Next to my computer desk, a battery
driven wall clock audibly ticks away each
expired second, "Tick Tock, Tick Tock,"
In the silence of the room, it's every measure
clicking like muffled somber drumbeats.
Sitting today the clock a foot from my ear,
I placed my fingers on my neck and found
a perfectly matching heart pulse beating
"Thump-Thump, Thump-Thump repeated.
Clock and Heart together paired in perfect
synchronization, an inescapable reminder
of the fleeting precious time that remains.

Each second, minute, hour and day a
cherished gift.

My grandson
Likes his *****
A LOT
He is only three
If I hadn’t raised a lot of boys
This would be alarming to me
As understandable
As it may be
To like ones *****
One must take their hand out of their pants
While walking down the street
He hasn’t figured it out yet
How creepy it does seem
Walking around with your hand in your pants
For everyone to see
It’s not like I can wean him off it
It appears to be glued on
So please ignore this little
Three year old
Walking around town
With his hands down
In his Underground

~
In the mist of late night solitude,
                 from a mislaid plateau,
                 with a suitcase full of sparks

She observes constellations
        reflected as little needy eyes,
                        peering down at her

They could be midnight directives,
       postcards from distant nebula
                            suspended in gaffa

       "Ne t'enfuis pas..." She exhales

Still she wonders:

        will her children grow to love
          their perfect machines more
                                    than they love
                  their imperfect mother?
~

I cannot forget...
אני לא יכול לשכוח

©  STEPHAN PICKERING / חפץ ח"ם בן אברהם
12 Shevet 5778 / 28 January 2018
revised:
3 Iyyar 5758 / 28 April 2018
19 Iyyar 5778 / 4 May 2018
20 Iyyar 5778 / 5 May 2018
21 Iyyar 5778 / 6 May 2018

Shabtai Zisel / 'Bob Dylan' (1964):
'Forget the dead you've left, they
will not follow you'

W.G. Sebald z"l (1966):
'And so, they are ever returning to us,
the dead'

I.

the Path / derekh is silent,
a vacuum,
resonating with the
footsteps of tzaddikim, whose
teachings transcend(ed)
the Kingdom of Night...

where there was no longer
kefitzat ha'derekh
shrinking of the road
jumping the Path
teleportation.

...un die vvelt hot geshivign,
taught Reb Elie Wiesel z"l...
& the world remained silent.

not existing for themselves,
the tzaddikim speak with the
Shekhinah from their throats,
and the mar'ot johanna
visions of johanna
are witnessed by breslover
chavurot on desolation row,
murmurations of starlings
overhead.

listening to them, we survive
to walk / dorekh
the Path, with kabbalists z"l,
R. Chiyya & R. Yose,
the chevraya kadisha
the holy companions,
a derekh through the sea,

away from the energy vampyrism
& relentless phantasmagoric
cyberstalking of
the phantasmagoric Queene,
who engages in quacker
cross-contamination,
while prising her mindfully
plagiarising lips (a mirror image
of a death's-head hawk moth)
for a crucifictionist wafer:

a tax-deductible, copyright charity
deduction for ontological delusions
long after midnight,
clutching her cossetted Yehu'di
hatreds like
a perforated osculatorium,
because, שמח בחלקו.

    ****

Reb Uri Tzvi Greenberg z"l, 1923 [trans.
Michael Weingrad]:
'For so long there has been no water
in the wells. Only curses. ...& suddenly
the icons scream in Yiddish'.

II.

Light is the absence of Darkness,
to acknowledge Rav Rebecca
Newberger Goldstein.
& the holy slow train moves
(when it does)
sideways across flat earths.

consider the post-Auschwitz dilemma for
an opus dei natz'ri  who cannot grasp
the etymology:

prae / before + posterus / coming after
praeposterus / reversed, absurd.

did Shabtai Zisel / 'Bob Dylan' influence the
teachings of R. Yitzhak Luria z"l ?

III.

memories are stalking & ambuscading,
& as you said, Reb David Meltzer z"l,
'the Yehu'di in me is the ghost of me'...

& now the hourglass is invisible...

the windows of perception
to be peered into,
not out of,
as hairline fractures
develop in the retinas of narrow-ruled
yellow writing tablets masquerading
as frenetic mirrors,

never glimpsing tzefiyat ha'yeshu'ah,
the expectation of salvation.

& we are here,  
witnessing cyberian corpses
erecting three-way mirrors to their
obbligato and  mindfulness for girl
children...the mantras of a white
supremacist ****** ****** trained to
effect genocide  at a distance, his
audible hungering  for the  rapture  
of an endloesung in his drive-by
dark carnival, having no
farraginous self to say farewell to.

Lilith, the Midrash teaches, ate the
'bones' of Her enemies, but the
****** uses prayer beads as
majong ***** fired from his cap gun.

IV.

'she' stands on the bamboo porch,
thinking the lotus leaves floating by
are a reflexion of 'her' crumbling
totenkopfverbaende phantasies.

long after midnight, she shrieks to
a cyberian Mytilene, her mind so narrow,
thoughts are forced to crawl through her
fossilised ***** majora, which she identifies

as a personal luchot ha'edot, the glass
**** molded by her proboscis tongue,
as it fabricates yet another delusion
of a 1967 that never happened.

'she' turns, stepping onto an
embroidered nationalsozialist
matt,  'her'eyes a frail ambassador
of demure malice.

it is a moment such as this, when 'her'
desire of wanting to have been an
Auschwitz  Aufseherin, cannot be  
masqued  as a playful Latrodectus mactans.

ephemeral fabrications cling to 'her' --
an unbroken dance of impetuous
mirrors, as 'she' remains on the
porch, clutching 'her' 'we' aliases,

thinking, somehow, they are 'her'
aharon ha'bris...



V.

interlude / הַפסָקָה

Kafka z"l:
'I am divided from all things
by a hollow space'

Shabtai Zisel / 'Bob Dylan':
'I felt that place within, that
hollow place, where martyrs
weep, & angels play with sin'

Rav Yitzhak Luria z"l:
after tzimtzum,
the withdrawal of
'ehyeh 'asher 'ehyeh,
there came to be
halal ha'panui,
'the hollow space'

R. Shabbatai Sheftel ben
Akiva Horowitz z"l, 1719.
Shefa tal [Frankfurt edition]
3.5, 57b [Hebrew]:
'Before the world's bere'****,
'ayin sof withdrew into its essence,
from itself to itself within itself.
It left halal ha'panui within its
essence, in which it emanated
and created' [emended from Reb
Daniel Matt 1995]

VI.

sh'ma...'mir veln zey iberlebn, iberlebn, iberlebn'
(Lublin Chassidim z"l, 1939)...
hear: 'we shall outlive them, outlive them,
outlive them'...

why did R. Moshe Sofer z"l teach
'Chadush aser min ha'toray' / 'What
is new is forbidden in the Torah'?

the trolls here & what they call 'poetry':
collections of letters on a flickering
moon-glow  computer screen behind
a suburban curtain,
letters having no glyphs or sounds,
all encased in Sho'ah denial...

and yet. white supremacist sock monkeys
cannot silence the memories of the
thousands of Yehu'dit children z"l
burned alive on pyres, June-August 1944,
in the holy natz'ri village of Auschwitz,
in october country.

לעולם לא עוד לעולם לא עוד

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
...with thanks to my akhim / brothers & poets,
D.J. Carlile & George Dance & Will Dockery
for reading previous drafts...
...and to the memories z"l of David Meltzer 17 February 1937-31 December 2016
& Anthony Scaduto 7 March 1932-12 December 2017...chaver'im / friends
& for the 'or from R. Paul Laderman z"l &
R. Meyer Goldberg z"l

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
STEPHAN PICKERING / חפץ ח"ם בן אברהם
Torah אלילה Yehu'di Apikores / Philologia Kabbalistica Speculativa Researcher
לחיות זמן רב ולשגשג...לעולם לא עוד
THE KABBALAH FRACTALS PROJECT
לעולם לא אשכח



IN PROGRESS: Shabtai Zisel benAvraham v'Rachel Riva:
davening in the musematic dark

She is the typesetter’s “e”

The once-rounded uncial script,
Unbroken like the solemn vow of a monk,
His whisper, a shepherd of words under the cowl,
Murmurations of the Holy Mother to the lambswool shroud of candlelight.

His candle-flock of dreams to some hill of penitent towers, war-cowed
And broken open like faith-unfended helmets, littering the ground,
With their unspeaking tassels in babbling pagan sound of wind,
That hill too, once-rounded bare under the glittering apostles of twilight.

In the abbeywork of air, calligraphy was a cipher of souls,
He unwrested demons from an inkwell of sunsets, smothered them in blotting paper,
Freed the incarnate whole to the book of hours, nib-pointed in quills and illuminated in gold,
Line by line, in Carolingian winding sheets, he returned the misshapen to the fold,
To the carpet page of home and the warm ligatures of their waiting women.
So the shutters of the heavenly house could blow light in slanted rays to a wilderness in storm.

But he never tamed the aero-elongated, descender of Troy in a “t,”
He never knew the unholiness of the underscore or fonts as ******,
Or the world unwilling to know itself in serif robes of ancient lore.
His life was a simple rounded-out syllable of one man,
Left in the muddied, unintelligible text of faith and war.

She is the typesetter’s “e” and now belongs to any hand.

Pacing in soft falling rain along a path seldom taken.
Preoccupied by thoughts, perturbed by the direction of my concerns.
How, in the epic of everyday normality, the excesses of humanity at large intercede, intrude on the peace of mind. Intrude on the grace of the green and peaceful rurality, in which I walk.

Insanity runs riot in some of the most , otherwise, passionately beautiful locales on the planet.

It manifests in the slaughter of unsuspecting innocents sitting down for a breakfast in the quiescent early morning light of old Kiev.
The monstrosity emanating directly from the mind of the mania driven, 70 year old, balding man in the Kremlin.

Carnage, death and unspeakable outrage and sorrow. Both young and old contorted, suddenly, in the stench of cordite and smoking rubble. Dreams, dreamt, just yesterday, obliterated forever.

Incandescent rage of vengeance ignited in the eyes of the beholders, a rage that will endure in a livid hatred that will perpetuate for centuries.

And of course, every day now, in the palaces of Pyongyang, Beijing, Paris, Washington, London, Delhi, Tel Aviv. Iran and Moscow, old men in expensive suits ruminate, sip rare old whisky and plot strategies on the nuclear chessboard. Moves that have the capacity of determining the endgame.

The fate of all life on earth.

In the meantime, the planet, fed up with the excesses of humankind, is reacting in melting the ice floes of Antarctica and the North Pole, swelling the oceans to engulf, warming the seas to create the emergence of devastating cyclones, hurricanes and tornadoes.

Man is awakening to regions of expanding drought, vast and repetitive deluges of rainfall causing landfall and huge areas of catastrophic flooding, Encroachment of coastlines and the threat of inundation of vast low lying population areas, coastal cities and essential infrastructure, airports, power stations and arterial highways.....and then there are the wildfires, ever expanding, ever increasing in frequency and the continental choking palls of smoke.

Pondering these things, as I walk this country path in the falling rain, perhaps the greatest concern that causes my brow to furrow, is that largely, my fellow man turns the other way, preferring to put these things out of his mind. leave it to someone else to sort out. Place it all in the too hard basket.....and this attitude, I'm afraid, percolates to the top.
Concentrate on getting the votes, it will all sort itself out just so long as WE WIN THE NEXT ELECTION.

And so it goes on now, indeed.... A Whiter Shade of Pale.

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ

The civilization of
poets has thinned out.
There's a drought of
metaphors and symbolism.
We are all prisoners in
a musty attic.
Where is Emily when
you need her?
I'm afraid they've gone
the way of the graveyard.
Too much ***** and
too many broken hearts.

Where have all the
painters gone?
Sunk deep in
cobalt blue.
Artists resurrect!
Come out and play.
These are days full
of sumptuous sunrises,
and nights laden with neon.
I long for those
Jagged edges and brush strokes
that bleed pain and love.

Art changes our world.
It makes the brutality
bearable.
The smell of paint and old
books, transport us to
a gentle place laced with
ambrosia that we all
should drink.