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  Aug 2022 Nat Lipstadt
Amanda Shelton
Walking amongst the distant shadows,
feeling like I am drifting away
the fog is stealing my passion.

Like smoke from a candles flame
I linger on the edge of reality,
I learned years ago, a poet without
a pen is a drowning fool flooded
by unused ideas.

My passion bursts forth from
the deepest depths igniting
the fire of poetic desire.

My ink is that like fire,
it burns from within my skin
and bones, it acks to be free
from my heart that is its cage.

Such passion is pain, a long walk
with suffering and depression.

I built my roads on this digital
ground, and built my bridges with
poetic passion.

©️ 2022 By Amanda Shelton
Nat Lipstadt Aug 2022
the house in August is summer morn quieter

the sink clatter of breakfast dishes awaiting disposition by the dishwasher (me) ends abruptly. The slamming screen doors are
signal that crew has departed for yoga or Zumba, even work,


and the cottage is his.

An early riser, he has already visited and returned from the Environmental and Recycling Center which demands he ken various kinds of plastic, sort clean metal, glass and batteries for Hades voltage  crushing to their eternal resting for burial and rebirth & celebrates

bringing order to refuse.

Now, he retires to the sunroom couch to bring order to the refuse of his rambunctious mind, where he has birthed too many poems, survivors, destroying many stillborn or defective, that were not good enough for you, wept many tears of joyous completion, reveled in the late current bounteous good fortune in a mostly accursed life,
and dwells in a world entirely

of his own mind carving.

With one exception.

He sees the few names of those who have shared this journey.  With some, he has conversed for almost a decade. His grace for those willing to tag along and make their presence known, I am grateful

beyond words!

Thank you.

nml
08/03/2022
you know where.
Nat Lipstadt Aug 2022
Last Best Shot

July 31, 2020
8:07am

the morning sunlight. high enough to lighten first café & the future.
warming, mellifluous, biding good tidings, a head, ahead for the day.
sun-in-sky-low, so trees stand taller, shadow-makers, just for now.
grass blotched, pockmarked, alternative hints of hope & mystery.
the bay wave waters stilled, unrolled, unroiled, no-thrashing, omen?
is this wellness? is this a green tea soul and soil infusion, calming?


my mind wanders to that remains unaccompanied, unaccomplished.
unwashed breakfast dishes, miles of mail urgently unattended.
poems half-composed, some decomposing, resurrection on the list?
these unwashed word-shards, cry out, if not today, then when?
passerby’s, yachts, kayaks pause, turn, all bow-me-pointing asking?
is today their finale, burial by deletion, or their
last, best shot?

my reflection, neutral-neutered mien in 19oz. Blue Mountain
black coffee, in a Canadian Macintosh porcelain mug, provides
no clue, accident or incident, but inquires: why the adrenaline?
Nat Lipstadt Jul 2022
“They say everything can be replaced,
Yet every distance is not near”

”I shall be released” Bob Dylan

                            ~~~~~~~

this fragrant lyric,
burro-stubborn, hot burr burrows,
into an old man’s deteriorating brain,
one who spends nowadays, mending,
stretching short hours to feel lengthy,
by reviewing the distances he has travelled,
means/meanings to/for unalterable endings

when time hurries
to shrink distances
tween them points,
of incidents logged,
forking roads, always
wrongly chosen,
safety over bravery,
easy pain over hard love,
miscalculating time
and memory,
prioritizing avoidance
of the unknowns ******* up
the risk of the best laid guesses,
those things that come to be
the chiefest fete of contradictory
ironies, the travelogue nearly done,
what never happened
cannot be replaced.


he sings dirges
for the remains of the day
and other things vaguely recalled.

2/2/2022 ~  7/17/2022
one of the many orphaned waifs living in my half started, half finished files.

A email from a Dylan fan made me birth it
  Jun 2022 Nat Lipstadt
waskosims
Retreating Light

You were always very young children,
always waiting for a story.
And I’d been through it all too many times;
I was tired of telling stories.
So I gave you the pencil and paper.
I gave you pens made of reeds
I had gathered myself, afternoons in the dense meadows.
I told you, write your own story.

After all those years of listening
I thought you’d know
what a story was.

All you could do was weep.
You wanted everything told to you
and nothing thought through yourselves.

Then I realized you couldn’t think
with any real boldness or passion;
you hadn’t had your own lives yet,
your own tragedies.
So I gave you lives, I gave you tragedies,
because apparently tools alone weren’t enough.

You will never know how deeply
it pleases me to see you sitting there
like independent beings,
to see you dreaming by the open window,
holding the pencils I gave you
until the summer morning disappears into writing.

Creation has brought you
great excitement, as I knew it would,
as it does in the beginning.
And I am free to do as I please now,
to attend to other things, in confidence
you have no need of me anymore.
Nat Lipstadt Jun 2022
~but, yet, another love poem~

In the thousands of years of Earth’s foregoing,
marking the reign of humans, all seeking sapience,
full well knowing, neither first or last am I to mark
this day’s commencement with a need, a desiring,
to notate this not unusual but definitively unique
calendar entrance with a tribute, neither requested,
but freely given to the person who lies beside me.

Did I wake commanded or so compelled to scrabble
a collection of words, sequences, initially disordered,
into a shape, to chisel these sendings of a chest into a
living disbursement, a marbleized breathing creature,
that empties and releases a sensory disposition rambling,
rumbling into a messy, utterance of sentience while they
sleep quiet, pockmarked by dreamed mumblings, dreaming?


No, I did not.

News headlines come demanding see me, insistent that
I am urgency, but one displaced by the next, making them
instantly stale by pealing replacements.

This poem, a self- appointed task is now eased, story spent and spurted into a lifespan of a length unknown and untold.  But, and  yet, here I end, ceased and not resisting, demurring, desisting another stanza, The hour approaches the seventh hour after midnight, rising time.

Go now.

The choring chords of fibrous tasks that stitch existence into
a sustaining impertinent permanence, list-crossing-off, a-nagging.
The itches of living, ask for scratching, 1st cup of coffee making,
but smile bemusedly that this first and freshest to do, newly added,
is done, dispatched with a line-sworded satisfying crossing off.
She sleeps on, while I soon to rise and quiet paddle to the
kitchen where kept the utensils for sustenance,


But, and yet, I am contented, miraculously, simultaneous,
emptied and fulfilled.

4-14-2021
NYC
7:18am
Leonard smiles and whispers “hallelujah! I-used-to-live-alone-before-i-knew-you”
Nat Lipstadt Jun 2022
This day will start out mostly sunny with temperatures near the high 70s. Then expect a chance of showers and thunderstorms late at night, with temps dropping to the high 60s.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until June 20 (Juneteenth)

by
God.

(who is relieved that we humans will celebrate and honor Juneteenth,  by not having to rise early to move our cars to the other side of the street to enable the horde of street cleaners and free men and women to sleep late too in honor of the emancipation of enslaved people in the US.
June·teenth
/jo͞oːnˌtēːnTH,ˌjo͞onˈtēnTH,jo͞o:nˈtē:nTH/

a holiday celebrated on 19 June to commemorate the emancipation of enslaved people in the US. The holiday was first celebrated in Texas, where on that date in 1865, in the aftermath of the Civil War, slaves were declared free under the terms of the 1862 Emancipation Proclamation.
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