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  Jul 2021 Nat Lipstadt
Rainswood
I’m feeling inspired to write again
I tell him.
He looks at me with a pained expression,
And asks if we’re ok
Yes, I lie.
Straight to his face. Eye to eye.
Fine.
He knows the truth.
I am untangling knots, picking them apart with my mechanical pencil
Click click click
pick pick pick
It makes him uncomfortable-
My introspective searching
Quiet Contemplation.
He is Threatened
by my creative Expression
And the eager teachers that I attract
Disrupting our delicate balance
With their beards and intellect
I still burn my drafts after I post. Part of my creative process for many reasons
Nat Lipstadt Jul 2021
Of ***** roasting pans and racks and island fog!

if you love me, then you know poems wright themselves when standing, driving, bus riding, love-making and especially when
doing manly battle, ******* ***** dishwashing midst island fog

a passing remark goes noticed and summoned to a
Friday night feast, roasted fowl, wild rice with golden raisins and mushrooms, English spring peas, was it a Montrachet?

for dessert the washing up is obligation mine, a traditional desertion,
separation of church and state, her cooking a church  in which I worship, she states eloquently:
“Unto Caesaria , Render Her the cleanup”

this is hand to hand combat, no dishwasher mechanical
can scrub like the human hand, and with body english,
water hot, but no gloves employed for this is ***** man’s work,
not for sissies, cleaning roasting pans and roasting racks
that are at least twenty years burnt and crusted with a blackened
finish, residue of other lovers and dinners P.N. (pre-nat)

array three kinds of sponges and some human & metallic *****,
no one asking which came first,
the scrubbing away of life feasting residues,
or the poem writing that comes with pre & postscript sleepiness

when I say the dark stains and the grease buildup are
flavor enhancers, am beknighted with starry stares of
“how stupid do you think I am?” and sadly return to the
Battle of Agincourt, the one the American lost….



but they do source poems that flavor life

2020
*sometime last year?
  Jul 2021 Nat Lipstadt
Thomas W Case
When the agony
of dawn awakens
me.
I think of
drinking
***** to arouse
the muse from
her slumber.
But I don't;
instead, I slam
three cups of
coffee, hoping to
jolt the old
***** from her
lethargy.
If the caffeine
doesn't do the trick,
I grab a few of
our favorites:
Bukowski,
Neruda,
and Dylan Thomas.
I pace the floor
and read out loud.
Eventually, I feel her
begin to stir.
I yell,
"Is your fickle *** ready to work?"
And then the real day begins.
I know this sounds crazy,
but the muse and I
wouldn't have it any
other way.
Nat Lipstadt Jul 2021
the truest love: ask me about too perfect*

this I believe:

that part of we humans
that intersects emotion
& memory retains a video

not frequently reviewed,
placed deep in an unlocked,
unlabeled chest of drawer

surrounded by keepsakes, hidden
letters, scribbled napkins and
a less-than-handful of stills,
plain poems of raw delicacy

infrequent summoned, preceded
by a stray, strong thot asking
no one but you, why now? what
was the trigger synapse?

the love, the being, blessed, cursed,
known by its call letters:
TOO PERFECT…
Nov 2020
  Jul 2021 Nat Lipstadt
betterdays
upon your skin
the tears fallen from brooding clouds
tastes of warm and wetness

upon your skin
the specks of sanded down mountains
tastes of salt and rust

upon your skin
flecked grass shaved from the meadows beard
tastes of goodness and hope

upon your skin
water rivuleted from the salted realm
tastes of iodine and mystery

upon your skin
timbers tamed, taken,
taste of cedarsap and history fallen


upon your skin
my tongue  tastes
these wonderous thing

i am but a beggar at a feast.......
Nat Lipstadt Jul 2021
the body is atrophying,
rising from the bed is an
exercise in handholds, comedy physical
wall-grabbing, flail to fall, laughing at myself, still

my super quiet whispers in the bed
of imminent death go unheard,
as somewhat desired, but not entirely,
3/4 tween unsure and surely and surly.

the blood don’t circulate fast enough,
streams slow, sad songs Pandora accumulates,
and Spotify artificial intelligence finds more,
certifying a usual unusual, feel dust mites breaking off of me

<>

mind running in rivulets, fear floes,
courage-drowned, easy stuff
impossible, hard, beyond pale, summer melt,
drowning in self-disgust, hapless hopeless harmonic wastage

every deadline passes, dying,
easygoing no screaming, the
minimal, hard, past the behind, the pale,
the poetry is untraceable, untranslatable and never-good-enough


the easy out is steps away,
illusions are illusory, delusions offer no comfort,
stories you tell for amusement, leaving whimsical
dreams are practice runs, for the longer run, will shortly come do-due

the poem words die on the vine,
scorned silence, best is past,
appropriate ignominy is red-****** iced,
so it goes, no minyan for the funeral, no ten friends


the query repeatedly reappears,
how did I mess up so bad, some part
lazy, part afraid, humans, so much effort,
the voices-in-head saying, we’re plenty good enough

shelter can become a prison, an island,
fortress or prison, a salvation pretense,
osprey overhead, preying, feeding next gen,
hear-’em discussing options when “sleeping,”
his affairs in order?, which smile provokes the provocateur


my affairs long dustbin guests,
sand and atmospheric disbursed,
your next poem probably, granules contained,
for this is how all life is transferred, I’m in a tiny minute, in you…
July 2021
Nat Lipstadt Jul 2021
a thousand years ago, wrote a poem called
“why I always carry tissues”  -
a labor of love to
mine own toddlers misadventures,
requiring love covered in tissues so soft,
yet an ironclad coating
of natural substantive parenting
useful for tearing eyes, running noses,
and the cuts of living outdoors joyously

children grow older and oft that means,
they seek not your counsel,
and if offered, politely ignored,
for so it goes tween fathers and sons

then one summer days you receive an
observation, a datapoint that irradiates,
a quiet confirmation that not everything
you’ve said and done has gone astray

a young’un of “almost ten,” informs her father,
around the luncheon table of three generations,
that her foot is hurting; the son, now the father,
diagnosis renders, a blister, which will require
a protective custody that will protect the child’s
feet from the ravages of furious Shell Beach fun,
or the rough of a Manhattan sidewalk

I watch with a joy so quiet and so overwhelming,
as the son-father reaches into a cargo pocket,
producing not one but two bandaids, for life
requires backups for there are other babes about,
who at moments notice, produce scrapes and cuts
of ever greater consequence for each year they age

his wife renders me overjoyed, when she dryly
observe how certain children are lucky that
their father always carries bandaids, a new factoid,
for me, an unknown that glistens like a wet shell

now my eyes tearing, for a message in a bandaid,
or a tissue no matter which, is a certified proof,
somehow a message got through the clutter,
marked “well received,” that loving well requires
an oh so very hard attention to details, and that deep pockets
are repositories of good notions, handed down generations

June 24, 2021

Shell Beach
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