry.com/poem/3932910/when-leonard-cohen-met-charlie-daniels-the-devil-went-down-to-geo­rgia/

!!the links repeat below, so no cut and paste required!!

Shiv Pratap Pal  writes me:

“Every elder must be respected even if he is elder by a single day. This is tradition. Please let me follow the same. A poet never gets tired and poetry never dies.”

<>

Oh! this leaves me gasping for so many reasons needing enumeration.

The world reminds me daily by email and text, television commercial,
I am a privileged one, by age and right, among the most vulnerable,
so stay, baby, stay, inside your apartment and your mind where the
only virus that can come, is the one you’ve planted and tended all your whole life long.

Oft have I writ about being closer to the end, and this, untroubling,
a relief of sorts in what I fear is a new Dark Age that will arrive,
that will make writing poetry, sadly, an unlikely survival skill,
so I rite furious and furiously to give the best, the rest, of me, away.

Few are the societies that do not venerate to some degree, the elderly,
as if living long bestowed wisdom, in addition to an irritable crankiness,
(why the Inuit Indians put their elderly on an ice floe to die)
neither, both, of the “ain’t necessarily so” conditionals as wisdom deevolves and crankiness is a perpetual, a perpetual annoyance.

Do I deserve respect?

This haunts, for by right, we all believe it is
a conditional that must be earned, and not acquired by a general,
genetic lottery. R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
I do not, and a man who announces,
“I am deserving of same”
by saying this, clearly is and was not, or ever will be.

A single day!

What an amazement!

This relativity theorem, this luck of the draw, can’t argue with it, because it is tradition, somethingthat I’m well acquainted, because when I suffered on Saturdays, as an Orthodox Jewish  Child, who wanted to worship with the brothers at the Riverside Drive basketball courts, was dragged to a synagogue where he joked, they could of just inserted the video tape of the prior week, prior year, thousands of prior centuries, a previous millennium, who’d notice?


Who deserves respect?

The teacher, the one who gives it instant unflinchingly,
he who accepts a task from a stranger to translate
his words to a language he knows not even the alphabet,
indeed, a tribute to another, and executes it so well, but best! best!
no questions asked.

Who deserves respect?

One who respects tradition,
giving respect unquenchingly,
for the things that we cannot see,
only observe, come only in a size of limitless,
come unasked, freely given, even happily, and this is
why, for all of the reasons herein listed above, I give all respect to
a fellow poet, and pledge to arm embrace before tradition’s always untimely messenger says to me अब और नहीं!  (no more!)


                                       Shiv Pratap Pal

written one year ago, upon the passing of my mother.


I break a vow.
A serious vow.

In a place, in this site,
Where the pain is the fluid,
Is the water of the world,
The element that is crux,
The amniotic liquor of creative flux,
The morning juice,
The afternoon caffe,
The first beer of the day,
The liquid that we rinse and spit out our every day,

I will write about pain,
Arrogantly, as if there is any unused combination of
Letters, vowels and consonants left unspoken, *****,
Having sworn not to, for pain is cumulative.

Asking myself,
Which is greater?

The pain of creation, inception, origination and birth,
The pain of  wreck and ruin, destruction and death.

Homework Self-Assignment: Compare and Contrast

Suddenly, I am expert.

Creating a poem a day is very painful.
A poem that is the sum of
Reflection, research, and purging.

Once I wrote:

The poem is the afterbirth,
A conflicts resolution, an outcome,
Battlefield debris, the residue of
An exacting vision, a sentiment surging,
And your army of words, inadequate to the task,
Fighting to capture that insight flashed,
Each word a soldier, disheveled,
Crying, let me live, let me be saved,
Let me make a poem,
Let it be inscribed upon my victorious flag.

The poem is the sweat left upon the brow,
Having exercised the five senses,
The salt of struggle and debate,
It's completion, each word,
Both a victory and a defeat.

Suddenly, I am  expert.

My mother is dying.
It is a process. Days pass,
She neither eats or drinks,
Yet she lives on.

I watch each labored exhalation,
A subtraction, a countdown,
It is as if she was returning each singular day,
Every word e're spoke, every dream dreamt,
she ever possessed to the atmosphere,
One breath at a time.

Is that painful?
It is for me.

Now you complain. They're different, not to be compared, et cetera.

Pain is pain,
Whether it is in the service of creation, or
Creative destruction.

Once I wrote:

With each passing poem,
I am lessened within, expurgated,
In a sense part of me, expunged,
Part of me, passing too,
Every poem's birth diminishes me.

So, one and the same?

Nope. Yes. But. Cannot one be the greater?
Yes, one is greater.
When I lay on my deathbed,
I will exhale the answer
Into the atmosphere
For your retrieval.
Greater. Think upon it.
~~~~~~~~
Lipstadt-Roth, Miriam née Peiman, 1915~2013,
passed peacefully Sat. July 20th, 2013

Critic, speaker, writer,  
her fiercest feat,                    
her leading role, creator.      
A near century of memories  
her legacy, memories that  
linger not, for incised,        
chiseled in the granite of the
books, papers, and poetry
and the very being              
of her descendants.            

Her faith in Almighty,            
unflagging, for he did not    
forsake her in the time of      
her old age, when                  
her strength failed.

she make me coffee
on Saturday mornings

She makes me happy
On Saturday mornings

sometimes can't tell
the difference

but she makes me
on Saturday mornings,
see the differentiation

taste the differings,
color coded clearly,
she doesn't even ask
See?

needed not,
she hears me whispering,
in a foreign tongue,
vive la différence!

sweet to the eye the short ones,
yet oft, the short road to disappointment,
pervasive the tiredness within,
long in the making, long in the writing

.                                        Wherever (Synthesis)
                                                  t­wo years later...

"Don’t urge me to leave you.              "If I could, then I would
To turn back from you.                          I'll go wherever you will go
Wherever you go,                                   Way up high or down low
I will go,                                                   I'll go wherever you will go
And where you stay,                              Run away with my heart
I will stay.                                                 Run away with my hope
Your people will be                                Run away with my love
My people                                                I know now, just quite how
And your God                                         My life and love
my God.                                                   Might still go on
Where you die, I will die,                      In your heart, in your mind
There I will be buried."                          I'll stay with you for all of time"

(Book of Ruth 1:16)                                  (Charlene Soria Lyrics)


                                      Let it be writ,
                                      Let it be sung,
                                     All should know,
                                     This I swear,
                                     Where you are,
                                     So, I shall be too.
                                     Your hope, my hope.
                                     Your heart, my heart.
                                     Life and love,
                                     But one.

                                     Where you run,
                                     I shall follow.
                                     Now, today,
                                     Forever,
                                     If our bodies apart,
                                     If our hands cannot
                                    Grasp each other,
                                    Yet, still,
                                    In your heart,
                                    In your soul,
                                    I will be,
                                    I cannot leave.

                                   Where you are,
                                   So, I shall be too.

~~~~

Thank you all for loving this poem so much.  I have long thought of the symmetry between Ruth and the lyrics to the song "Wherever You Go,"
when ever I hear them on Pandora....last nite around Two Am, I decided to set them up side, by side and then to see what happened...and the merger, the synthesis was the obvious and only solution.