POEMS: Page III

Penance

Ugliness is contraband

Lending legitimacy to beauty.

The two are as complicit

As brick and mortar;

As concrete and steel.

I kneel

Sometimes

At the altar of my conscience

Yet I always walk away eventually.

I find raw onions achieve the same effect,

And peel them over the sink to marinade with memories.

Even Lysistrata wouldn’t have stood a chance

At stopping the planes

From gutting those monoliths.

I could have taken my camera that day,

I could have offered my blood,

I could have wrapped shock in servitude.

They would have found an empty camera,

And alcohol where blood should be,

They would have found one lucky enough to be alive

Yet pitiful in his existence,

Wandering,

And wondering why.

The recipe calls for a dash of regret

And I give it a healthy dollop.

I check to see if my soup is ready

And the smell reminds me of when the winds shifted uptown.

I eat anyway, and stare out the window,

With stifled tears offering a prismatic blur

of two holes in the sky made radiant by sunset.

Homage

I awoke to paint her portrait

in order to awake.

A mandatory morning

To ritualize

My compartmentalized

mind.

Don’t know who I am sometimes

In our eyes, there’s nothing

terribly wrong.

As I paint and we gaze together…

(four eyes see better than two when one

has another to love.)

And the tear falls to the brush and dries

onto the canvas

a stain

she would

be here to observe

were she not graphed onto a photo.

coax the oils I do; I skew and subdue

but all is apparent and therefore isolated.

And this is the nature of my

days and nights, when

she’s not there

posing for the canvas

or I’m not there

posing for the page.

Rage is a line I deleted from a poem.

And drawing a potato is just

as good

as

painting

a portrait

if it would make her smile.

in the end,

it will always be you,

you are the line I crafted

for a poem.

yet I would gladly trade it

for the price of a potato

if you were here to share it

with me at the table.

(If it was cold,

I’d blow on it like

no one else would)

until it was warm enough

for you.

Above the Music

The pregnant lady in Carnegie Hall demanded to cut the line

And I let her

Until

the line became too long and I felt it an imposition

To wait

And I was compelled to be “that guy”

(You know, the one who speaks your “unspeakable” thoughts)

And said: two means two, not four

And enough equals enough

Just like the usher said

Her eyes screamed asshole! but

she relented

I clutched my ticket and raced toward my seat and settled in.

They say in this hall you can hear a pin drop

But they never speak of its prick.

The music was gorgeous that night—

I hope the baby comes out ok.

This Is Not a Love Poem

For Ayelet

Now

That mole I ignored

Were it to go away

Would not so

Articulately complement

The dimpled grins

Brought to you

By your court jester

That charcoal flaw in the pail of ivory irony that frames your face

That speck in the sand I once considered not considering

Now it

Burns in my memory

Casting shadows and light

Upon inappropriate jokes

Cast in inappropriate places

Made breezy by an hourglass of flaws

That we once considered our compromise

Now I promise

That

Should it disappear

I too will consider

Your smile a hostage

And my tears

Nothing less than the ransom of time.

August in D.C.

A family of cicadas

is on sojourn

outside our motel-room window.

They buzz and swarm with frenzied wings

that a midnight mourner can easily spot

with dampened eyes kept open by the flicker

of cable channels that are “part of the package.”

These guests have made a nest of our window-screen,

worn so thin that flies can get in

to gather around some moldy peach pits

left by the kids—seeds once surrounded by summer juice and flesh

and yet to be discarded—as the sign on our doorknob reads “Privacy Please.”

Today, I will offer the kids lollipops instead of fruit,

but they will want “Mom’s Special Toast” instead.

(We will compromise with crackers and cheese, and tomorrow—

when we visit the grave—I will promise her to remove the sign.)

The Memory Twins

—Sometimes I forget to remember;

I called home to ask myself if I turned

The oven off

And was reminded

I wasn’t there—

—the lights were left on

Of that I am certain

And then I think close to a whisper

And then I shout through tears

That no one’s home—

—of that I am certain

At least one day of seven in a row

Of endless rows that I forget

To remember the scream of years

Before the whimper—

—of mismatched socks

Falling down the stairs

Angrily negotiated by

Self-medicating feet to head

With earth, not You, to catch me—

—with a few errands to run

I bought fruit, soup, chickpeas

And Your favorite flowers

For someone else;

Sometimes I remember to forget—

Lunch Break

Outside it is hot except

It is not really hot, no, really it

Is rather muggy and the air is dense but I can’t

Quite call it hot I can call

It muggy, or humid, except people who say

“It is hot” can’t stand to be corrected

When it is so hot.

I go outside because it is so muggy

That I decide a cold, cold sandwich will do

And perhaps a cold, cold beverage of the alcoholic variety

Even though it is so hot

I decided long ago that these were the best, not

That I was right, but they sure do take the sting

Out of countless bruises wrought upon this thing revolving

And walking around this thing I

Find that damn are those others dressed pretty

Or scarcely dressed at all, you name it but they’re still pretty

And they sweat just like me

And talk almost like me

But they probably hear differently

Or so I wish to believe and once

My sandwich is purchased as is my cold, cold beverage I

Am suddenly more aware of the sweat which drips from foreheads both young and old

and I, an atheist, pray that this day will never end and

I, an atheist, pray that I am wrong

About a great many things.

Diamond on the Dance Floor

For Ayelet's cousin Steve Berk

& there was this day when I saw

a most amazing man

& I fell in love with the world

all over again

because this man,

(who we have now relinquished)

taught me a thing or two about

how to be not the sum of one’s parts,

but the sum of one’s survivors.

& I quietly thought to myself, as he battled

with his travails,

that there is man I admire.