if I fall where no one sees
and I fall where no one hears
and if when I fall all by myself
I don’t make a sound
don’t disturb the crickets and lightning bugs
don’t wake the neighbors
and if I fall and trip and break
and I’m all alone in my quiet
acceptance of the pain
how do I know it hurt?
Deadly Fiction kills
only through selective choice.
Care in craft is power.
Foods have the unique ability
to agitate half a population
and animate the other half
to fight as if that food were
their only nourishment
for the rest of their lives.
Although green tomatoes exist
throughout the year like other tomatoes,
these limed and bitter coins
reemerge with the summer
to claim a seat among
the other appetizers tired by their stay
as a staple of the American palate.
Although every morsel
is magnified multiply
through immersion in boiling oil,
green tomatoes release their taste best
when paired with other constrasting flavors.
No two finished fried products
ever taste the same,
so perhaps the disgust
these humble friends have earned
results from the wrong example.
Much like summer itself,
some days scorch while some only shine,
and some people reinforce
the goodness we know exists in our centers
as others remind us why
we each develop individual textures,
like we each develop unique tastes
that barely rationally motivate us.
And don’t get me started on the deliciousness of pimento cheese.
(Random Thoughts)
God could have made me with a shell
like a tortoise, I’ve been carrying
my home on my back since I was born
in Green Point, Brooklyn in 1938
By Acts of God
this old half-Jewish half-Dutch reptile
has been a navy man (of a certain type),
a noncombatant with a purple heart,
a nurse, an ignorant father,
grandfather, great grandfather,
and soon to be great great. It seems
titles are the only thing I’m great at.
My own grandfather, a rabbi, always
told me not to end my sentences
with a preposition. Thank You Papa
I think God is too non committal
to have a body, too curious
about the world to be tied to it.
And I’m too old to despair
over what God will squeeze
out of me at the end
Tonight, back in Temple Terrace,
I open my eyes and go on dreaming
sailing with Dr. Tom
on the High Seas
For what will you give your day
an extra special yay?
Receive loving kisses.
A hard rain you missed.
Hearing your favorite song.
Nothing you did going wrong.
Feeling a comfortable breeze.
Thanks from a friend that you pleased.
Something beautiful to see.
Sincere thanks from someone you pleased.
Hearing your favorite song
and singing along.
So many pleasures that may
give your day a big A.
The nightmares roosted in my chest but did not leave
when the morning light bled in, when the days turned.
My desperate mother cannot massage the blood back
into my extremities, cannot kindle a spark within my eyes.
Kill switch my brain silently. There is no post traumatic.
This wire is live, an exposed nerve. Let me dig it out,
bare down on the electrocution. I seize, my jaw clenched,
scratching off invisible hands, severing reality into a memory.
I can talk about it until that one point. Then I’m left incoherent.
Then there’s no point in poetry. Nothing could describe it,
that feeling, the unadulterated horror that never pales,
never becomes tolerable. I regurgitate the same terror
but I can never digest it, it just burns through me, images
corroding, impossible to rationalize, impossible to live with.
The notion of madness is always lurking,
A black shadowman, a wailing banshee,
A folklore Hide-Behind. It is the ball and
Chains and I’m the Christmastime ghost –
The holidays are always especially, after all.
There is an uncertainty in whether or not
It was born spontaneously, or the product of a cursed person from a wicked family.
There was a face in the trees today,
Round and green like an oak life.
He did not meet my gaze, just scowled off
Into the distance, his head a round bulb
Of a nose and frown like a dead fish
Pulled from the deep to the surface.
When I was 20, some switch flipped on
In my brain and I started screaming and
Crying at random because it felt like I was going
to die, like everything was awful, and
I could not sleep.
I started to see dark, wiggling lines
In my room, or crawling shapes in the corner
Of my eyes.
I took pills to knock me unconscious for 14 hours.
I still don’t know if that was just destiny, or the result of a stressful school schedule.
The green man went away and no matter
How hard I try to find him in the patterns
Of the leaves, I cannot find him again.
