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7d · 100
blurt by blurt
“I write blurt by blurt, edit once, then post and send it out like a puppy”
that is learning to walk, impossible to walk straightly,
thank gawd for walls and laundry baskets and single sneakers
that obstacle us into trouble, opportunities always a near
but never fatal crashing,
and our whisking swishing tail is an ever
countervailing, counterbalancing
waving gesture of
“oops,
there we one goes from nearly, nearer, almost another
nearest disaster

that is the style of substance of how I write
headlong smashing, bouncing off walls,
regrouping spindly words into a balletic
clown show,
startling off in a new and unforeseen direction,
scrambling energy like three sunny side up eggs,
whistling and crackling and popping,
god, this writing stuff is **** tiring,
so much easier to respose,
chew there upon,
selectfully taste and spit~select
a single word,
picking the appropriate apropos,
taking a nap in between,
then
recommencing
blurting
blurts
of escapading words
that tumble out,
falling all around,
requiring reassembly like
an impossible-to-put-together
new toy,

anyway,
here for you to play with
for your sensory pleasure
is my latest greatest
blurt,
which rhymes with
dessert,
which I will imbibe
after eating all my

vegetables.
commenced 3/3/24
11:55am
Nat Lipstadt Mar 8
Tennessee Williams, once said, “The world is violent and mercurial—it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love—love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”

<>
how succinct, successful a summary
do we require, nary a word excess,
only love comes at ya slap-dash-
across-the-face, to make the point
its presence in everything and every
human touch point juncture, is a
conjunction,,

be a writer, even when muses en masse
desertion seems overwhelming, query
with love this conundrum and fill the
open yet tiny interstitial space with a
soup of creamy hope, inspiration is ever,
never late, for it runs on its own schedule,
which is forever unpublished and happily
irritating us when we least expect its timely
birthing…

wet the eyes, remove the shadowy slumber
residue, with vigorous water splashes, flying
drops everywhere- is that not a poetic command?

rinse the mouth of the failed taste of insufficient
sleep, or the countervailing dry excess of too much,
when we hide from the challenge of game on,
and the liquid sloppy of the premier
day~light~enunciation…

give birth to conjunctions, attach the independent,
linking the minuscule to the primary, and write of
it as if you were the first, indeed, you are this moments
first…

to exit the permanently burning building…you must
run to it, enter willingly and save it and by dousing
yourself with love, save more than just
thyself

9:11am
3/8/2024
Nat Lipstadt Mar 3
8:28 Sunny Sunday Marching 3rds
(3/3/23)

<>

as per usual,

(tho my fingers strangely type ‘per Isaiah’)

commencing at my beginning with no
direction home, an entitled title asking
for complete composition, and your
attentive compensation, threatening
to sue for “failure to finish,” a crime
for which I’ve served many a year behind
the bars of my ever increasing
TO DO file

but struck am I this morn by the poetry
of the common place, the phraseology
that we use without momentary cognition,
the every~day verbiage that, within lies
perhaps veins that deserve mining for
nouveau riches

and we get what we deserve,
no more, no less, but when
I inquire who has decided this
measured cup of justice and
painted the lines of liquid fluidity,
or just vanilla inspiration, a one
hand clap and a mocking hoot is
returned  reverberating as in an
empty spelunking cave

we are all experts in the ordinary
diurnal doors that require opening
by morning, closing by night, while
waiting for that “break that would
make it ok…from the wreckage of
your silent reverie”^


yesterday was my birthday,
no, it was not, but I’ll pretend
to have that right to make the
summary judgements that the
spirits and harlequins, who,
now revealed as my silent mockers,
none
the less, no more, no,
lessening,
I am rendered,
split asunder, by the sentence I’ve self~
impose down on my conscience and
constitution

balance does not require balancing,
more bad than good, wrecked and wracked
by the un~proportionality of my unbalanced
imbalance, what flaws, what traits,
what genetics,
what misapprehensions, foolishness, led me into
this straying straight life, of no more, no
less

and I quit here for the answers do not appear,
and that voice says you need a shave, go!
look in the mirror and revelations will dance, emanating from your eyes who bear witness to all,
no more, no less




^ Sarah McLachlan, “Angel”
Nat Lipstadt Mar 2
“This Insubstantial Pageant Faded”
(spoke by Prospero, The Tempest, by W. Shakespeare)^

<>
Our words are all actors,

a long run, run its course,
our long playing record,
scratched, love~worn to
worn out extremity, yet
yeoman service did offer,
extreme only in magical
transforming plain sight
into visions, a legacy,
bent gray, tarnished by
weary wearing aging,
their brief sparks now
but reclamation flares of
burst lights of waning days
in short lived tastings of what
was and can be nevermore

everyone’s magic has its preset
timed timing, and with
every day, each a concentric
ring marked and hallowed,
a heartbeat ring narrower
than its predecessor,
a shallower hollow,
a fair represent of both
all that came our way, and that
we resent with no resentment
into a cloud capped atmosphere
for all to ****** from a flailing,
flying breeze, their brief gleam,
multiplying, thus envisaging,
illuminating the manuscript of our
hinted future forward’s next percept


“And like
this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep”
^
Prospero’s speech at the end of
, The Tempest, by William Shakespeare

Sabbath
March 2 2024
8:22am
Nat Lipstadt Feb 29
“I fear that many people are put off by poetry because they don’t know where to start. If I have any advice for them, it is this: find what you like.

Who is to say what guides this process?

In my own case, it has simply been the fact that certain phrases, poems, and figures have acted like flare-lights along the path of my own life. Sometimes you see a flicker in the darkness and know that it is saying something—often something of great importance—and you sense that you have to go toward it, to get near to it, all the time looking out for other lights.

My love of certain poets stems from a single phrase they wrote that hit me like a great freight train of truth.

At other times, I have been attracted to a poem or a poet because I am taken by that feeling of recognition that someone else has felt or thought exactly the way I did. As C.S. Lewis says, as a character in the film Shadowlands, “We read to know we’re not alone.”

Sometimes, we read poets because we want to be like them, or because they are arbiters of good taste, or have been through something we want to know about. Literature—poetry, in particular—offers us a way to become different from what we are or might have been otherwise.

In the end, I suppose the question is: What is the purpose of all this? Why is it worth making our heads into a well-furnished room?

I think it’s because what we have up here—in our heads—is the only thing that cannot be taken. So long as we have memory, we cannot be made into automatons by man or machine…”

Which brings me back to Shakespeare.

The Tempest is the last play Shakespeare wrote on his own. And because of that—and because we know so little about his life that we always look for clues in his work—a lot of autobiography has always been read into the play.

It is about a magician, Prospero, at the end of his magical days. At the end of the play, he promises to drown his magic book and break his staff. It is impossible not to read a certain amount of biography into this, Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage.

Every now and then, somebody comes up with a new theory about Shakespeare. All have been heard before—for example, the vivid description of the sea in The Tempest indicates Shakespeare must have spent time as a sailor.

My response to this? In that case, Shakespeare must also have been a Roman emperor, several English and Scottish kings, a Danish prince, a shepherd boy, a teenage girl in love, a murderer, and almost every other person who ever lived. It is a reductive argument, because it forgets that in the realm of the imagination, you can be all things without actually being them.

And, in any case, at the end, it all disappears, falls apart, and comes together again somewhere else.

This speech, by Prospero, in the fourth act of The Tempest, is the finest farewell of any I know, and one I hope to keep in my own head for many years to come.

**Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep
excerpt from
https://www.thefp.com/p/a-second-year-with-douglas-murray?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=260347&post_id=141539442&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=1njhw&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=emailwaq
Nat Lipstadt Feb 24
The Level of Uncertainty, This Yellow Star

“Even though I’m OK right now,
there’s a sense it could all go
away in a second.”  

<>
foreboding,
a disease well known to me,
not “as if,” but in fact
been Cain-marked at
birth to be wary, be watchful,
ever alert, never inert in the
realm of possibilities,
the king
in my universe’s galaxy is the
randomness of existence,

microsecond, milligram minuscule,
muscular instability that even if
unspoke,

danger!
it’s bespoke nature, customized
just for me, lurks, prepared to ****
me into a hard fall, loss of balance

yes,
I prepare with subtleties, minute
measures, discrete and indiscreet,
measured steps, slow-wide turns,
“hands on the railing down the stairs we go”
motto~attitudinal, antithesis~carefree,
for this birthmark was forehead installed
from birth, as a reminder that
reckless abandon
is a countervailing force,
and there are whales in the ocean
and whole coteries of fish in the sea,
waiting, wanting to swallow me whole,

lions across the ocean faraway continents
eager for a nibble of my tender heart,
round ****, and
thousands of people
who hate me and my kind, for no reason,
other than my birth mark,
this foreheaded
yellow star,
notifying all eyes, that I am to be dreaded,
feared, for reasons no matter,
just but unjustly

because, I am a Jew

who prays thrice
times daily for peace
for the whole world.

Sat Feb 10
8:35am
Nat Lipstadt Feb 23
Francie Lynch gets it! (The Thin Red Line)

https://hellopoetry.com/francie-lynch/

“A poem is like a tickle,
it gives both joy and pain:
with blissful tears and tearful
giggles, you'll read that poem again.

A poem is exactly like
a damaged heart in
need of surgery:
a cut that heals,
a line that
leaves a
scar along your heart.”
F. L.
<~>

I,
now in possess
of said thin red line,
where they cut me
just so, opened
stem to stern
for a rethreading repair, a repaving
of the highways & byways of
my little blue engine that
almost but couldn’t quite could but thought…
b e l i e v i n g
it could eke by for a little longer

new observable routine,
first item of my daily rising
now includes a pre-diurnal poetic
extraction~*******~ejection,
an intro~introspection
of an
introductory, petite reflexive
contemplative
reflection
of life’s mysteries,
like enjoying that
first bang of eye~opening conscious breath and a
disruptive need to spill
a few verbal beans before the
daily dead~lines of to do’s
strangle me into oblivion

a morning dispatched
by the poet paperboy
on his cardio bicycle

with
tearful eyes,
and many mirthful
gaggles of
giggles

yep,
a tickle
too,
no
extra

charge✅
Nat Lipstadt Feb 18
I suppose I will never lead the ordered life my father led.
And I’ll never live in the kind of house he lived in, with its rituals,
its dignity, the smell of polish.

Leonard Cohen

<>
the orderly of an individual life,
guided by the guardrails of family life,
superimposed upon it by a calendar of religion,
that layers into you with a cyclicality of communal ritual,
that rules, guides, tides and hides you subliminally, the individual,
in ways that forever alters how one comprehends the meaning of
belonging

the oven~heated, banging smells of the kitchen,
the hubbub, frantic sounds of a Sabbath eve prepping,
vacuuming house cleansing, far more than just a cleaning,
the young boys in their jackets, white shirts, for Friday night
candle lighting, the girls in Sabbath frocks, assisting Mother,
but by
Saturday morning sermon time
those boy’s shirts
were always untucked, sweaty and always less white,
from running around outside synagogue from playing Ringolevio,
for which you were justly critiqued by a mother’s glare-stare

this play-within-a-play poem,
played out in homes nearby,
for community was very defined by geography,
and the candles of Sabbath oft visible in every home as
Fathers & sons returned home from Friday Night services
where the Sabbath’s peace was welcomed like
a new bride.

but the knowledge that this scenario was occurring in
homes around the world in almost identical custom,
lent a larger perspective to even the youngest, of a
belonging

As for me, I passed on that life,
not as well as it was given to me,
but as best I could, or honestly, desired,
but because I the individual inherited these
ways, words, knowledge and sensations and deemed
failing to transmit would be a grievous denial of a heritage
were I to not gift them this order,
the dignity of these rituals,
the pungent smell of a polished home,
a life of intuiting

belonging,
be longing.
some of you know that our paths nearly crossed
by virtue of the intersecting diagrams of the circle
of three degrees of separation, and our similarity of
upbringing  overlapped in ways that molded instant
recognition of our commonality and community…I
saw both the house and the factory, when visiting
Montreal in the 80’s

“Whenever I blow into Montreal, I manage to take a look at the old house. It’s that large Tudor-style at the bottom of Belmont Avenue, right beside the park. It looks the same. Maybe the elms on the front lawn are taller, but they were always monumental to me. I wouldn’t hold on to the place or the factory and properties that went with it.” Leonard Cohen
Nat Lipstadt Feb 15
You are so kind.  
Thank you with all the
resolve
in my heart.”

J.V.

<>

A thank you note,
for a simple shining-of-light,
stuns me into inspiration,
deep chested thrombosis consternations and calculations,
palpitations of the boom-boom variety,
signaling the onset of  intracranial contractions
of a new birth~poem
aborning…

who of us these days,
speaks of the resolve in our hearts?
who of us free confesses deep natured thanks,
it is almost too old fashioned.

it is powerful.
it is a thanks that
powers the wattage sufficiency
to light up a city entire,

and even though inward focused,
it yet is shedding Moses-like
light beams
heavenward,
I wrack my heart to even comprehend,
that simplest of actions reciprocal:

1/Thank You

can it, (it can!)
steel the heart,
give its truthfulness a special
power, and more than resolve,
even solves
our equation solution

so elegantly is the endless searching for the
right way to give thanks, to receive thanks,
it is a mutual gifting, for our mutuality is of
two hearts, echoing the words of
all legislative bodies:

”Be it Resolved”

what is this resolution then?

the consummate of English words
with such a variety of shadings,
requiring a declarative,
not a narrative,
consummation

be it resolved,
that two resolute hearts
shall not depart this Earth
before their arms interlocute an
embrace,

the shadows of their eyes interlock,
casting away
interfering long distances,

a single atmosphere shall
be tasted, inhaled,
by their
combinatory sensories

then and only then:
their resolve tested
and surpassed
will their poem

commencé et terminé,
begun and completed

The Emotion is Carried




<<>>
“*The gender-neutral name Jamadhi comes
from Arabic origins, meaning “beauty.”
When thinking about all the beautiful
things in the world, your little one, with
their kind demeanor and bright smile,
no doubt springs to mind! But a name
simply meaning “beauty” doesn’t only
refer to their appearance. This name
is a reflection of their beautiful little
soul, too, on a journey through this world.
Baby Jamadhi could be a gentle soul
or the fiercest of little childon the playground,
but no matter what, a name meaning
“beauty” will always ring true.”
Nat Lipstadt Feb 10
Our Holy Communion of Words

you wrest my words away, with tongue and teeth,
running their sounds out with your soft tonguing,
gentling their enunciated freedom to float airborne,
but not before,
your teeth hone them sharper, wiser, better,
before freeing the letters
for life eternal rebirthing,
swapping, warping words,
into a
a holy communion

then with thy lips closing after them,
wishing them godspeed,
safe travels to yet another’s eye imbibing,
until released once more,
traveling from souls you likely
never to meet, embrace, greet,
but to whom you have formed a
direct intangible tangling,
shared wafered words,
a holy communion*

But

yours,
your words,

gut punch me,
how could you know,
where/\were
you there beside me when in darkened hours
the sun shone brightly, illuminating with bent light
our crevices and our crevasses,
your, words, written,
stun me into crazy, as if
you were within my interior
a cacophony exposed for all to hear,
my grunts & oofs,
visceral, too real, and
my actual tears cascade unfiltered
into the cup of our tangible entangling,
salted & starry*


our holiest communion yet!

~~~~~~~~
Fri Feb 9,
10:00pm~10:30pm
inspired by Audra McDonald,
this poem came in a single short breath i taken,,
and left just as quickly
single, speedy insight
Nat Lipstadt Feb 6
Upon appearance of an untitled poem with no body in my Drafts
<>
never have I ever
written an untitled poem,
nor painted a human sans
a head;  arms, legs, o.k., but,
but when the purging urging
enwraps me at 12:22 in the AM,
i cannot birth my babies
stillborn,
unnamed, forlorn,
it’s every breath would be
an accusation, of breach, malfeasance,
a child nameless, is the worst of all orphans,

the poem’s title is its inner essence, a preface,
a forward, and epilogue, just as your names is
both begin and end, a hint of who you are and from
whence you came, and where you are bound to be bound,
it is your birth name, and final resting place, a hint of who you
we’re, ared destined to become, to be, and to come,
an entitlement!

ah you curse or bless, thy given name, no longer do
you examine it, write it repeatedly, to despise or admire
the sounds of it exiting thy mouth, a roomful of teeth
and tongue in concert cooperating and conniving, silky
hissing your who-you-are-ness, you, who are poem, exist not,
cannot be, without your entitlement; ah you pause and say
to the sleeping woman who neither hears nor cares,
who am I, who I am, and the differences
entre deux
that are my
character

yes, a untitled poem is forever
unwished, unfinished
unwashed?
and to eternity, forever lost,
unsigned, unconsigned,
unfortunate
unconsummated
finis @2:52Am
2-5-2024
Feb 4 · 569
better to endure it
Nat Lipstadt Feb 4
a quote from Samuel Johnson, or Dr. Johnson, the storied eighteenth-century poet and essayist who once said:

“The sole aim of writing is to enable readers a little better to enjoy life, or a little better to endure it.”

<>
our “sole aim,”

Oh what burden the doctor places on our shoveling pens,
to be earthmovers
that dig trenches, uproot earth,
that lies and hides our faces, entombing our hearts,
eliciting and erupting emotions that cannot be contained,  
nor controlled,
indeed, deserving of replanting in
our shared selves, transplanted into a communal flowerpot
of our multi bursting colored commonality

lift my composing tools,
peer into
winter blue skies guarding the towers of
Manhattan isle, longing for guidance.
lusting for specificity of direction,
how,
how, to easy our burdens
with carefully selected and
careless wonderful words,
words that deal out caring uncarefully,
with a graceful recklessness of abandon
that open thy tears,
lift up the edges of your lips,
so that my duality is your duality,
the burden shared.
the burden eased…

to cry and laugh simultaneous,
lift and lighten,
a momentary distraction,
a cut flower in our vase,
that lasts but brief,
yet with each gaze repeated and
repeatedly,
well stains us with
eyes uplifting
8:03am Feb 4th, 2024
how quickly the new year molts into a
normality, resolutions tarnishing but still intact,
and any blue shade of sky, even the least
baroque and most pale, hints that summer warmth
is nearly visible…
Nat Lipstadt Feb 3
"I will create as I speak."

<>
these profound and most serious of words,
vibrate within my chest (really!) as I
tongue test them, having just awoken
and a Sabbath ~Saturday looms before me,
naked and full of
potential.

I am hopeful, and unafraid, by the clean sheet of twenty four hours that covers me nearly toes to head, a singular occurrence,
normative
would be dread of the shroud of lists of items of urgencies that demand outage justifyingly,
urgencies crying out,
attend to me now!

but this day different, a sleepy peacefulness
compromises my interstitial spaces, and an amber color of
calming quiet fills them, no raucous splashes,
no errant droplets hinting at the fullness-yet-to-come
when the tanks of
empty are quietly, with a silent sigh of finality, announce the profundity of sufficiency and satisfaction facing
undefined emptiness,
that these contradictory sensations are
harmonious extant
within me for the foreseeable momentary.

Dai!

this single syllable Hebrew word for “enough,” issued in one breath, like “the end!” hits me with a slap of sensibility as a closing lid on this just about to possibly boil *** of emotions and internal combustion.

two last thoughts burr me mind before signing off:

the contradictory nature of the blanket of
an unscripted openness of a day ahead, and the
totality of its fulsome satisfaction it offers,
do not confuse me.

no scholar I, it occurs that the word Dai,
unlike any other, has a root unknown to me,
but internet of godlike humans had anticipated my query and offers me irony and reassurance that I am so not the first to wonder and know this satisfying confliction of this two headed Hydra send-story, sensatory, balanced imbalance
for the root of this common word used daily to say:
“enough,” “stop,” or “that's sufficient.”

comes from the root is DaWaH דוה which literally means
“to flow or extend outward.”

and though
*
I created this poem as I spoke,**
I only reiterate what my ancestors already knew
thousands of years ago!

by the bye,
the Hebrew phrase "I will create as I speak,”
is well and better  known to you as:

Abracadabra.


Dai!
Saturday
Feb. 4 2024
6:39am
Nat Lipstadt Jan 20
“a decade old is forever new, for
truth is never old.”
Pradip Chattopadhyay 


this man, ten years of inspiration, ten years of friendship, here,
on HP,
provides nourishment to my lagging body as it nears eight decades
of Earthly occupation, for
his eyes and heart and his mastery
of the songs of the tongue,
have wrenched me straight,
we, attentive to the tears
he makes me weep, for his insights penetrate my insides,

even now as one, unexpectedly, reflects midst
yet another first poem of the day, my eyelids blink away
the wet,
my brain revels at his pithy, how he corrals,
encapsulates the daily smoke and fire of life,
it truest value,
in words that make one wonder,

what admixture of mineral, chemical, history,
adventures, atmosphere, parentage, spices,
love gives him these super powers to gentle
seize the moment, size our souls, causing my
cheeks to wide smile, while mine eyes sheds
monsoon droplets of feelings so deep, that
my repaired heart oxygenates my very soul,
making me high, my mind reels that a day will
come inevitable
that one of us will be unable to sit by side,
swapping tales of granddaughters, and
other earth meaningful events, to walk his
streets or he, mine, finishing each other’s
couplets.

to think that I awoke with no intention of
composing this paean, but his brief pearl
knocks my head side to side,
and with the
tears, come words,
that age, or an entire
decade,
cannot restrain,
retrained to modesty,
for regarding my friend
Pradip,

my boundaries expand and cannot be
contained, even by my delimited vocabulary,
the paucity of my skill, the insufficiency of
the adjectives acquired over a lifetime, but
do my unequal-to-the-task best efforts,
but without choice, but compulsed, compelled,
one more time, to say,
to my new day,
perhaps my last,
I love this poet~man.
this is one of my truths.
<>
Wed Jan 17 8:31am
City of New York

<>

read the poetry of
https://hellopoetry.com/pradip-chattopadhyay/
<>
truth is never old.” Pradip Chattopadhyay  lipstadt
Nat Lipstadt Jan 14
easily,
with an optimism misguided,
that both volume and quality
of what lay within was
infinite,

a beaker that could never
be drained, nor overflow,
brimming and believed,
in the always
of a
next poem!

know better,
known worse,
and the only poems that are birthed,
all flawed, lesser,
the curse of worse,
time wrenching
the best words away,
alas!
spend, spent, sent…
it was writ as a hope,
now, a  false prophecy
and woe
misbegotten


<>>

Jan. 13, 2014

a  flawless poem

if such there were,
will always be,
the next one

my poor soul,
my rag tag heart
has no censor,
so careless, reckless,
as if words were but
frivolous treasures,
easy spent, easy get


if only, how I wish I
could harvest my best,
with golden cutlery excise
the single flawless poem,
that I know in my possess


lay down this hand so weary
from cupping tears,
be satisfied at long last,
so much so,
that my casket lowered,
hands in repose companioned,
clutching his best, easing his rest,
a paper record to join his ash,

his flawless poem,
at long last
flawless anniversary
Nat Lipstadt Jan 5
^words of Wislawa Szymborska
(a phrase from her poem  “Some Like Poetry”

———————————

gorge on poetry,
thereby!
imbibe your raison d’etre,
if well examined,
one will be exclaiming:

Exactly!

we on trial from birth,
for having been born sin~innocent,
yet guilty for having allowed
in nighttime light pollution,

one searches for places in
life’s momentary memorabilia,
band~aids, orange lifesavers,
a phrase, photograph, pale bulb light…

these “things,” are our
hitching posts, lean~to,
grasped hungrily for
support whence
negotiating the
steep Spanish Steps
of the staircases of
monumental outrageous misfortune

this poetry,
this poem,
this railing,

sustaining from Day One to
Day T+1 and beyond,
a protuberance of strength
to grab onto before the
shaming of old fails falling,
a head banging despair of barely
hanging on,

unbeknownst to you passerby,
we, who live a life of bare bones,
only mimicking existence, while
questioning Death’s delayed arrival,
and only by,

this poetry,
this poem,
this railing,

sustaining our edge two forward, one back,
cognizant of our awesome missteps,
begging permission, to-liv-liven, a moment more,
offering upon-this altar, a sacrificial lamb,

this poetry,
this poem,
this railing,

sustained in the writing thereof,
expelling the fumes of the

nearly, the never, the hapless hoping

Thu Oct 26 2023
8:15am
x^words of Wislawa Szymborska
(an excerpt from her poem  “Some Like Poetry”

p.m. when the poems grasps me,
my nostrils filled with single breath
good for one more day
Nat Lipstadt Dec 2023
Lay My Body Down

Sunday sipping my Hawaiian java,
the world’s end is hallmarked this weekend,
like hash marks on a old fashioned
wood ruler,
and unrequested and unbequested,
heady voices demand a retelling,
even a tallied
recounting
of 2023
the year I almost blew it.

took some pics, even a video,
of my-internals, and pronounced me
nearer my god than thee,
I was precisely, scientifically,
97% almost dead,
said the occultist
said see you tomorrow
for a haircut and a nip and tuck
upon thy heart

strangely,
I was of good cheer,
not fully comprehending my walk on the edge,
and
strangely,
never gave it too much thought,
which for a poet,
is just plain weird.

But this Sunday,
as I lay my body down,
thinking about “deadlines,”
all missed,
and are all still, cursing me,
residuals of 2022 & 2023,
which are carry on baggage
for the next trip through the
door of
2024

and these words come jumbled and
we are out of time to sort
them better than this,
but
as I lay this body down,
one last time,
on the ruler’s edges edge,
the last hash mark nearly touched,
and almost
equidistant from this year and the
unmeasured blankness of a clean white sheet
of Next!

<>

a good ole saying, a good ole lyric,
“lay my body down”
invokes image of spring water
a brook wash~flowing
over the shell of man
clothed in white linen shroud,

water of clarity crystalline,
taking a tour~trip with an itinerary
of (must-see!) sights,
cracks and crevices,
slats, slots and slits,
apertures and orifices,
groans and worry lines
accumulated this nearby past,
my body’s own poem

<>

but I recall W.H. Auden’s words
about the revitalization quality of water,
and I decide to
baptize myself,
like recommissioning, retrofitting
an-old ship

(though I am a serious jew,
who knows nothing of this rite)

But fortunate seemed that

Day because of my dream, and enlightened,

And dearer,


water,

than ever your voice as if
Glad—though goodness knows why—to run with the human race,
Wishing, I thought, the least of men their
Figures of splendor, their holy places.


<>

in some places, you can follow the dotted lines,
on my physical container;
man-made marks from
exploration of my body,
now understanding these lines and holes
are a schoolboy’s
long division’s remainder,
(always annoying)
bits & pieces of him,
looking for a surety that one can
yet call it home,
one more year?

<>
my interstices,
tween the manmade decorations
of medical foreplay
and the cri de coeur
of my mental anguish,
are life reminders,
I am
alive and still hurting,
BUT

could be worse.


enough.
Aug 22 11:44pm/Dec.31, 9:50am
2023
Nat Lipstadt Dec 2023
But I know…

this blending of a warped (time) continuum,
the future resting on shaky table legs,
errors of habitual inconsistency,
one on top of a prior, on top of…

we pursue regrets, misdeeds, theorizing
that we can fix the wobbly mess we instigated,

that can we smooth the ruckus that
the unknown in surety is bonded to be
surly serve up buffet style,

we help ourselves to troubles so attractive,
like rice thrown at a wedding, dead seeds of
messes yet to come

old regrets freshly regretted, for we waste
not even
what we wanted then
even now!

for we do not proper value the passing of each momentary,
but weep and mourn the entirety of years corrupted by
wrong-headed mish-mash of longings,
swift stupid inexcusable acts of impulsive weaknesses permitted,
so that we dust
the dust encasing artificial flowers,
that are so faded that the dust mispermits one
to fool themselves
that they were once ,
burnt orange vibrant,

like the optimism of a sunny day gone and hoped for
just once more

yes, I know why…

<><> <>

*Burnt Norton by T.S.Eliot
*

“Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past.
All time is eternally present 

All time is unredeemable.


What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility   

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden.

My words echo
,
Thus, in your mind.
                                  

 But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

<><><><>>


postscript

the rushing to my ever nearer demise
the dust suffocates,
the regrettables
have no half life,
and I dust,
I know
if I do not,
I choke…
9:02am 12/14/23
Nat Lipstadt Dec 2023
sad fact and none truer,
despite my accumulation
of millions of trinkets,
and millions of lottery tickets,
useless word combines,
acres of scripted scripture
of scrumptious scarred
scribbles,
and dollars,

I boast not of my good fortune
for I am a waste not~want not
tykee type, no spendthrift me,
and my phone and writing tablet
date from the Paleo Age, technically,
and one’s batteries live in the
red and yellow light of the
dying lightening edge of the
OMGF,

1%

otherwise known as nearer to death experience.

carry chargers everywhere but my
batter usage habits have eroded my
charging life and happiness for us
a mere clean
green clean 20%

you see or maybe
you don’t,
my devices
have endured countless
drops and falls, just like
my body at this tender age,
and the male man ~~😵 female connectivity
of plug and plug hole are deformed,
bent so that charging is a struggle moderne,
a dance of avoidance of an earliest death

Living on the edge of 1%
changes a human, one thinks
constantly of the fragility of the
electric grid, and how the hell
we will charge all them unwanted
EV’s with insufficient charging stations,
not to mention all those spanking brand
new power plants we are rushing to build
NIMBY

(cmon, you can’t be unaware of this
contraction, for it is the guiding principle
of urban design, today)

anyway, my tablet is in the bathroom sink,
whose rigid porcelain angles allows for 
a conjoing  of the cord into that
flux capacitor hole to make tentative
kissy
kissy noises
and by the light of the
early morn,
said antique Generation 1 ipad
will be restored to usable status
for yet another brief moment
in time
and another
bad poem

this choring is a skill honed bendless endless
experimentation as to how
to insert a Peroni shaped
(beer bottle; no, not not a Pony Man plug shape)
into a lightening squarish O, and witness the
miracle of ******* of
Yes! Yes! YES!
(thank you Steven Spielberg))
a semi functioning de-vice,

vice being the exactly right adjective

my mind is weird, true,
but I draw on my experience
to share with you the specialness
of being in the  elite,
them
1%

so you can be less envious.
you satisfied boors,
awakening refreshed after
eight hours sleep and a green light indicator
smugly informing you are an overheated hoi peloi
member of the
100%ers

yes I’m done!
why does my software
keep asking me that?
Nat Lipstadt Dec 2023
sad fact and none truer,
despite my accumulation
of millions of trinkets,
and millions of lottery tickets,
useless word combines,
acres of scripted scripture
of scrumptious scarred
scribbles,
and dollars,

I boast not of my good fortune
for I am a waste not~want not
tykee type, no spendthrift me,
and my phone and writing tablet
date from the Paleo Age, technically,
and one’s batteries live in the
red and yellow light of the
dying lightening edge of the
OMGF,

1%

otherwise known as nearer to death experience.

carry chargers everywhere but my
batter usage habits have eroded my
charging life and happiness for us
a mere clean
green clean 20%

you see or maybe
you don’t,
my devices
have endured countless
drops and falls, just like
my body at this tender age,
and the male man ~~😵 female connectivity
of plug and plug hole are deformed,
bent so that charging is a struggle moderne,
a dance of avoidance of an earliest death

Living on the edge of 1%
changes a human, one thinks
constantly of the fragility of the
electric grid, and how the hell
we will charge all them unwanted
EV’s with insufficient charging stations,
not to mention all those spanking brand
new power plants we are rushing to build
NIMBY

(cmon, you can’t be unaware of this
contraction, for it is the guiding principle
of urban design, today)

anyway, my tablet is in the bathroom sink,
whose rigid porcelain angles allows for 
a conjoing  of the cord into that
flux capacitor hole to make tentative
kissy
kissy noises
and by the light of the
early morn,
said antique Generation 1 ipad
will be restored to usable status
for yet another brief moment
in time
and another
bad poem

this choring is a skill honed bendless endless
experimentation as to how
to insert a Peroni shaped (beer bottle,
(no,
not a Pony Man plug shape)
into a lightening squarish O, and witness the
miracle of ******* of
Yes! Yes! YES!
(thank you Steven Spielberg)
a semi functioning de-vice,

vice being the exactly right adjective

my mind is weird, true,
but I draw on my experience
to share with you the specialness
of being in the  elite,
them
1%

so you can be less envious.
you satisfied boors,
awakening refreshed after
eight hours sleep and a green light indicator
smugly informing you are a hoi peloi
member of the
100%ers

yes I’m done,
why does my software
keep asking me that?
Nat Lipstadt Dec 2023
Crazy Guy Sends His Poems to a Dead Guy

~for Joel Frye,and yes it’s true~


ah another trivial pursuit of trivial nuggets
bout yours untruly, that is a truly truly,
poets that
I’ve known here, but who have moved on,
it’s my obligation to keep them posted on the
au courant,

so slip them a poem or two,
when you ain’t looking to

make one wonder even more,
what makes a man a nutty Natty.?

well if you don’t know the answer to that after
two t h o u s a n d plus poems, you are not getting me

but Joel Frye,
mutual enjoyed our scribblings,
yeah, he got me,
so via social media,
keep him posted of my latest écrits,
fancy french for scribbles,

of course he gets them
before me,
in so far I assume
my thots are known to rise
or more likely drop,
even before
they traverse that narrow passage between my ears…
but really, just in case,
in the peace and quiet
of the hubbub above, with all them comings and goings,
he, God forbid, (ha!), he may overlook my inane insanities,
and the weirdness
of my compositions,
real, ethereal and in between~al,

that’s a great whew~relief knowing,
at least
some one!
is reading my stuff…

natty
Joel Frye,
Poet on HP

Deceased 2023
Nat Lipstadt Dec 2023
DISINHIBITOR” By Ariana Reines






   <>
  

There’s a sadness I’m avoiding

It’s why I live like this

The truth is I know I can’t hide

From it. I know I can’t

But I can hide from you

Or I somehow still think I can

& what that really means is hide it

From you. It’s not that I don’t trust

You. I’m just scared to lose

It. I’m not avoiding

My sadness I’m trying

To protect it. What I lost

I already lost a really

Long time ago. Whatever

I tried to do apart

From what I lost had more

To do with covering it

With probably some kind

Of monument than “moving on”

But I’m the only one who needs

To know that it’s a monument

Or what it’s for. Anthills

Mountains out of molehills.

Growing a roughness into

A jewel: Aphrodite’s secret.

I am ignorant of my people’s

History but I have seen the scrolls

In their crowns and gowns.

The times I won I wasn’t able

To celebrate. So I learned equanimity

But equanimity’s as tricky

As any other state. These may

Not be words of wisdom

But they’ve got no other

Place to live
published in The New Yorker Dec 11, 2023
Nat Lipstadt Dec 2023
some of us walk insistently,
instinctively, and instantly to
and upon the edged path,

this physical nexus & abstract mental locus,
a cliffside enticing rock strewn trail,
drawn of men, by men, for men

(yes, men are people too, still)

enthralling views,
down to the riverside,
where eyes intuit the
beauteous aroma of
precious precocious
precarious precipices
and the near-stench of
mortality

amidst
wafting scents of inane undesirable need,  
hints of destruction, or,
alternating eager relief,
like a ****** infused, instant attractiveness,
making weakness in the knees, all too real,
trembling with a delicious accented edge of
a fresh, familiar scent, fresh baked bread,
an all enveloping consumption need now!

to
crave what we fear,
to fear what we crave
our cravings are craven,

this twisted sense, annuls
our common sensibility, yet,
titillates our pleasured imagined relief,
releases, our unsated, even better,
our insatiable curiosity to tremble,
an entire body enjoined by vibrato~
enticing tremulations, shaken and stirred,
this danger choice releases something primordial,
escape? a reckless wrecking so deeply designed,
it has its very own designation…death wish

multitudes of easy choices afforded my senses,
and by accident, all mine chosen, all nearby,
I travel the esplanade près de the East River,
where even if calm is the sole visiblilty,
undercurrents and the unpredictable passage
of container wakes and the larger freighters
will hand you down, so easy, to become parcel
to a littered river bottom of centuries’ artifacts

but even more tempting, the balcony,
a hop, skip and a jump unlocked,
mere ten steps, no need for a running start
why it’s the “height of convenience,”
he ruefully winces, and not even any
TSA lines or inconveniencing “conveniences”

Why this calamity seems so desperately desirable,
Why this unabrogated feat so featured, nay, even
feted in our hot? cold? bloodstream

Why just men?

I don't know,
Perhaps,
it is all I know.

Do You Know Why Men Cry in the Bathroom?
Why Men Cry in the Bathroom

For so many reasons.
I will tell you the why.
I think you know,
Or perhaps, you think you know.

Men are always O.K.,
Even when not.

We expect the worse,
Accept the worse,
Nonetheless,
We are forever unprepared.

Wearily, we cry,
In the bathroom, in private,
Lest sighs slip by,
We be unmasked,
Early warring, strife signs warning.

Copious, tho we weep
Before the mirror confessor,
It is relief untethered,
Unbinding of the feet,
An uncounting
Of beaded rosaries,
Of freshly fallen hail stones,
Of night times terrors
By dawn's early edition's light,
and welcomed.

But look for the mute tear,
The eye-cornered drop,
*** tat, that never drops,
But never ceases formation and
Reforming, over and over again,
In a state of perpetuity of reconstitution,

The tippy tear of an iceberg revealing,
And I see you peeping, wondering,
What is beneath

Look for:
the torn worm-eaten edges of spirit,
thrift shop bought, extra worn,
grieving lines neath the eyes,
where the salt has evaporated,
discolored the skin.
worry lines,
under and above,
browed mapped, furrowed boundaries.
the laugh line saga,
where better days are stored,
recalled, as well as recanted,
publicly, privately.

Why just men?

I don't know,
Perhaps,
it is all I know.


Jan 6, 2013
Dec 2023 · 1.2k
At 4:00 AM in the City
Nat Lipstadt Dec 2023
inspired by a short story from the man from Snake River


<>


no alarm clocks heard expiring,
unrequired and unrequited,
we,
those, self-employed by the
nocturnal repetitive recounting
of sins of omission and worse,
those commissioned in
anger and haste, that breed only
more anger and lay further waste
from humans to 
humans,
awaken with an
irregular precision
and bad disorder,
demanding chances,
expiation, restitution, amendment,
but time erodes
possibilities for the
impossible,
foreign forgiveness

knock-you-down rushing currents
of water erodes Snake River boulders,
them oldsters just like the litany of our
malfeasances, indestructible in nature
geologic,
and in
human nature
illogic,
terms, such as time measurements,
irreverent and irredeemable,
for our sins
live far longer than
our owned memories,
in those harmed, who
cannot in the unlimited timeless quantity of
ever ever,
understand

your wry smile,
your why cries,
audibles you’ve
play called, go
unheard, unseen,
even and odd
Bach Orchestral Suites,
Beethoven Sonatas
more mock than soothe

trapped between industrial carpet
and flat unpainted Armstrong ceiling tiles,
you
in a hell of your own creation, forgot to include,
a Sabbath day extant, of rest for weary creators,
ever ever,

or planned in a world you’ve  designed,
so the best you
can do
is write
another and another
confession ever ever

watching and listening to
the alarm clock that neither
requires setting, for
it’s audible ticking is
alarm-ing curse
enough ever ever
that always never
rings
see “4:30 Am in the City” by Jim Cunningham from his book of short stories,
“Reel Stories”

writ at 7:00am
Dec 2023 · 1.2k
dance to these words
Nat Lipstadt Dec 2023
~inspired by Lar Lubovitch,
gifted to Glenn Currier  
who made my eyes water-dance this
morning ~
<>

raise the arms in preparation
for an articulated genteel waving
to keyboard,
an elegant slow descent,
fingers extending, splaying,
but in fine coordinated curvature

for they are 24 carat gold filled fingertips,
word & dance-art~infused
i king and expelling sounds of dancing words,
all over my body

some body part of me,
grasps that the cylinder of ink,
becomes a baton,
single instrument director,
an attaché,
an additive~lubricant,
for all my orifices,
firing rocket-in-the-air bomb bursts
while body in its entirety
motions,
shuckin’ and jivin’
in the prayer~poem first position,
a rock n’ roll motion,
back and forth,
to fro,
holy mesmerized

words run down my arms,
letters drop encased in salt drop capsules,
from the intuition in my eyes,
we see them forming words,
pooling,
without volition,
upon,

all my surfaces, but they
a mere conveyance,
bringing these expulsive explosive verbs
in an ordered fashion,
to your eyes,

intuitively,
asking you
to dance with me,
begging you
to envision me,
hearing the piano maintaining rhythm,
while a violin crys out in a overly long held notes,
concertinas  bellowing,
all together quavering,
oscillating, emoting,

and you!
you are reading me perfectly

so we dance in unity
cheek to cheek,
to the song of
our poem,
our words, our tongues,
our entire entities,
rogue kissing
Nat Lipstadt Dec 2023
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide
Of Humber would complain.

I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.

My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast;
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart;
For, Lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
   But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Nov 2023 · 186
Axe Handles by Gary Snyder
Nat Lipstadt Nov 2023
Axe Handles
BY GARY SNYDER


One afternoon the last week in April
Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet
One-half turn and it sticks in a stump.
He recalls the hatchet-head
Without a handle, in the shop
And go gets it, and wants it for his own.
A broken-off axe handle behind the door
Is long enough for a hatchet,
We cut it to length and take it
With the hatchet head
And working hatchet, to the wood block.
There I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
"When making an axe handle
                 the pattern is not far off."
And I say this to Kai
"Look: We'll shape the handle
By checking the handle
Of the axe we cut with—"
And he sees. And I hear it again:
It's in Lu Ji's Wên Fu, fourth century
A.D. "Essay on Literature"-—in the
Preface: "In making the handle
Of an axe
By cutting wood with an axe
The model is indeed near at hand."
My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen
Translated that and taught it years ago
And I see: Pound was an axe,
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
And my son a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
And tool, craft of culture,
How we go on.


Gary Snyder, "Axe Handles" from Axe Handles. Copyright © 1983 by Gary Snyder.
Nat Lipstadt Nov 2023
“If people bring so much courage
to this world the world has to ****
them to break them, so of course
it kills them. The world breaks every
one and afterward many are

strong at the broken places."

A Farewell to Arms,
Ernest Hemingway

<>
struggling with so much,
then this scripture of writing sent
by some unfamiliar, a providential
provider; and I am realized, this man
is broken in ways you have no idea,
can~not comp~re~hend  

understanding floods, healing
required, for I too have been killed,
my trust and beliefs, trashed,
too many fools who think that
moral equivalence is a thing,
that the unspeakable is justified,
hatred makes me so broke so low,
how,
justification is not justice,
nor an excuse to do whatever

cross the street, and believe,
that drivers will honor a red,
a stop sign, but plenty think
this don’t apply to me, not me

getting on the back of a line
is for fools, people who cannot answer
the arrogant question of the insistent
“Do You Know Who I am?”

I know who I am, yet the ponderance
of evidence says that is not enough,
I
am insufficient,
I am less
than human,
I am
undeserving,
because of my
ancestry

And I will spare you the precise definitions of these statements,
for it should be unnecessary, you should be nodding in agreement, clear eyed understanding, intuitive, in your own broken bones felt!

But,
my bones are broken, and the healing needs a source, a “see here”
directive, explain me how my insane madness is not a proper
responsa to the
weight of hate
my eyes see, seen,
and that my own
eyes
are not lying,
but believed.

but intuitively understood
that my broken bones can be
healed, each in their own way,
so I will retire, perhaps return
when, even if not fully recovered,
sufficient to care enough,
ready to be rebroken, again,
for this! this! is my
true poetic ancestry

thousands of years have not broken us,
and never will, for it is not fear that will
prevent our resurrection, for we immunized,
for what unimaginable have we not known, and yet recovered,
this,
I believe,
my healing will be quiet, solitary, removed
from the distractive noises of invective infecting,

but I will be present,
for my children, and my children’s children will
look to this ancestor and learn that his blood
and bones deeds them the self-healing properties
that always has and always will defeat those
who seek to destroy your future

1) the DNA of your ancestry
inherited inherent in your bone marrow  
and bone tissue is continuously remodeled
through the concerted actions of bone marrow cells

2) Stem cells in your red bone marrow
(hematopoietic stem cells) create red and
white blood cells and platelets, all of which
are components of your whole blood.

so here is our truth:
when,
The world breaks every
one and afterward many are
strong at the broken places!*

our whole blood will replenish us
Sabbath Eve
Fri Nov 17
10:00am
in the ***** of my birth
Nat Lipstadt Nov 2023
preternatural ordinatty, beyond what is normal or natural,
when the ordinary is suspended, and my river me~wanders
between profound and mundane, tween hell and tomorrow

and miracles are shrines to make believe

the break-fast poem comes in threads of grayest cobwebs,
days are necklaces of obsidian stones, hanging heavily on neck,
head bowed, weighty matters, disasters unfolding and
sins of omission, commission block your throated gorge,
sallowing swallowing freedom waters can’t flow,
trickle~stuck in between a cascaded
motionless, collection of bouldered words

and why should
you care, it’s ok, no obligation and
depart at your own free will,

but I’ll still be here, introspecting, introspectating,
observing my hands and my lifelines that cross~twisted,
me~wondering like the river of rêves & reefs & thoughts
of all that I have done,
& not done,
and
both lists guilt-choke me, too many failures,


I recall writing
eight years and one half years ago,
all the sad words start with D
and still do, still so,
preternatural
ordinatty


(The preternatural that which appears outside or beside,“suspended between the mundane and the miraculous".  In the early modern period, the term was used by scientists to refer to abnormalities and strange phenomena of various kinds that seemed to depart from the norms of nature.)
All Sad Words Start with D

deep in the pond of unhappy, swimming,
drowning the next contemporaneous
depression thought quickly swallowed,
desperation in quick glances everywhere,
dawn is no consolation but just another
daily drawing tighter of twine cutting
disillusionment


dear god, commences every thought,
delayed answers have yet to arrive,
**** the deity's non-responsivness,
dare not say out loud lest,
deserved fates be worse, be realized,
didn't know? how can that be?
disguiser par excellent, I am the original
deceiver

But I never think about

death or dying, for that would be
defeat finale, a statute to, a status of none, a
destiny some wick spark, still insists can be
deferred

differed always,
diffidently, but grasping yet at the
double entendre that is my
dark vision of a future already past

May 2015
Nat Lipstadt Nov 2023
"we were never lonely
and never afraid
when we were together.

I know that the night
is not the same
as the day:
that all things are different,
that the things of the night
cannot be explained in the day,
because they do not then exist,
and the night can be a dreadful time
for lonely people once their
loneliness has started.

But with Catherine there was
almost no difference in the night
except that it was an even better time.

If people bring so much courage
to this world the world has to ****
them to break them, so of course
it kills them. The world breaks every
one and afterward many are
strong at the broken places."

A Farewell to Arms,
Ernest Hemingway
Nat Lipstadt Nov 2023
Write like you have already Run out of time…
(what do you want for breakfast?)


the despair heats my wearied blood to near a freezing temp,
and the Hamilton song lyric, fresh on my mind,
haunts my soul, with a modified tense-ion,
running becomes also~ran, already now, is a past tense,
gonna get me a weapon, other than words
cause I want the
satisfaction of taking some murderer~haters down

anyway, future is now past tense revisiting,
and you think can still make a difference, but
optimism ain’t my forte, could be a
genetic POV curse,
a refresher course

BUT it’s past time,

used to worry, still do, that my grandkids
in a decade or less, would not have running,
potable water, electricity for a couple
hours a day, as we transition to a
new world the visionary~isms haven’t
prepared a **** for

and words are cheaper now
than they have ever been,

and the freedom to hate gonna be
added to the new constitution with a
new Bill of Rights revised, approved list,
got no illusions that ‘no preservation’ of
my kind will be a top ten item item

now I worry about the useful idiots, believers in
“extermination of the vermin”
are revisiting  this world, and laugh at the ‘evidence’
that it can’t happen here, and/or anywhere, because
those who call for my destruction are celebrating in
rallies from sea to shining sea, yeah, not that sea,
not the one they chanting ‘bout, no doubt, they’ll
extend the boundless vision
to get us all,
once and for all,
and  please don’t tell me I’m
overreaching
cause war and organized ****** is ONLY
just the same as
politics by another name,
and. your view, let’s **** a jew,
is protected speech,
and land of the free will soon have a whole
new meaning for political,
as on free of people like me…

so let’s go about our day, intensely discussing the NFL,
and it’s never to early to talk about summer plans and
air plane tickets just so hard to get, forget about getting a plumber,
and a now memory resurfaces
of visiting a synagogue in Rome
in the 1980’s and seeing the machine gun toting carabinieri
standing guard outside and swastikas on Parisian bustops
and what an idiot I’ve been thinking the future will be like
the recent past, but weight of ancient Idée Fixe
of  five thousands years duration
and when asked
what do I want for breakfast,
and other
newly pointless questions,
my response
is on point:


don’t give a ***
8:54am
Mon Nov 13 2023
moving on
Nat Lipstadt Nov 2023
an all purpose cleaner response to the

how-ya-doing-question,

as my vibe unmistakable;
the hatred in the world directed at
MY PEOPLE,
is inexplicable, beyond reason,
a hatred raw and pure in the
tiny places we humans hide it, lest
our ancient linkage to an unreasoned,
embarrassing emotion, be revealed

but now revealed it is reveled,
as the freedom to despise is a
valued thing

is an ancient scar, now freshly wounded
and the two thousand year old accumulated, callused,
surrounding wafer thin, layered upon layer of
tissue,
wiped away
in utter disbelief
cleansed,
a different kind of impure clean,
“like” an ethnic cleansing,
traceless, whisked away in a wink of moment,
a goner.

like hope, prior sentient optimism
sentenced to life imprisonment and
this sentence, and this very sentence!
written finally understanding that it is
a punishment
far worse than the quick relief of death.

c’mon, how about a few “fukk you jew”
cri de coeur, heartfelt, genuine, pointless
hate

no, not I, no, not me,
spare me the pithy comments,
the pointless sympathy, glistening
like evaporating water droplets
before disappearing, I ask myself,
not
why they hate, why it persists,
for this I understand and accept
the foulness of what we are capable of is,

beloved,

as a secret pleasure, now secreted in torrents.

no, I ask myself,

why do I write poetry,

for it is as pointless as
the hatred directed at me,
from birth, till death,
and ever after,
the humanity of poetry
just another fraud

another reason
why this man cries in the bathroom,^
not from any shape of shame,

because poetry is pointless
in times of hatred, and now we
know, recognize, it is always
somewhere, nearby, always
present and prescient,
pointless hatred,
itching to be pointed at me,
makes for
pointless poetry.


To whom shall I point my poetry?
Nat Lipstadt Nov 2023
At What Cost?
This Purchase of Our Future

a thousand answers + variegated shadings, a summation:


of millions layers of our owned chosen complexities,
so many possible outcomes, it makes infinite randomness
seemingly simpler than our googolplex crazy preposterous
notational choosings, our owned decisions which though false,
cause nothing is tandomn random except for love at first sight

it’s all  just *******, we conditioned from pre-birth,
the expectations subtly subsumed into the woman’s womb,
overlaid by the ***** donors whisperings that you will be a
great third baseman, or a great bass player, or both, but
“your” fate, ha!
is anything but yours…
to purchase!

if you were born to live in a home with no heat, and water was
obtainable by walking 100 yards away, you would still be a
pianist, writing notes of plaintive need, grand desires, musical
words of agonizing delight just as when
you first blushed when the brain
connected yellow rays with a word,
sunrise,
and an experience was synapticaly imprinted,
that real things could be defined by an ordering of letters and sounds
and you were tongue burnt by a need so great
to collect these pleasurable things and put them in a right order
of your
peculiar
particular
personal
inherited inputted
design

=
and
you yet debate
what is my instrument,
knowing that the multiples of your fingers
are the engine of your existence,
and on any particular day they, your well connected perma-crew,
will pick which is the chosen one,
and
no matter which,
for you had nothing or little purchase,
it was coded in your pre-history
just as you prepare a transmission list
of your own,
when you daily first touch your face,
closing the sensory sensual connection tween
the ephemeral and the physical
and
the new combinations
that you will imprint upon
someone’s flesh,
that is your right,
that is you write,
that is what you were
predestined,
to
create

but,
(what the heck)
you get
to-pick the instrument of the day…


(
that,
is your purchase, your only cost,
everything else has been
pre-paid
)
Thu Nov. 9 2023
8:51am
ny
Nat Lipstadt Nov 2023
zero context shifts

multitasking is multi~asking your brain
to do what does not come naturally,
the enthused poem starts up, lion roaring,
a muscle car, brain throbs organic pulses
semi~******* of a near-completion in
your neuronic *****, exciting and ****
all you-writ so far is:

your name, some crazed, minimal
******* of words with

no context, no preconceived word lotion to
balm-spread over the enflamed areas of
your brain skin
except that it’s
6:47 am, coffee in hand,
your woman slumber rumbles a left over dream,
speechifying, and room, cool conditioned cold,
ignoring notifications of overnight elections,
and a reminder-by-photo where you were this
day seven years ago today, all put asided,
permission ungranted to any distractions,

there will be zero context shifts
til the
spillage of your morn squeaking meager is fully
pillage~d here, it be within my it-takes-no-
village,

@ 6:56 and Whitman is tsk-tsking at the low poetry of my scripting, Hafiz says “hey!
nothing about god or love, what good is that?”

but it’s ok for i’ve emptied the early morning
brain bowels,
defused fusses and asides, tossed asided & there is yet some coffee
remaining but the expiation for having been
reborn this newly birthed day has earned me atonement

for taking up space in this planet
and as of yet, I’ve not stated yet to any, no. all
humans, I hate you ~ but the day is infantile
and opportunity plentiful

@7:03AM
nyc
morning
Wed Nov 8,
in the year of hatred,
a/k/a twenty twenty three.
Nat Lipstadt Nov 2023
the cardiologist, in passing, remarks, or perhaps,
“re-marks” my ECG test, casually revealing
that every fifteen or twenty or so of my regularly scheduled
hearts beats, an extra one sneaks it, which appears
unlike all the rest of those normative little hillocks
pointing skyward, ^ ^ ^ V ^ ^ ^ ^
yep that one,

sneaky ****** slips in, pointing downwards
like a class clown always disrupting classroom’s good order…

Doc reassures it don’t mean a thing
if you got that extra swing,  
and our friendly informing internet reassures:

“The idea of your heartbeat going rogue may sound alarming.
But in most cases, an ectopic beat is a harmless condition.
It's also a common one”

but yet I am intrinsically intrigued,
oh yeah, that’s an intentional funny double entendre,
but methinks that explains
so much of my irregular, irreverent poetry scribbling,
particularly because this bratty beat be best addressed directly as:

“You Little Rogue!”

a highly scientific term,
taught in medical schools by non-poets,
but needy for definitions that the layman
can love and keep in their
heart shaped hands…
Sat Oct 28 2023
4:58am
Nat Lipstadt Nov 2023
Hey Yalie, Diurnal Rituals Yield the Best Poetry

A Yalie jogs before dawn, her senses being exercised,
semi-aware there’s layered poetry out there and it must
be retrieved, for the eyes observe the diurnal arousing of the day,
and this too, must be recorded, part of the ordered duties of living, as the skin cells shed sweat droplets and
words of living, parcels of breathing, a diary of notations,
to educate the brain in ways and things that
professors cannot teach…

every sense operative, interactive, sound off neurotic synapses,
are acrackling, as you lay out the day ahead, calendar and
assignment checks, but the senses don’t care
about that
trivial minutiae of living

nope
the words are now coming fast and you hope your best that
you will retain, retrain the memory to savor save, those
combos of images encapsulated in new word combinations,
that are yours alone, unique, proving to no one but
yourself, that education, science et. al. is a seeded embryo &
you the valedictorian of birth commencement ceremony

so put them trainers on,
and by dawning daylight you are awondering,
now becoming a pondering, and the
question never spoke aloud but oft posed,
is this, this is,
this is why I exist,
and
my identity?

I am an institution in my own right,
in my own write.


Saturday Nov 4
8:01am
nyc
Nat Lipstadt Nov 2023
'In the city of slaughter' ('B'ir Haharegah"), 1904, Excerpt

<~>

Arise and go now to the city of slaughter;
Into its courtyard wind thy way;
There with thine own hand touch, and with the eyes of thine head,
Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay,
The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead.
Proceed thence to the ruins, the split walls reach,
Where wider grows the hollow, and greater grows the breach …

The spirits of the martyrs are these souls,
Gathered together, at long last,
Beneath these rafters and in these ignoble holes.
The hatchet found them here, and hither do they come

To seal with a last look, as with their final breath,
The agony of their lives, the terror of their death. …
Question the spider in his lair!
His eyes beheld these things; and with his web he can
A tale unfold horrific to the ear of man:
A tale of cloven belly, feather-filled;
Of nostrils nailed, of skull-bones bashed and spilled;
Of murdered men who from the beams were hung,
And of a babe beside its mother flung,
Its mother speared, the poor chick finding rest
Upon its mother’s cold and milkless breast;
Of how a dagger halved an infant’s word,
Its ma was heard, its mama never heard. …

Descend then, to the cellars of the town,
There where the virginal daughters of thy folk were fouled,
Where seven heathen flung a woman down,
The daughter in the presence of her mother,
The mother in the presence of her daughter,
Before slaughter, during slaughter and after slaughter! …

Turn, then, thy gaze from the dead, and I will lead
Thee from the graveyard to thy living brothers,
And thou wilt come, with those of thine own breed,
Into the synagogue, and on a day of fasting,
To hear the cry of their agony,
Their weeping everlasting.
Thy skin will grow cold, the hair on thy skin stand up,
And thou wilt be by fear and trembling tossed;
Thus groans a people which is lost.
Look in their hearts, behold a dreary waste,
Where even vengeance can revive no growth,
And yet upon their lips no mighty malediction
Rises, no blasphemous oath. …

Speak to them, bid them rage!
Let them against me raise the outraged hand,
Let them demand!
Demand the retribution for the shamed
Of all the centuries and every age!
Let fists be flung like stone
Against the heavens and the heavenly Throne! …

Take thou thy soul, rend it in many a shred!
With impotent rage, thy heart deform!
Thy tear upon the barren boulders shed
And send thy bitter cry into the storm!
The Hebrew-language poet Hayim Nahman Bialik was the great-great-great-granduncle. of actress Mayim Bialik.
Nat Lipstadt Nov 2023
~ one more for patty m. ~

slept late after dancing with my devils, from,
from the wee, until a pealing pearl from the Earl of Dawn,
recovering from an intrusion~invasion~brain~regurgitation,
and it’s nearly 9am, sipping my first cuppa Hawaiian,
& woke to a repost of a ten year old wondering plea(1)

makes me think “This old thing,” poem, like a fav
frock/suit that still drapes perfectly, and yet draws the
***** admiration and drippy drawling yummy compliments,
gracefully, gratefully demurred with them three words,
& it’s 8:39am, Bruce pitching in with “Born in the USA”

recipe for a new thank u Gawd poem to make room for
a fast~break diet for an old man with a rebuilt ticker, this
very emission~transmission of a verbal politesse writ going
some where, cooked on a medium slow burner fueling dressed up seeds of heartfelt appreciation made of ancient oat grasses

birthing a poem~child of thanks to the Lawd for one more day,
opportunity, the five sense’s delivery gratitude and gratifications, and the desire to intertwine the sights, music, a crisp blue November Sky, the need to bleed brew these words into a fulfilling,
second moment mug, for the pearls and Earls

of poetic humans


10:01am
Thu Nov 2 2023
(1) Do You Know Why Men Cry in the Bathroom?
Nat Lipstadt Oct 2023
The “little” Art I Possess

~writ for, inspired by, and warmly dedicated to
Kelly Rose Saccone~

“So an artist does…They say that often when you fill your walls with art you often forget it’s there and you don't absorb its beauty, but I enjoy what little art I have everyday. Sometimes it is just the color or the passion that hits me anew when I look at them.”
KRS

<~>

long ago the new~knowledge,
“newlodge” came brewing~infusing me;
art was not capable of being possessed

my reversal~eyes opened
the senses over~fulfilling,
body sensations brimming,

for I was the container,
only in temporary possession!

the art, in whatever the day’s chameleon guise,
is the professor-possessor, I am the missionary~emissary
remaindered by-product,
just
the vassal~vessel

when to gaze upon a poem~creation of years ago,
my expected mistakes appeared, a wee pride,
largesse of satisfaction, but these are frailties,
weaknesses, human misperceptions,
human ill-delusions!

never

ever was a poem among my possessions,
it was “in-sighted” within me
what was placed in my cupboard,
stored by my sensual conduits,
mine only to covey, not to covet,

art that tempest resides in as part,
a parcel in of the entirety of your body+soul composition,
but “out for delivery,”
seeded, stored & carry~birthed, given forth,
in a completed quantity
that’s so grand,
it takes five senses to truly comprehend!

it is pieces, a child of you,
recombinant,
you the birth sac,
how could ever be assessed as merely

little?

you are better understood to be a translator,
a temp~progenitor,
taking what all of nature and human experience
has installed on your inner walls, and then dispatched,
by you, gestated and unhesitatingly dispatched,

and when gift unwrapped from the plain brown paper of
our now orphaned belly skin,
it is to be hallelujah greeted,
for you, artist, translator, poem~mother,
have done you job, hallowed and sacrosanct,
and now the renewed giant emptiness,
will soon,
needy to be refilled, and
retransmitted once more:

this is no little, limited, mean feat,
your gifting is
beyond any words that limit,
no size constrains,
no words,
neither sufficient and insufficient,
you, are in loco parentis,
you’ve take what you/we are given,
beyond sizing,
and it seizes and is seized,
until you give it away
completed

and that is the grandest art .
inseminated within you,
true artistry!




7:42am
Fri Oct 27
2023
Oct 2023 · 2.2k
“What can a poem do?”
Nat Lipstadt Oct 2023
“What can a poem do?”
—————————-


”A poem
is a not a tourniquet
when you’re bleeding.
It’s not water when you’re thirsty
or food when you’re hungry.
A poem can’t protect you from an airstrike,
or from abduction, or from hate.
It’s hard to write when our words feel
like they’re not enough—they can’t do
the real, tangible work of saving lives,
or making people safer.”

(see (1) Maggie Smith)

<~>

as is my wont,
I write,
as is my Natted~inhabited,
retiring to the local watering holes of
Cerebrum & Cerebellum,
them regular haunts,
where all requests are mailed, processed, satisfied & marked;
‘return & render to the sender, who’s on a cerebral ******!’
and that request?

‘give me the words’ (2)

those ‘to do’ words, floaters, direct to top of list,
those ‘can do’ words, that can effect the affect,
spare the despair, realize the fungible, concretize cures,
soften hard waters, giving a worsening worn life fabric a
curated baby blanket feel, a 4-ply human tissue of

‘words that tell me everything’ (2)

salve solution verbs that bounty-wipe spills in entirety,
vacuum up spillage spoiling of 17 days of terrible nouns,
uncovered-unknown rages caused by inflicting prepositions
released a hatred rising,
safety rebury it deeper, drug & destruct the sleeper agents,
and let me start over again with

‘telling me everything by saying nothing’ (2)

the pausal silence, the quieted spaces tween the heartbeats,
where ‘reflection,’
the noun,
and its world of alternations,
reflection,
the noun,
look inwards, but shining outward,
this, this!
is where the poem goes to do!
enervating & arresting

its contradictory powers
rock you into wild docility,
possessive and submissive,
contradictory interferences,
smoothing the roughness,
closing the gaps it opens,
healing the caused truthful cuts,
with words that tell you
everything and nothing,
open the holes, filling the gaps,
that is what a
poem do,
in and by
the manner it is spoken…

<~>

“Sometimes a poem is the stone you carry in your pocket—the one you rub when you’re worried.  Let’s fill our pockets with poems.”
(see (1) Maggie Smith)
(1) Maggie Smith Oct. 24
(see link https://open.substack.com/pub/maggiesmith/p/what-can-a-poem-do

(2) see the lyrics  to”In a  Manner of Speaking”
Oct 2023 · 1.6k
doing the heavy lifting
Nat Lipstadt Oct 2023
doing the heavy lifting

picking up my emaciated heart,
letting the rest of my wilting body
tag along qualifies, but is not the
heavy lifting referenced above.

we all have a meeting, the bits and
pieces, the bobs and keepsakes
that constitute my mien, a constitutional
convention of 13 colonies that raucous
write of burdens, of freedoms, with wild
inspirations and cold political calculations

this combining document hoping to topstitch
my reeling mind and deteriorating physic,
to write words of hopeful praise but rising
to a world that is baking in hatred into fabric
and tissue, and that is the heaviest lift of all

Sunday morning, coffe-d, somewhat rested,
a full day planned, and a Mike Message says
it’s me that does the heavy lifting and I know!
he knows! the displaced state of my mind, and
the hardened ache of writing with fresh hope,
when there is so little, that it is lost in the litter
of endlessness of a world gone, not going,
mad~insane and murderers are
illogically celebrated,
and yet here I am punching words on my
AM Morning Punch List of worthy words
available that aid us needy for repair & yet
might move us together to a state of full repair;  
but I am punchy from trying, to find words
themselves that require do not require, a
truth washing,
a new word recleansing
and


    (
they put the load right on me),

and naïf-not, see the troubles ahead and get
me more paper to add to the list of lists of
worldly worrisome words that are heavy
lifting of the world as it is but know I weep as
I write this for not in my possess the light airy
words, the wordsmith is crushed neath the weight of


tonnage of human word-lessened-ness

Sunday Morning
Oct 22 2023
9:02am,
writ in a singed single cry
Nat Lipstadt Oct 2023
the earth world retains its soiled crust,
more polluted than just a few weeks ago,
meaning me is meaner, an iron irony ironic,
madness and meanness anger me more
than-ever-before turning me sour, an infection
and an self-inflection point, forgive me cause
I no longer easy forgive, starting with me, here.

it is so easy to be easier, but the creeps creep in,
what they possess interdicts the free
flowing blood of what we could be,
maybe, even
what we want to be, for some of us,
so I’ve come to display,
come to splay,
come to say,
nice has
been disposed of, in overflowing corner city garbage can,
spilling onto the street, madness and meanness,
littered and the lies sugarcoat it with veneers of
righteous, cause anyone can claim the moral
high ground, but find me the low places, where
honesty is not defined by an ism, or in only your opinion,
and right and wrong are so oft
so easy distinguishable…

yeah, soured on many things, and what hasn’t changed
cannot be shared, for too many will seek to pollute these few
good things remaining.

and the mirrored reflection of my inflection point
is my soiled infection, red, swollen,
and being this away is…new

8:04am
Sat Oct 21 2023
Nat Lipstadt Oct 2023
with each passing day, I understand less and less, for
who could ever claim to know it all, yet, the simplicity
of our base-ic basest instincts makes evil so easily attractive,
that now, I forgive almost nothing, anyone for the cruelty
inherent in on the surfacial skin of our normalcy, so easily,
revealed, and reveled in, wrecks me, and the poetry
sparks are not doused, but wick and ember shriveled

oh the irony, that foolish me should write of the
commandment to love just as the world displays
old levels of hate historically deep… .I am hated,
to many who would know me only as Jew,
and this refresher course in my brain, reminds me,
that love thy neighbor as thyself, can morph into a
generational opposite, that my former degree of comfort,
beliefs, was only skin deep…and Tolstoy was a naïf, a romantic,
a royal, who hoped for the best in each man, and that
cannot ne achieved for hate is so easy digestible, so sweet a treat
for humans, who desire no compass other than simple baseness
to know which direction to take….

————————————————————————————-
”There can be only one permanent revolution—a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man. How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself."

Tolstoy

”To perform evil deeds a person must discover “a justification for his actions,” so that he can regard stealing, humiliating and killing as good. “Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble,” and so conscience restrained him. He had no ideology, Solzhenitsyn observes, nothing like “anti-imperialism” or “decolonization” to allay pangs of guilt. Solzhenitsyn concludes: “Ideology—that is what gives evil-doing its long-sought justification and gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination . . . so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but receive praise and honors.

**Solzhenitsyn
https://hellopoetry.com/poem/2237741/secret-jew-of-my-heart/

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/20/opinion/moral-luck.html?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20230921&instance_id=103278&nl=opinion-today&regi_id=17556971&segment_id=145313&te=1&user_id=0e2bfe72b2cf96f30ceaa6e616d59ce6
Nat Lipstadt Oct 2023
~one more for Joel~

The “valuations” methodology taught me forty plus years ago,
now rendered valueless, and yet,
the devils remind in
humongous whispers,

confuse not price
(or reads)
with value!

To a man I never met, and now,
will not yet on this Earth,
this process, to estimate,
what a man’s worthy words
are but worth exactly,
how much???

It matters greatly,
for one has come to realize
these scattering of poems
will be my repute,
my legate in reverse,

to see me forward,
you will need to see me
in reverse.
7/30/2023
Nat Lipstadt Oct 2023
October 2023, ten years later…dedicated to all my dear friends here,
some who may be reading this for the tenth time!

<|>

you need two hands, one foot.
counting my years.
each finger, worth a decade.
each toe, well, a century...

birthdays.

point of inflection,
point of opportunity,
presents itself,
to rewrite history.

a second coat of paint,
gift-wrapped in weak excuses.
how I lied, how I ain't,
grimm-fated fairy tales
somebody else created.

invisible suits of gold-cloth
worn to my party of
past rewrites and
future versions three and more
foretold.

one single thought,
memory,
seizes my heart,
as I fall to my knees.
cracks my temperate ease,
renders open the
woof and weave
of recycled deceptions,
causing all to be revealed
when I ask,

what if the poetry ceases?

you know prostrate?
you tasted grief?

have you not but
one pain,
one act,
one deed,
one memorization,
act of cowardice,
act of desertion,
mistake made, taken,
for which
forgiveness
can never
be given,
be taken,
attained?

do, does, did.

let me then
win the birthday lottery,
let floods of relief from
daily chores, not drown me,
chauffeurs to drive,
masseurs to massage,
cooks to cook,
les delicious treats,
keep theologians, logicians
on retainer, if needed for
explanations.

none know, or can provide,
still and yet,
a priestly sacred chord,
grants relief,
absolution,
a song of hallelujah
the ache of
perpetuity worry,
an ancient pain,
grows fresher daily,
the loss of one,
of my body,
my primal knot
unreasonable,
everything should be
permitted to be untied,
on my birthday, no?

this day, these days
breathe through words,
molecules of vowels,
stem cells of consonants,
the fabric, the tissues of life,
veins are a dictionary
of corpuscles,
red blood cells are
nouns of nutrients.


this day, these days,
the infection of my soul
is tempered, kept at bay,
tamped down from the
full flowering
by white blood cells ,
champions of rhyme, verse.


what if the poetry ceases?

Though the bones creak,
the body they carry. resurrected
once more,
for morning, afternoon
and evening prayers.

thrice daily poetry I recite,
roses red, violets blue,
my marrow transfused.

though my prayers refused,
the poetry act immolates
the fringes of my disease,
for which the common cure
is not yet currently invented....

what if the poetry ceases?

but be assured, told
scientists hard at work,
on the
forgive n' forget drug.

meantime,
take a bubble bath in
rosemary and mint
trap some words,
tap some words into
your cell phone bone,
the poetry heat that
provides aspirin relief.

through this poem,
on one day annual,
I am relieved, relived
the muse is feted, sated,

gone for few moments
concerns, worries of
exposure today,
agnostic's foxhole of hell
is dis-remembered,
the gloss returns,
the faux dispatched,

ain't birthdays grand?

what if the poetry ceases?

what rhymes with
Sorrow?

mmmmm,
could it be
Morrow?

bath drains, rosemary and mint odors dismissed,
the Argentine disparu,
the Spanish Medievalists,
the Neo-Raphaelites,
all gone,
didn't they have birthdays too?

Michelangelo didn't know
the Renaissance come
and gone,
and nobody
tole ya?

please recall t'is the day
after my sweet city recorded my
naissance in the
Hospital of the Flowers
on Fifth Avenue.

the 'crats put the datum
in the bureau with the
night creams and
the statistics
as follows:

on this day +/- a few,
seven or twenty decades ago +
a few centuries,
a question was born,
and an ache that is
sometimes relieved,
by a poem song.

though do not celebrate,
t'is a day to calibrate,
review, edit, tinker,
rewrite, often a stinker.

always one thought recycles:

what if the poetry ceases?

(how will I breathe?)
first penned ten years ago,
annually tinkered,
weirdly prophetic
and still spot on…

in the “early” days, wrote my poetry on a cellphone
while soaking the venoms out…
Sep 2023 · 1.3k
The Hardest Forgiving Slant
Nat Lipstadt Sep 2023
The Hardest Forgiving Slant

<|>
9:19am Fri Sept 22 2023 ~ 8:02am Fri Sep 29 2023
commenced during the Ten Days of Awe

<|>

we debase our language daily,
robbing the spectacular majesty [example]
of awe with the common overusing
vernacular of “awesome”

especially forgiveness is degraded,
we utter “I’m sorry” trippingly,
costless, less than cheap, with even the
snap-on veneer (1) of sincerity discarded,
but move on to the next rudeness

but today I will not permit myself
an easy letting-off-the-hook, no shifting
of blame to anonymity, or fast forward to tomorrow,
when we can obfuscate our intrepid
dishonesty one more time…again

to forgive those who have injured us,
not that hard, or the judging deities,
who silently wink and nod, but offer
no certitude beyond trying, itself a
maybe, maybe not, truly tiring this
trying tacking the constant requests

so first an etymology explication on
the tension inherent that very word,
f o r g i v e

As a word, as a sensed,
intuitively-
it is a
Perfect Continuous Infinitive! (2)

to
forgive is
perfect,
to forgive is
continuous,,
to forgive is
infinite!

what a marvelous, perpetual
past, present and always futuristic
word (alas)

The Hardest Forgiving?


to forgive oneself
so nearer to impossible,
the first responders doing triage,
leave people like me for last,
as it a unconditional condition
with no cure that can be effected

indeed, by our very affect,
they instant diagnosis seeing our
very gestures, body language, or ****** expressions,
all reveal the hopelessness of
the never-to-be-given-grace,
among us

for a thousand years,
I have tried and failed to forgive myself
for the worst I’ve done,
and there is no sword or club,
blood-letting,
that can dispatch the onerous burden I carry

so I write poetry,
a salve that offers
temporary relief,
while I write,
imposed a
momentarily distracting,
a kind of dusting of self~spin,
that chills myself
just until
the, this!
poem is finished,
the slant is drawn


<§>

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

BY EMILY DICKINSON
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
(2)
Perfect Continuous Infinitive
The regular present perfect continuous tense structure follows the “to” and makes it perfect continuous infinitive - “to + have + been + Present Participle.” The sense of continuation is added to the perfect infinitive without the obligation to state the time frame as in the perfect continuous tense structure.

(1)
Snap-on veneers are removable plastic trays that cover tooth imperfections. Also known as reusable, fake, clip-on, or pop-on veneers, snap-on veneers are relatively cheap and available without a dentist.Jan
Nat Lipstadt Sep 2023
~ For my darling Isabel on her twelfth birthday~

Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water's roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool's triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind?
Has no one said those daring
Kind eyes should be more learn'd?

Or warned you how despairing
The moths are when they are burned,
I could have warned you, but you are young,
So we speak a different tongue.
O you will take whatever's offered
And dream that all the world's a friend,
Suffer as your mother suffered,
Be as broken in the end.
But I am old and you are young,
And I speak a barbarous tongue.
For my darling Isabel on her twelfth birthday

emphasis, last two.ines, mine. nml
Sep 2023 · 177
good things to know
Nat Lipstadt Sep 2023
~for rr~

good things to know…
~~~~
where to begin, how to end?

a sincerity well intended,
a first word provocation & invocation
to bless a new day is thereby missioned

it is good to know that there are among us
those who restore to us the history from
pieces of broken glass, fragmented histories,
that tell us tales that when found, birth insight,
who among us can claim this honorific, whose
work(!),
is glorious tasked to give us understanding!

réalisateur,
(more powerful in French)

to comprehend, achieve tween us a shared reality,
linkages of time in ways that makes time a truthful
almond confection, sweet with bitter as an after-thoughtful
aftertaste

but no talk of bitter today, John Denver’s
sunshine on my shoulders after 5 days of  wet wooly
mammoth gloom, and so I say simple thanks to you,
for it is another

good thing to know,

and leave it

here
Nat Lipstadt Sep 2023
that’s all I know, title, subject undisclosed,
new morn amourning arrives,  when writing~writhing
hunger, comes and remains till fufillment,
sometimes, nagging, sometimes roaring, completion is
the satiation satisfaction when the pouring/
spilling is from within to without, topping off
the nearest receptacle with hugger-muggery,
beauty jumbled, elegantly jagged linen creased

the it of it, must be done, so my heart un-seizes,
breathing to nearly next to normal, yet the distance there
incroyable, inch or mile, meter matters not, until closed it’s a
chasm rupturing,
 fingers grasping my temples, to hold the
jumbled tumbling innards within, redirected towards my
screaming fingertips, hoping, relief will come sooner,
making room until the throat and lungs engorged,
when~with this selfsame need returns
on the morrow
if, when,
my eyes open,
and yesterday itself
is a writ,
a realization accomplished

~~~~~~~
perhaps, you recognize yourself?
perhaps, you reconcile yourself?
Tue Sep 28 2023 +82
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