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B Wasserman Jun 2016
Oak: attended by insects and disease
tug tight and called my name for me
it asked to be carved out

I've polished and removed
more than all the efforts
of former years could

the sea invited
the tides imparted
the tides bathed
and sanctified
we went till the head
of the lake

the boat professed
and yearned that now
since two hundred
grand years past
that if it could once
now and ever more
pass

I removed a plug
and the waves buzzed
belched the breeze up

the boat sank free
rotting gullets filling up
the pipes rendered mute
by the powers of the waves

free from hunger
not free from touche
at the grip of the hands
of lake
now consigned to the lockers of waves
B Wasserman Jun 2016
I am both an exhibitionist
part of a transaction
and response
people gather like clothes
and depart like names
vessel of dirt
permeated by a lost soul
lost to the world
lost to society
lost in experience

I extract horses and the horses
fall from the tracks of my head

All my travels burn in mouth
delicacies of unbroken air
falling on horses
falling on twilight

pushing me from you
and pushing me remote
my heart rises,
hums and returns again
tomorrow it will
arrive as it was before
it left from water
charged and discharged
with life and ropes of water
now it retires
sold to waters.
B Wasserman Jun 2016
A river received me well
my head floated
a bit,
my eyes sailed
around
I saw other floating
pictures

As long as I believed
that the river
was real
then the river would flow
and I would be buoyant
upon its shoulders

I sail on vast reflections
I could sink under the tapestry
of my youth and sleep there
I grant these images passage
wrapped in the bows of transmitted
light on the backs of mirrors.

I am a page
surrounded by a book
the eyes of chapters penetrate
consume and look
the whole essence of brilliance
is to celebrate
and to wrap
my voice and celebrations
and muffle my rationality-out!
B Wasserman Jun 2016
I take my time
I rot and wind
no place, but here
all movement
moving down
I fell from grace
cast like a bouquet
my face alert
a face intact,
a face intact
my bones picked bare
I perfume in dispair
I curse these rapids
as I curse my family
my brother
deep in a grave
my father
deep in a grave
my mother
deep in a grave
all dead, but
me
I pour and run
armless
socket of my mouth
terrible
the wind howls
through my hull
mosses filtered through my bones
blood of drowned men
filtered through my heart
constant flight of stairs
reduced to the path
of again
and again
and again
B Wasserman Jun 2016
I
My world revolves in mystery, day breaks from waves and vanishes into graves.
B Wasserman Feb 2016
On bus rides, I often see grad students
suspended in their own scholastic slime
or as I call it-monotony. For instance, once
walking with what I presumed to be a friend,
I told them I had read Rilke they had presumed
that I had read it for a class-no. I read it for my
own pleasure, how trivial of me. One of the
most endemic pathological problems of
the university is that their mindset is
engrained, too rigid, too mundane.
There is no funding for creativity, the only method
is the paint by numbers system. No new poets
in the canon, anything new is cannon fodder.

The only way to cultivate a dream here is
to **** it before, it can infiltrate and pollute
the minds of the young.
Conformity at least is the religion of the
university, and life must go on as it has before
-stagnating. The university masters here
wield art with grand indifference.

In this presumed friend eyes, no
curriculum exists outside of what is assigned,
their own  life is vicarious- a tenthhand extension,
examing the writing of a 1000 year old text.
They translate these texts while learning obscure
idiosyncrasies of Old Norse by heart. Little
do these "academics" realize that these people
who wrote these texts lived full lives: full
of  love, betrayal, stab wounds , and dirt.
They lived more than these quibbling academics
who argue on about written contradictions of texts.
The irony irons on.

The greatest call for me is to write,
these texts were never meant to be dissected and
investigated scientifically. I think for me, at least,
they are meant to inspire, these works inspire me
to live. The madness of Don Quixote stills
boils in my blood, literature has encrazed me.
I yearn to live, love, and live so much I know
how to die.
tenthhand- more than firsthand or secondhand
encrazed- ex. like enloquicido in Spanish, en-loco-ecer, en- intensive prefix like in enjoin, embrace (/n/ --> /m/ conforming to /b/);
B Wasserman Feb 2016
I'm walking for a coffee rush, enough that
a surge of caffeine will blow this wall
off this writer's block and all these dammed-up
thoughts will spill and issue forth-unimpeded.
I bought coffee,read some poetry-some bad poems
some good, surveyed the area for other customers
a man with a boa constrictor scarf
and a woman glued to her computer, job searching
while her Pomeranian roams the cafe.
This is my habit, I buy coffee, read poems, talk
to strangers at a coffee shop, somehow it works.
This coffee buzz doesn't quite stimulate me
enough, the threshold is short of the spark
and the spark refuses to ignite.
I ask for another coffee. The barista accepts.
I take the coffee and sit
down and read before taking off to see a movie.
As I sit back to my spot.
The barista is taping me on their phone,
laughing with a regular customer.
They assume I'm crazy, because I walked
a mile from the cold in what appears to be  
a fur trapper costume from the 1800s.  
I easily shrug off their laughter, other people laughing
at you only confirms that you're alive.

I walk 2000 feet to the theater. I am a resolved man, no
one's laughter can deter me. I think to myself,
"the greatest struggle for me as an individual is to
forget that other people exist, and realize that, I as an
individual am- I have to convince myself of my own
solipsism, that I have a right to be who I am, how
I present myself, that is my responsibility and my tragedy,
both my madness and my health.

I walk into the theater vibrating
with coffee jitters-am I in the right mind,
the right state to sit through a whole movie
by myself? The movie is great, I feel like I understand
more than I should, some part feels more raw than
the others-I should watch it again. It's message: America is living
beyond its means, some people profit, others
slide past unpunished, the common citizen bears the burden
of Wall Street's obsessive gambling problem.
A familiar story to me, does anyone
intend to pay their debts in America-do I?
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