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  Apr 2018 Nat Lipstadt
Jeff Stier
It is all flowing uphill
back into the tributaries
into the headwaters

Life returns to its source
at the end
Chinook salmon spawn in their natal streams and die
their bodies nourish their young
who make haste to salt water
then return from the sea
to repay the favor

Uphill it is for us
a long slog, it seems

We are dedicated enemies
of entropy
unconscious
yet knowing our duty

So these are your instructions.

You must wake each day
and know it as a gift
never pause in worship
never cease your upstream struggles
until it is time
for such foolishness to end.

Grit and muscle
heart and will
life is short
yet sweeter still.
Nat Lipstadt Apr 2018
tease


I love a good tease that
all the possible endings end in
a becoming becoming,
a flashing flash flashing,
pleasing, pleasant, pleasure passing,
a fancy tickled,
an itch scratched, just a crazy little crazed


but to all you
hot married women
who crave my mind

a happy marriage (yours) is a **** rare thing
so no messing about please
but
if I should you in ny sees,
and I get the vision in my scope, the first glimpse,
my open-carry-you-away
big game hunting license is auto-activated

do not hold me responsible for your
wide eyed look

when
I strip you
down to your
poetic essence

when I strip you down to your poetic essence in  

our
single breath
  Apr 2018 Nat Lipstadt
betterdays
her ring sits on the mantlepiece
worn thin on one side
that dull warm yellow
that gold sometimes takes on

i remember it cutting into my hand
as she held it tightly as we shopped
it was bright and shiny then

she used to wear it on her  longest finger
after dad left us, she left it off for awhile
and then wore it on the other hand

it was tight on her workworn hands then
she took it off again before she went into
this last home, but kept it locked in a security draw

now it sits on the mantlepiece, waiting
for me to find a safe place for it
for it is the little bit of my mother's spirit
that will one day be part of my son's  wedding ring,
One of my mother's requests....incredibly, poignantly  beautiful
Nat Lipstadt Apr 2018
how this came and come to be,
from gone to come to gone rediscovered but unreleased,
a passage thematic that birthed
fully formed, formal in its inception,
contented in its first appearance and
its primary coincident deception

who wrote this? not me? could not be!

yet a scented hint of
eau d’familiarité
suggests that I may have
inadvertently
plagiarized
myself

this old poem mine,
we certifiably have never met,
but nonesuch a hail fellow met,
that upon our (re?) acquaintance,
the heavens marked the occasion with
hail and neither of us deemed it strange

so we well recall our ancestor’s words

”there is nothing new under the sun”

adding our brand new imprimatur
”not even June or the Moon or other iconic loons”

we may have borrowed from the insights,
recollecting what happened to us when separated at birth,
envisioning like the prophets of yore what was implanted
long before  we remembered it well
upon its birthday

our intertwined twinning
fate befallen*

   postscript

quaking heart, trembling pointer
dawning and dying
simultaneous

neither tissue, cell, molecule,
i am but a composite of
letters, alpha bits and bets,
recirculated songs and tunes born
like me,
compromised, bridged,
newly un and recovered,
lengthy and unabridged,
my appearance faulty,
my eyes ****** ruddy and red,
my fingered tips blend and bleed
words acquired, words invented,
marching before me,
old lands recaptured,
new ones set free

take and give -
there’s no difference -
intimation, initiation,
all
bring me home
to where my boundaries begin


<•>

this one, for the ladies who loved its
predecessor

https://hellopoetry.com/poem/2367267/the-temple-of-you/
Nat Lipstadt Apr 2018
a short poem

<•>

kept women

my words are all kept women;
an old fashioned term
that has no currency today
but true for me

they but be the heart of my hearts,
when they leave my employ
keep them well, these yeowomen,
good fellows all,
for they will always be your
one true reciprocating lovers

keep ‘em

please

<•>

lie

how many gray April Saturdays are inventoried,
that we be bequeathed yet another this dull day of the 7th of the 4th month,
of errands and tax preparation and poem initiative-nationhood

the city backyard is a dulled green, energy ****** by one three too many nor’easters in March that  “Sherman-through-the-south”
came marching double time,
leaving the leaves, airport-delayed
and the spring poem planting, struggling

buy milk, lie and get a refund, do stuff and
don’t forfeit forget to
do laundry and
lie

write the longest short poem in history
that green-shots nature won’t provide,
so Me absinthe wills into existence

<•>

this English Woman

tomfoolery’d me continuously,
nature comes to her on knave-bended knees begging for
a verbal sword tap upon each shoulder for a knighting of a periodical glorious poem.  

She provides.

Does woman live in a glen, upon the wetlands,
walk moors
in moons grasp,
or upon a table way in the back of the pub, drinking pints of imagination?

man will die disconnected for so many “reasons”
but if his passing precedes an answering to where,
wherever she locale composes,
man will haunt her residential terrain  happily

<•>

Seven Hours

the clock implies that the body sleet-slept, probed deep-dark for seven hours.
disbelieving, then recalling the dues Frodo-Friday eve paid:
three and half hours with two thousand others at the Opera,
hours of Placido Domingo,
extracts from the body
emotional  countenance,
homage to artistry exemplary;

the pharmacist denies having this drug among the sleep aids
so to the opera must return to earn my occasion occasional dreamland refreshment

a well worthy trade: innervation trust rest from enervation must

<•>

idiosyncratic

all my idiot life wanted to be
syncratic
unique something special different

then I realized that’s what
everyone wants and we are all idioticsyncratic

so much trying, exhausting life,
it’s wonderfully human and classically

idiotic

<•>

* Postfaces*

Postfaces are used in literary works so that non-pertinent information appears at the end, to not confuse the reader.

this very short poem was born, birthed, on a salty grey Saturday, April Seventh, Two Thousand and Eighteen,
precisely between
Eight and Nine O’clock Eastern Standard Time

The opera was Luisa Miller at the Metropolitan Opera,
Lincoln Center, New York City.  

Everything Everybody is a factual fiction of your imagination.
Short Poems are copyright, copied write from the tissue of a man who is epistemologically incapacitated in a life incapable of writing a short poem, post facing forward.

(Too **** bad for you).
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