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  Feb 2018 Nat Lipstadt
Left Foot Poet
commissioned by and for those
who constant comment on my
            poems, my indenture


moi,
handy with verbal weapons,
cut down a few trees for my necessities,
duels or dams, written Odyssey long and Tombstone OK quick,
who was it said, I lay down verse cause it’s my daddy’s curse?

why it was me and thus the free and easy flowing from the obligatory urges, cannot be disobeyed or disturbed, ignored,
this one, inherent, so fast comes the flow steady, unbending,
the six easy pieces come up half heads and three tails

it is just dictation from the *mental musing committee
and  as far as they’re concerned, they’re the tator and I’m the tot, the
dic who just has to get it down like I knowed it complete
before they decided to speak it

ain’t deprecating and ain’t saying that a thousand or more poe’s ain’t time used well, but this one has a pale, almost Elizabethan white powdery dusted pallor, caused it spilled out in 10 minutes
with no time to get tanned or tamed

to the skilled individuated commentators
who Tennessee volunteer their skill, sight, their time, unbidden to savvy and to savage say what they see beneath the surface,
a place I’d prefer not to visit or even, just hang,
lest I find out what the heck I actually meant!

hats off to the reactors and the actors
who write their own lines
pithy and for pity sake,
hot and cold, youthful and old,
who speak without long considered pauses
and so often write in two lines the summary
of hours labor and the product of decades,
of the good and bad, the thirty one flavors in my mind stored

hats off to the gallant and the uncredited uncrowned,
who are the validators and the gladiators who enter the arena with but a short sword and yet subjugate the army of
the many verses and see close up and offer freely their
heart warming frostings over my écritures

you gladden an old man’s heart,
by the hearth, and egg him on
asking without asking for but one mort~more,
with the unintentional inspired commissions
that their comments instigate

you lay and slay me down repeatedly
and I ‘m held harmless
but not wordless for so oft have I exclaimed:

anything you say can and will be used by me
in the court of poetry**

the next to the bottom line is this:

those who comment commend condemn are the extenders
and should claim legit the greater credit

<•>
2/20/18 2:00 ~ 2:10am.

writ in a single seating without hesitation and consideration
the sojourn a quick ten minutes and with thanks and bowed head to all that commentate on my given words, a hearty god bless and accept my pitiful thumbs up for annotating isn’t a skill in my possession or my permitting; thank god for emoji's and icons and
XOXOXO's
  Feb 2018 Nat Lipstadt
Diane
It's easy to see why you fell in love with him,
It's easy to see why you hoped you found forever
But you didn't.
And that disappointment felt like a death
and you have been trapped between anger and denial
for four years.
You think you must bury him in order to bury your grief.
And convincing others of this too
has become a game
where you sleep and play
inside your litter box.
Now the feces of hatred and revenge
stick to your feet wherever you go.
You must turn him into a monster
by telling anyone who will listen
that he is haunting you—and you really want this to be true
because that would mean he was still interested in your life.
But when you are alone and still…you remember...
coffee and stories, genuine kindness
and you know, his only crime was breaking your heart.

I understand your heartbreak;
you saw your knight in shining armor,
The answer to your loneliness.
Your pathway out of poverty.
His demeanor is gentle,
his quiet, listening face
hears your words with truth and interest;
every sentence is allowed to live its full life
until you are validated and understood.
He is your biggest fan, a loving caregiver.
Children and animals are drawn to him
like a shepherd or a father or a friend.
We both know he gave 8 years to a child,
a paraplegic who wasn’t even his own.
Bathed him, carried him, wiped drool from his chin
and in between all the doctors, made him laugh.
He offers himself to everyone this way, so

I understand why losing him hurt you so wholly
I know this, because I love him too.
But I think you and I define love very differently;
I wouldn’t want someone whom I had to threaten to make him stay.
I wouldn’t derive my identity from an unspoken contract
or imaginary promises that I insisted he owed me.
I wouldn’t try to destroy another human being
for the sole purpose of hiding my own embarrassment.
You see, love would remember his beautiful soul
and love would sincerely want him to be happy

Even if that meant he found happiness without you.
A kind, self-sacrificing, honest man is being slandered because a woman he dated briefly turns rejection into victimization.
Nat Lipstadt Feb 2018
be my therapist

massage both my temples
from whence these poems originate

will your fingertips perform tailored alterations,
will they insert strange spices and your favors,
unfamiliar but imagined overtime desirable flavors,
thus resolving the question that my answers perpetually fail,
to satisfy my unending need to understand:

how do my temples
speed the heart
bring forth whole poem utterances inconceivable,

reminding me to remember what has yet to occur?

she grins, whimsies me and suggests:

that’s why they have been
appointed anointed announced as the
Temples of You

2:19am 2/19/18
Nat Lipstadt Feb 2018
“marvelous brush strokes”

~for Yocum~

the complimentor favors brevity,
employs these pointy few words

the complimentee, me,
favors the insanity
of the overwhelming
overarching hell of
the over-lengthy

but that would dishonor the symmetry of comprehension,
that would dishonor the comprehension of the symmetry
of painting and writing

select colors, use the old palette, favored,
the cash cache of mixology and finally the strokes

i commence
i brush your grizzled face
i brush your grizzled face with colored words
i brush your grizzled face with marvelous brush strokes

the painting incomplete, my brush strokes need retouching,
my brush stoking fingers need a touch of real
so I am coming to see you as foretold^

so i may sign my name signifying completion

^https://hellopoetry.com/poem/556521/a-beautiful-first-re-union-that-will-be/
2/18/18
0415pm
  Feb 2018 Nat Lipstadt
Poetoftheway
the pleasured thrills of a
une liaison dangereuse
the mystery du triangle hypoténuse

two open, unended lines attached
to make a so interesting right (wrong) angle,
mais sans l'hypoténuse leur est pas de connectivité

indeed the hypotenuse hypothetical is crack for my brain
imagination steel furnace fired, molten are my fingers
as they trace the line you left for me on your body

to adore to cherish to lick to follow an arrow pointing
where?

to the heavenly pleasures that earth reside
in our differences substantial
which intrigue rather than
divide

opposites attract is true and not,
we could be
we could not be more unalike
that so excites for dreams only I can uncover
in the rounded shape  of thine wide eyes

a horrific inserts
she is only teasing me

but the need to dance on the brink
the fulfillment that origins in a need perpetual
is the one that satisfies because it cannot
be fully satisfied

if you know this need, then you are mine bonded

beyond is at where the hypotenuse connect our lines,*

"we'd be beyond human,  beyond poem, beyond horizon,
beyond stars and black holes and daisy-chains and metaphors
with  nothing to say to say to an end, because it goes on, my dear,   -- I'll see you at the brink...dance with me there"
a woman in the shape of a young girl,
her eyes wider than a grand boulevard,
who writes me in scattered verses I can’t comprehend
takes my hands in the metro on our way to
St. Germain-des-Pres, where she will make confession
she loves another, forgetting that was her first reveal
and why I now laugh/love her maintenant, plus complètement

<•>
un jour je vous enverrai un message au parc Monceau à 1500 heures; être prêt
  Feb 2018 Nat Lipstadt
onlylovepoetry
Parkland: Oh My divine, We Wrestle Over What is Yours



and what is mine

it took days for the after- shock and awe to arrive;

the bizarre tempo reversal, myself, out of order,
is my shame, after the mind’s pretense ennui of “yet another,”
had to slow seep away beneath the
firewall cutting off the pain of my the true self
and the I, of ordinary

how else, to keep the madness away?
it’s disguised in a well tended secured lockbox
chamber labeled, I, all about me,
deep hid in the rear, not too near the true self,
must keep the unseeing functioning, functioning

but bus-ted poet is triggered and the weep welling
in the eyes commencing that makes writing on a cell
on a moving vehicle an annoying frosting
on what is an inconsolable hell

everyone stares unawares that the shock,
is without awe, and the only awe is in awful awful awful awful

we sit at the Friday eve sabbath table to begin our negotiation;
but there is no negotiating though the excuses and the divine’s stumbling, flailing failings are pre-prepared,
we know this battle too well and the outcome as well,
it is mine true self’s to win, have me not
words and stanzas and music suffice
to convict the lord of the hosts, adonai

take all your seventy names in vain to crush the vanity of
omnipotence for your godliness degrades and your instant access to where the good in me resides is cutoff;
under My Contacts
you have been


blocked

we shall meet as always on the Day of Atonement
but this year no repentance to be granted, the pardons shared
with my kind only, none left for the lonely gone-gods,
no longer seek yours for me, there are 17 extra to be given out*

the left foot and the falsehoods join in the denunciation,
though some suggest reprieve and only reproach
for isn’t atonement possible for even gods?  No. not,
for a god who got human kindness installed in all his devices
but then never opened the app

my name was
onlylovepoetry;
but for now, till the culling of the agonies is done,
till the hollows are refilled and the curses fully final expended,
till the sudden eye tearing ceases to render me torn, messed,
you may call me nothing but this:

onlyreproachpoetry

should you come calling
there will be no beseeching,
just the stoic bearing witness of my silence,
my finger-pointing judgement,
and my angels presence

“May the angel Michael be at my right,
and the angel Gabriel be at my left;
and in front of me the angel Uriel,
and behind me the angel Raphael...”
and above me seventeen new protectors
whose names my true self will now memorize,

for now they are mine

~<•>~

2/16/18 4:34pm  ~ 2/17/18  3:34am
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