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Helios Rietberg Sep 2012
Singing on the roof tops
dancing with the owls
preying on the ocean
wandering through the comets
soul by soul we devoured
plagiarising every thought
typhoons and their memories
pummelling every heartbeat

Choppy moments
And finding secrets

Blending on the side walks
chasing the tail of Mars
leaping from the aether
coughing up the stars
rain of rain we let roar
sipping every shadow
deserts and their reveries
pummelling every heartbeat

Colder summers
And clearing skies

Poems on the sunset
obelisks on the edge
triremes in the universe
clocks in our heads
hell by hell we traversed
loving every essence
clusters and their eulogies
pummelling every heartbeat

Changing meadows
And healing wakes

We watched the cows graze.
© Helios Rietberg, August 2012
Raj Arumugam Jan 2012
If I were the king
endowed with a sting
I wouldn’t be writing this poem
I ‘d just summon you to court
and when you are on your knees proper
I’d just get you to sing
a song, a poem
that goes:
ding-a-ling-ling
bling-a-ling-a-ling
ding-don g-a-ding-ding


and I’d silence you and pronounce aloud
be telling you then
none in the land writes well at all
and I’ll take your own horrid song from you
and I’ll be telling you:
“Listen to my song
Listen to my poem”

And I’d recite your very own lines to you
And I’d ask you: “What do you think? ”
And of course you’d say,
trembling:
“No one in the land
Sire
in all the wide world -
no one writes like you, Sire”


But that’s if I were King
which I am not
And so I’ll have to sing
and write my own poems
(except when I’m plagiarising)
And you’ll be here nice and honest
just laughing and rolling
as I sing:
*ding-a-ling-ling
bling-a-ling-a-ling
ding-don g-a-ding-ding
I cannot forget...
אני לא יכול לשכוח

©  STEPHAN PICKERING / חפץ ח"ם בן אברהם
12 Shevet 5778 / 28 January 2018
revised:
3 Iyyar 5758 / 28 April 2018
19 Iyyar 5778 / 4 May 2018
20 Iyyar 5778 / 5 May 2018
21 Iyyar 5778 / 6 May 2018

Shabtai Zisel / 'Bob Dylan' (1964):
'Forget the dead you've left, they
will not follow you'

W.G. Sebald z"l (1966):
'And so, they are ever returning to us,
the dead'

I.

the Path / derekh is silent,
a vacuum,
resonating with the
footsteps of tzaddikim, whose
teachings transcend(ed)
the Kingdom of Night...

where there was no longer
kefitzat ha'derekh
shrinking of the road
jumping the Path
teleportation.

...un die vvelt hot geshivign,
taught Reb Elie Wiesel z"l...
& the world remained silent.

not existing for themselves,
the tzaddikim speak with the
Shekhinah from their throats,
and the mar'ot johanna
visions of johanna
are witnessed by breslover
chavurot on desolation row,
murmurations of starlings
overhead.

listening to them, we survive
to walk / dorekh
the Path, with kabbalists z"l,
R. Chiyya & R. Yose,
the chevraya kadisha
the holy companions,
a derekh through the sea,

away from the energy vampyrism
& relentless phantasmagoric
cyberstalking of
the phantasmagoric Queene,
who engages in quacker
cross-contamination,
while prising her mindfully
plagiarising lips (a mirror image
of a death's-head hawk moth)
for a crucifictionist wafer:

a tax-deductible, copyright charity
deduction for ontological delusions
long after midnight,
clutching her cossetted Yehu'di
hatreds like
a perforated osculatorium,
because, שמח בחלקו.

    ****

Reb Uri Tzvi Greenberg z"l, 1923 [trans.
Michael Weingrad]:
'For so long there has been no water
in the wells. Only curses. ...& suddenly
the icons scream in Yiddish'.

II.

Light is the absence of Darkness,
to acknowledge Rav Rebecca
Newberger Goldstein.
& the holy slow train moves
(when it does)
sideways across flat earths.

consider the post-Auschwitz dilemma for
an opus dei natz'ri  who cannot grasp
the etymology:

prae / before + posterus / coming after
praeposterus / reversed, absurd.

did Shabtai Zisel / 'Bob Dylan' influence the
teachings of R. Yitzhak Luria z"l ?

III.

memories are stalking & ambuscading,
& as you said, Reb David Meltzer z"l,
'the Yehu'di in me is the ghost of me'...

& now the hourglass is invisible...

the windows of perception
to be peered into,
not out of,
as hairline fractures
develop in the retinas of narrow-ruled
yellow writing tablets masquerading
as frenetic mirrors,

never glimpsing tzefiyat ha'yeshu'ah,
the expectation of salvation.

& we are here,  
witnessing cyberian corpses
erecting three-way mirrors to their
obbligato and  mindfulness for girl
children...the mantras of a white
supremacist ****** ****** trained to
effect genocide  at a distance, his
audible hungering  for the  rapture  
of an endloesung in his drive-by
dark carnival, having no
farraginous self to say farewell to.

Lilith, the Midrash teaches, ate the
'bones' of Her enemies, but the
****** uses prayer beads as
majong ***** fired from his cap gun.

IV.

'she' stands on the bamboo porch,
thinking the lotus leaves floating by
are a reflexion of 'her' crumbling
totenkopfverbaende phantasies.

long after midnight, she shrieks to
a cyberian Mytilene, her mind so narrow,
thoughts are forced to crawl through her
fossilised ***** majora, which she identifies

as a personal luchot ha'edot, the glass
**** molded by her proboscis tongue,
as it fabricates yet another delusion
of a 1967 that never happened.

'she' turns, stepping onto an
embroidered nationalsozialist
matt,  'her'eyes a frail ambassador
of demure malice.

it is a moment such as this, when 'her'
desire of wanting to have been an
Auschwitz  Aufseherin, cannot be  
masqued  as a playful Latrodectus mactans.

ephemeral fabrications cling to 'her' --
an unbroken dance of impetuous
mirrors, as 'she' remains on the
porch, clutching 'her' 'we' aliases,

thinking, somehow, they are 'her'
aharon ha'bris...



V.

interlude / הַפסָקָה

Kafka z"l:
'I am divided from all things
by a hollow space'

Shabtai Zisel / 'Bob Dylan':
'I felt that place within, that
hollow place, where martyrs
weep, & angels play with sin'

Rav Yitzhak Luria z"l:
after tzimtzum,
the withdrawal of
'ehyeh 'asher 'ehyeh,
there came to be
halal ha'panui,
'the hollow space'

R. Shabbatai Sheftel ben
Akiva Horowitz z"l, 1719.
Shefa tal [Frankfurt edition]
3.5, 57b [Hebrew]:
'Before the world's bere'****,
'ayin sof withdrew into its essence,
from itself to itself within itself.
It left halal ha'panui within its
essence, in which it emanated
and created' [emended from Reb
Daniel Matt 1995]

VI.

sh'ma...'mir veln zey iberlebn, iberlebn, iberlebn'
(Lublin Chassidim z"l, 1939)...
hear: 'we shall outlive them, outlive them,
outlive them'...

why did R. Moshe Sofer z"l teach
'Chadush aser min ha'toray' / 'What
is new is forbidden in the Torah'?

the trolls here & what they call 'poetry':
collections of letters on a flickering
moon-glow  computer screen behind
a suburban curtain,
letters having no glyphs or sounds,
all encased in Sho'ah denial...

and yet. white supremacist sock monkeys
cannot silence the memories of the
thousands of Yehu'dit children z"l
burned alive on pyres, June-August 1944,
in the holy natz'ri village of Auschwitz,
in october country.

לעולם לא עוד לעולם לא עוד

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
...with thanks to my akhim / brothers & poets,
D.J. Carlile & George Dance & Will Dockery
for reading previous drafts...
...and to the memories z"l of David Meltzer 17 February 1937-31 December 2016
& Anthony Scaduto 7 March 1932-12 December 2017...chaver'im / friends
& for the 'or from R. Paul Laderman z"l &
R. Meyer Goldberg z"l

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
STEPHAN PICKERING / חפץ ח"ם בן אברהם
Torah אלילה Yehu'di Apikores / Philologia Kabbalistica Speculativa Researcher
לחיות זמן רב ולשגשג...לעולם לא עוד
THE KABBALAH FRACTALS PROJECT
לעולם לא אשכח



IN PROGRESS: Shabtai Zisel benAvraham v'Rachel Riva:
davening in the musematic dark
smallhands Nov 2014
Rebellion never tasted so good
These are the things I thought I knew, I sing
Plagiarising the familiar, sewing it on my tongue
We crept, locked doors, did the unwriteable

Did I really know before
When we're on the phone you playfully tell me
It was all a ploy, a clever ruse, me saying I had
so much to say
You stay on the line anyway

It gets better, they told us, and you pinned your
dream to your body
I told you, now you can relax with snowcapped
mountains on your chest
And you said, I will, but I would prefer you

Do you like staring at the back of my head
While everyone talks about law and confusing
things I typically ignore
Glancing back to you is my favourite part
We study the statue and then I leave to
read sonnets, you depart with the others to the water
The library feels empty without you

Remember when we were looking through old
cassette tapes and CDs and I put my hand on top
of yours for the first time?
That was rebellion, too
After lonely, after relapse after relapse
I found a light
and I held onto it

-c.j.
smallhands Jul 2014
How grand is the spectacular NOW
Its decibels and magnitude are
larger than the last and the next.
Oh, how fantastic is the present
Taunting and freezing and plagiarising
I'd **** for another grand NOW.

-cj

— The End —