Synagogue Graffiti

The kitchens of Belsen are belching again.

Ancient chefs, puffed hats askew,

storm once more

the catwalks swaying.

When the ovens are full,

the chefs dig pits

in the kitchen floor, set

silver spits, roast fryer thin

the legs and wings they’ve

cleaned and cleavered. Yes,

the kitchens of Belsen are belching again.

Sax Named Pegasus

He had that not-interested-come-hither look
with a too-cool-to-smile upward nod,
shaggy beast with bad ass tattoos
flexing as he stroked the cue.

She was the pocket watch, bend-over girl,
with a love-me-deadly Daddy-done-me-wrong-pout.
No teeth flashed, but fangs were visible.
The prowl was on and I sat in the corner

Stirring my stories with a straw that sucked characters

from bars. Needed something to soothe the burn
in my gut, watched the exit like a hungry badger,
ready to bite at fresh air if it slapped me in the face.

Don’t like cigarettes, but smoke swirled a mean
dream around scenes that came alive in this marijuana
dojo where karate matches looked unrehearsed,
no bows at beginning or end
of kicks and board breaking chops.

I had a gig-bag hanging on the chairback, unzipped,
wide-mouthed staring at a too-drunk-to-fuck geezer
burping acid from a liver gone sour-milk.
He had the guts to smile at me.

Handed him a roll-over pass-out-tablet
with get-a-life-grampa eye-roll-politeness.
He took it like a man and I gave him half a smile

for having stamina in this marathon.

Back to the game,

my eyes caught Pinky Peacock prancing,
swaying lick-me-now invitations Rockhead’s direction.

He showed what he wanted with tongue rimming a slick
long necked bottle that went too far as he drank.

He chugged it all down, swallowed hard, turned his head
and said “ahh” with a raised brow get-the-idea-look, and she did.
Wasn’t long before she was bottom-lip-biting-hair-flipping
toward him making sure her tits jiggled on the down beat.

Nothing changed much, except posters on the wall. I checked
the set list on breaks, held the newspaper like a “do not disturb” sign.
Guys in the band went out panty-huffing Mary Jane in a old bread truck.
I scribbled my escape and counted call-me dollars in the tip jar.

Sometimes my bra got more tips than the jar, should’ve sewn
a pocket to fit those cop-a-feel hands, but I didn’t
want no look-up-your-skirt compliments.

I wanted to shut my eyes and grab my sax

like he was Pegasus and fly away.

Not Now, Biology

Not now, biology.
I have no need for screams
right now.  I want no jolts
from dreams in early morning.
I want no diminutive innocents
trailing behind my thick, brown thighs.
No filth furrowed in deceptively
white plastic-coated kerchiefs.
Leave me be.
I want rest and irresponsibility.

Tick.  Tock.  I hear you already,
aging ovule odometer.  In the depths
of four a.m., I hear you.  You invade
my dreams.  I have hallucinations
of mobile wind-chimes, chimerical
tinkling of an offspring’s future
aural desire.  Coos coolly ricochet
across nocturnal membranes.

Let me alone.
I wish my mother matrix
to remain blameless.

The Death

Jesus Christ walked out into a world of poetry poverty depravity

martyrs muggers mothers and The Bomb, holding His healing Hands

out to the quietly pious stretched out on the racks of the Spanish Inquisition,

the walking starving dead of 16th century Ireland and 20th century Auschwitz,

the silently-suffering Cherokee and Creek losing blood en route to disease-ridden reservations

the children of the Bikini Island nuclear tests, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

the AIDS-infected drug addicts dismissed and forgotten

in the streets of Los Angeles and New York.

And when He left, it was not pierced through to a wooden cross, arms flayed wide

to lure carrion, it was tied to a post set in a bed of lit faggots,

the crowd screaming not “Set Barabas free!” but “Burn the heretic!”

as a private confident and lover looked on, arms folded on chest, face set as stone.

And when He left, it was not at the torches of lunatic French patriots, but of a wasting disease

in the middle of the ocean

in the cabin of an abandoned plague ship, His only comfort

sea gulls offering gobbets of raw fish and olives from far-away shores.

And when He left, it was not en route to Java or Australia, but roped between

four crazed and blinded horses, whipped into a frenzy and pushed stumbling

down the side of a steep hill.

And when He left, it was not by being drawn and quartered in the highlands of Scotland

for the amusement of the English Royal family, but in searing holy agony

on the streets of Japan, the last child pushed safely into a crudely- constructed fallout shelter

before the twins hit the ground and the lightning goes up.

And when He left, it was not huddled beneath the falling timbers of the American consulate,

but of an accidental overdose maliciously prescribed.

And when He left, it was not sitting on the toilet of His Tennessee mansion,

stomach cramping, eyes blurring, but blindfolded and alone

before a CIA-sponsored firing squad, convicted

of teaching school children how to read both Spanish and English texts.

And when He leaves, it will not be lying comfortably in bed, reading a James Michener novel;

it will be at the hands of a NeoNazi vigilante, a boy in a uniform

fighting for his country, an antiabortion activist with a pipe bomb,

a confident doctor with good intentions,

a soused truck driver on his way home from work.

He will not go quietly into that final night,

but with as much doubt and pain and fear

as any one of us, forgetting each previous walk with man

upon rebirth, holding tenaciously at death to the belief and the promise

that He will come back again to us, and again, and again, and again.

Mortmain

The often stifling influence of the past.

The way you stood at the door,

your shadow a tear in time/space.

If I remember brown I remember you.

The way your hair fell over your eye.

The time you took me into the bath.

How you touched me. How you touched me.

The often stifling influence of the past.

How when it goes it doesn’t stay gone.

How when it’s gone it continues to go.

The sleep I’ve lost. The time I’ve spent.

If I remember black I remember your eyes.

The way the bed shook with our thrashing.

The way the thrashing led to nothing.

The way feeling died along the way.

The often stifling influence of the goddamn past.

The acoustics of sneezes

I measure the acoustics of sneezes.

Its true, I do. You are probably saying

to yourself, that’s mighty strange!

And you know, I have to agree.

It’s not a fetish, just so you know.

It’s not like I’m out there watching

people sneeze, their noses red,

The honking and then their eyes

shut tight, sometimes nearly

wrecking the cars they drive,

or bumping into each other on the street.

Sometimes they look quite dizzy

for a minute or two, they have to

sit down, drink some hot Toddy,

wait for the neurons in their brains

to collect and pool back into

all of the right places.

It’s not a fetish like that.

I’m not out there collecting sneezes

and maybe the God bless you’s that

follow. I’m only collecting that one

thing and that one thing only,

The acoustic of sneezes, the pitch

of the squeals, the moanings

and sighs that sometimes come after.

Mean Streets #1

In a Third Avenue turn of winter

I warm myself in a back booth

of a porn shop. The girl

with pop-up hands

with black cat vibes

and sleek artificial eyes,

green and disposable

so many

technological improvements

in one-night contacts,

electrifies me.

ELECTROCUTION.

CAUTIONARY.

TELL ME

YOU’RE NOT A LUPUS JUNKIE.

Before me and not a whisper

or trace of an outside

third-party voyeur or someone’s

rubbish in dawn’s after-hour streets,

she strips, peeling

layers of skin, onion-thin

a different shade for each

child who died a flower’s death

and never turned in the parent,

every portal of faulty communication–

eyes, nose, mouth,

stretched into alien longings,

crack-lines hiding vertigo

acid trips without sponsor,

until there is nothing but bone.

I can name each one: the femur,

the tibia, the cranial shell,

so lonely without a prisoner.

She turns to leave

all skeleton and wind song,

echoes of cochlea,

snails funny on snooze-control

and my words are as useless

as pennies of a foreign currency.

Holding the third rib on her

mother’s side, I yell “What the hell

am I supposed to do with this?”

“It’s a hand-out,” the disembodied

voice cries from across the street,

and I know that I’m feeling lucky

these days the soup-lines are long

and in denial and the broth is really

the consistency of the best reduction:

your mother’s water and mucus

when she first pushed you out.

Paraphrasing a Dream

You dream of your father’s house
moon-dappled leaves, autumn crisp,
his favorite elm that he planted
before you were born
too big to get your arms around.
The porch light flicks on
your new step-mother,
the one he used to introduce
as his “best research assistant”
the one you told your friends
lies about
her ugly teeth
& her bad table manners,
is calling you
in her best imitation
of hyena shrill
that your father
is having a second heart attack.

Those weren’t her exact words.
& over time,
the two of you exchanged roles
like neurotic playmates.
The story did not end
with you hating
motherless children.

On thanks

She thanked me, she thanked me, breathlessly,
and cast her arms around my torso,
and hugged me, her hot breath on my neck;

on the corner of Frederick Douglas and 125th
where the honey-glow of streetlamps
pooled in pockmarked streets and gilded McDonalds wrappers,
where the convent church bells rang madly,
at half-past Tuesday’s midnight,
where cars were islands in an ocean of limbs and flags,
and steam rose up from manholes
and blended into a mist of marijuana smoke and cigarette fumes–

I, an oxymoronic Jew in Harlem
with my small pin and wide eyes,
began to wonder
why she thanked me and
how I fit into this moment;

as the crowd grew louder and tighter
and cameras flashed
and car horns flared
and flags danced
and trash-lids clanked
and whistles squealed
and that old woman’s tear-touched cheeks lifted into a deep-creased smile–

that’s when this parade came upon us;

this string of trucks,
by means of some horrendously poor planning on part of the MTA,
five vehicles long, each towing the shell of a subway car;

the crowd crashed around the first truck and
the driver, seizing this moment, sounded his horn;

miraculously, it cascaded back,
one after another, each truck trumpeted
back, to the east, to the other side of the island;

the crowd alive in whitecaps,
it was Rosh Hashanah, the new year, the sounding of the Shofar,
hands reaching out to touch the subway car,
to touch the subway car as my parents touched the Torah in synagogue,
leaving hot, heavy fingerprints on its sides,
a vaporous claim to ownership;

I understand now that she thanked me for being there
for witnessing this improbable parade,
for welcoming this strange new year,
as the rain fell as confetti.

Pieces

Toddler clothes with attitude

are adornments that make it

easier to gain friends.

A condom is not a condiment,

though a nice spermicidal lube is.

My thin hair had caused me

to be a connoisseur of hats.

The visor as a design

draws a circle, a spotlight

on the bare patches.

It looks so horrible

I may have to get one.

A day at the races

is a squalid affair

and the beauty of poetry is

the opportunity to say squalid(see connoisseur above).

What should happen to people that return

to their job after retirement

because they miss the action or

state I love my job or

believe colleges should be

vocational schools of higher learning

or rank schools by the jobs their

students get because of the

school they attended?

_

Small Town Idaho

Hoosiers confused it with Iowa.

Stories confused the cold plug-in engines

with Wyoming.  The school catalogue

picture confused with greens and blues.

The university and Union Pacific railroad

confused me with promises of

liberalism.

The LDS church,

not on any maps,

was a quarter of the power

of Puritans in Massachusetts.

The skinheads were relegated

to a tree fort up north.

I lived in semi-desert, bald hills

and mountains.  Two and half hours

To Sun Valley, Yellowstone and

Salt Lake City.  A foreign country.

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