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  Nov 2017 Nat Lipstadt
False Poets
The Talmud Teaches...
With respect to his son, a father is obligated to circumcise him, to redeem him [if he is a firstborn], to teach him Torah, to marry him off, and to teach him a craft...he is also

obligated to teach him to swim...(Kiddushin 29a)


lay awake when the house is silent,
doing maths furiously in the head,
sleeping can be keeping while doing my calculus,
knowing in advance a conclusion comes coined
in only two colors, black or red

the question simple, did I meet my obligations?

and your read the passage for the umpteenth time,
and the same thought interferes as always,
should the order not be reversed,
the first thing to be fulfilled,


teach them to swim

based on experience life arrives in sequential, repeating waves,
purposed to drown the weak with no pretending that waters,
salt or sweet matters, so first order is business ought be survival preparation and


teach them to swim

if they can swim, stay afloat, then they can then comprehend
the glory of distinguishing right over wrong,
get their priorities straight, that saving others,
especially those you placed on the starting line of life,
is the first principle and overplants anything else when you


teach them to swim

my eyes see the tally, why, they are red! could it be lack of sleep?

I am smiling when I am lying,
teach them to swim always first,
but not enough, one must do it well, well,
and even then, better, 
as all else will, from the well, follow, when you


teach them to swim

3:10am

~~~
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud
Nat Lipstadt Oct 2017
"gravity has taken better men than me
just keep me where the light is"...John Clayton Mayer

where the light is...
this lyric gets carried from midnight to midnight next,
from troubled sleep to the bus stop, to and from work,
onto, back to, the homebound bus stop once again,
from solitary man to father to grandfather and cycles back
to once again a troubled sleeper poem writer,
who just wants to know, John,

when I find it, will, does the light fill, complete and heal the cracks...when I find that light...

in the city, starlight been banished by street lamps pointed downward, far too often it is believable that the whole world has been wrapped in white crinkled, filmy, wax paper, then,
how will the light know where it is needed most,
how will it find the empty chest cavity that writes these lines

there is real and artificial they say, nature vs. man made,
sun upon the face that heals for but an eight minute
bandaid summer ferry crossing, the fluorescent that says here, here is the bus stop, tarry, sit and rest, while you wait for
answer unscheduled, on a bench beneath to the street light
that illuminates a small swatch of street
between the dark spots on the x-ray of
this patient patient's soul awaiting,
are either of those
the light I need John?

no worries man, I'm just teasing, well knowing, neither of us,
tables turned, know where the light is, up high, down low,
if it is yellow or gold, if light is real or imagined,
only the sensation of the curettage needed to be healed when the
chest drained and the light supplants the drained fluids,
when it interferes, interpolates, how it found me or I it,
how I recognized it, how it reignited the home fire, and
I'll drop you line how light, lightly to find or be heavy found,
how light supersedes, defeats, the gravity of daily tugging,
and how what happens afterwards is golightly
up to us

2:10am **** it
now children, go back to your silly little love pretense poems and pretend you never read this
Nat Lipstadt Oct 2017
all I've learned from love


<•>

for the fedora man, 10/29/17 10:34am

<•>

another song done me wrong on a Sunday morn,
so much due to do, a list not for compilation/publication,
including poems promised and weighty deadlines overdue,
for its tedium would still be lbs. heavy in weightless space

instead a lyric plucks my attention, of course beeping,
insistent chirping a chorus of, write me right now,
immédiatement dans son français de Montréal,
this is the item that needs to be list topping,
now whispering a messenger-angel name dropping
a request formal from the fedora man dressed in black

all I've learned from love,  
a listing doomed to comprehensible incompletion,
a listing to the right as new reasons in-come
constantly from the left, each heart beat a
remarkable reminder that the list grows longer

every day, the repeating seasons, proffer suggestions,
disguised as a newly revised ten commandments,
obedience to which is a wish list for
attaining grace

all I've learned from love is its duality, essential quality,
a human single cannot attain the commingling required
for the visioning a peak season of life colorful,
its sad corollary, leaves falling exposing the body bare-****** of the soul linear alone

all I've learned from love is its shining skin is an agreed upon
indefinable nature, other than we all recognize how our
definition personal exists in that Ven diagrams space where
our circles intersect, when A breaks the skin of B, creating
{A,B}

all I've learned from love is without it no matter what
somewhere inside is a desperation pocket that is
an inquisitive irritant, a brain burr, a pea under the mattress,
a high and mighty 1% of disarmament incompetence that rules the imbalanced balance of my bottom line on the top of my head

all I've learned from love that it appears on its own timetable,
in surprising trains and planes and baseball games, sitting
alone in a theater or in front of a Rubens, on crazy disastrous
first dates in foreign countries at cafes or non gender
specific bathrooms amidst alternating currents of
this is crazy and this is infinite and ever so sobering
wondrous possible


all I've learned from love is it never shoots straight,
but will always end in a holy bullseye


*Tout ce que j'ai appris de l'amour, c'est qu'elle ne tire jamais directement,
mais se terminera toujours dans une sainte bullseye
Nat Lipstadt Oct 2017
still be on my feat*

oh Joni you showed up at my door once more, Saturday morn,
blonde bangs and ***** voice, two octaves below shrill,
right about where the register intersection of
heart piercing, me humming, memory smiling,
poetry inspiring, yeah memories crying, that too

together, we have had more than many,
one case of you, a million sips, and I am writing
to see *how you're feeling
and to let you know
I never drank a case of you that left me,
being still, left me standing on my feat

my feat?

drank de-feat like it was the sea, boundless but not soundless,
sweet waves repeating, sea tears tinged with bittersweet cries of
Tupelo honey,
cause you were one of my angels,
lifting me higher when love was saying
not!
this time kid,
place, babe, not this peculiar particular apparition,  
wrong rendition,
and at last, finally, long time later, sheepishly, sweetly only,
what was her name

your voice stood me up, your words still slap my face with
cases of kisses upon my neck, tune-turning prophetic notions of
what's next still  be only just around the corner,
waiting on a new, simple twist of feat,
another song, poem, lover, and yet another,
case of you, so we can always see both sides,
and when I think of you Joni
my mind seesaws,
and I, still be on my feet, and thanks to you
ready for my feat

<•>
10:59am 10/28/17
  Oct 2017 Nat Lipstadt
Where Shelter
an average human creature should such a mythical exist
in a lifetime will celebrate about 2,200,000,000 heartbeats,
billions of heartbeats per minute (I prefer moment)
but like everything so essence human there are
those very few heartbeat moments,
the ten or twenty maybe forty total in a lifetime
that you total truly remember,
recalling the cream and sauce,
swell and the hell,
of the pounding so slow so hard,
each one a volcano of
a moment until that day
you don't remember-anything

when she said yes and you're shaking and beating in a
*****-tonk rhythm cause you were heart undressed unsure
and truly afraid of a rejection that makes a heart stoppage
disallowing visions, to be exponentially happy future imagined

you're feeling your heartbeat
in your knees going weak,
when the doctor says:

congratulations healthy swell
and/or
some years later,
I'm so so truly sorry, hell

when they hand you a long handle shovel no instructions needed and that scoop of earth weighs two tons and the sound of slow reverb in your head hurts like hell and you lack the strength to move and they move you aside quiet gentle like
but inside the temple of the two headed hydra-heart,
it's the rock and roll of slo mo, the violin crying, the drumming of
heavy metal chords plucked so slowly, it's you froze screaming

a billionaire of heartbeats you are,
but only ten or twenty maybe forty total in a lifetime
you total truly remember with the perfect clarity and
forever renders into your own unique orchestral symphony,
your true net worth, the stripes you wear
upon your shoulders skin,  
the tune when you hear it and melts you into rigidity

you fall to your knees wherever you are,
that is where you will find me,
just listen for the cars horns blaring
cursing the man lying in the street, re-listening to
ten or twenty maybe forty heartbeats total in a lifetime

you alone total truly that concert set recall and
the win-loss record inherent, inhiment,
in both of them, tears and the rents, all there in the tunes,
of forty beatings you took,
somehow it feels like here is, there was,
the answers to
where is shelter for the heart,
the answers that have gone and come and gone and someone says,

I don't feel a pulse
what reading poetry is truly about: the endangered art of listening well,, a sustained exercise in empathy.
Nat Lipstadt Oct 2017
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


This is not a poem.  This is about a poem.

Poems require words.  This poem does not require words.

This poem requires memories' muscles.
This poem requires what is called colloquially love.

Learn that what we share here is not poetry.

Your poetic senses that produce the words that mark you present
are but surgical tools to extract, release the whole and the parts of you that help shape that single sense borning in your chest that defines you at any particular moment.

Quæ est mater Laureat.

She is the Mother Laureate.

She is the boundary you must learn to cross to be more than a re-arranger of letters and alphabets, but a translator of the human essence and fill our veins with the a sense of awe and wonder felt when we read each other and think aloud,
"yes, exactly, that was and is precisely what I was feeling."

She is the glue that keeps us sticking here, sticking together, each of us sticking to it.  

You do not know her?  
No worries, she will find you when you least expect it, perhaps
when you need it.

This is not a poem.  This is a human who's a poem.

Understand the difference and then you may begin a journey
that has no destination other than weaving the connective tissue that makes us anticipating excited when we log on.

Happy Birthday Mother Poet Laureate!

I do not think I can write a better not poem for you.  
Forgive me then, if going toward, I repost this every
October 24th as long as the chemical composition of
blood, God, spirit, logos or reason runs free within,  
exiting as words encased in tears that formulate into
human poetry.

nattyman

P.S.There are 800 poems here with Sally in the title, and least 700  are about Sally B.   If you like, please  feel to free to add yours, old or new.
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