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 Sep 2023 r
Nat Lipstadt
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v V v  writes:

It is quite amazing to me that everything in life, love, relationships, survival, progress, growth, etc. .. it all boils down to some type of sacred balance.. a balance that is extremely precarious, and fragile... even the known universe follows a sacred balance, the seasons, the tides, day and night, if any of those balances slip, we no longer exist.. fascinating and brain bending truth

<|>

3:27AM

there are somethings you just know

read the words above, without hesitation,
knew therein lay a poem co-missioned
that required instantaneous creation,
as if it was a observable commandment
that need instant gratification,
nay, more so,
a relieving, an unburdening
a lifting of a hearty blockage impeding,
distressing my existence

perhaps
our lives are a life long attempts
to keep
A Balance,
our individual and mutually conflicting
of-all-our-imbalances,
as they intersect and sway,
on a flood plain, ever unstable and shifting,
so many eddies colliding on the surface of a mighty river

yes, there is something otherworldly here,
yes, even sacred,
in the finest sense of that overburdened word,
so oft overemployed that
one man’s overburdened sacred
is another’s overworked profane

but sacred is sacred

at a level just above our collective reach,
is an aspiration, a respiration and exhalation,
we unconsciously try to time our breathing in coordination
with our surroundings,
grasping, gasping, grabbing
for understanding, micro-management of the minutest
current of water or air running contrary to the main current,
that we plunge willingly and willfully into

when we open our eyes
every morning
and confront a new array
of illusions, allusions
and conceive our own illustrations,
and paint our lives and every act
on a corner of fresh page of a giant, ponderous
tome
(or tomb, if you prefer)

I know you understand.

in a few hours, I will rise to
be confronted by chaos and challenges,
armed with bits of strings, tape and bows
to wrap them into a cohesion,
to present them to you,
insert them into your eddy,
and in the froth of poetic collision,
is our constancy of connectivity and breakage,
a perpetual reformation

so that we may
mind-bend into each other,
verifying our mutual dependency
and saying together,
out loud and silently

we exist,
we edit,
our eddies,
our overlapping lives,
in a never ending series
of Venn diagrams
all delicately balanced
at a single point,
forever transitory and reforming
our language of calculus
on a curve of constant change.
3:27 AM
Mon Sep 18
2023

with the kind permission of v V v
 Sep 2023 r
Nat Lipstadt
“the unbound unbinding: an admixture of words and swords…
that will cut a newborn cord of reciprocity of thee and me,
miracle!
thereby, an unbound binding that ties and frees us from
and connects us nonetheless by our shared senses…”

<!>
these words, recalled well,
for they but a newborn issue of a few days, and the notion of binding that
frees us into reciprocity yet buzz~hums
in my brain

the contradictory nature of a cutting
which ties us together,
that an unbinding binds us even more tightly,
I struggle, to better understand the nature how an unraveling
of our connection somehow ties us closer

but re-envisioning
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel in my mind’s eye,
that sparking space tween God’s finger outstretched
to bring the enlivening of his spirit to His first enervate, Adam,
the original of we humans,
somehow sates my confusion

to touch each other
at the most primitive basis,
we require a space
between us, in order to fulfill,
a contract contact
of completion and binding


and this bestills and bestirs
my puzzlement,
a space electric necessary
to permit us to
close the human circuitry

!and I am contented,
the contradiction
no more, I sense the
need to close gaps
tween us certify our human resources
for it is the permanent invisible grasping
of our loving minds that transcends
overpowers gaps,
bringing tears of joy to my eyelids,
even as I write these words,
and greet this morning
with
optimism
that every space
brings a richer
closure!
!
9/16/2023
9:48AM
 Sep 2023 r
Path Humble
“where time is the fly and age the fisher of men”

<>

”until I fell forward
into fall where time is
the fly and age the fisher
of men, then when winter
begins all will be forgotten,
where time is the fly and
age the fisher of men”


excerpt from “The Fall” by Rick Richardson

<>

that words from a different ionic state, jump as embodied ions from screen to the throat, evicting a guttural current of exclamation, you believe even with the half-heartedly palpitations from  remainder of my damaged pumping heart, that these words were always intended, just for me…

boy and old man coexist, the pottage of memories stirred,
and the time is fly, and I drown in the miracle of greenest grass of
Yankee Stadium at age eight,
oasis, heaven, a child reborn in a sea of Bronx concrete,
and the swallowing up of my boyhood is forever marked henceforth, the hook has caught me, and I am of the age
once and forever


not a fisherman, but a fisher of men’s souls,
mine own is my best bait,
hooked line and sinker, and
wisdom and words
elude and delude always, 
 like summer is perpetual and aging a construct,
time does not fly, but slowly laps and waves
eroding our myths and ourselves upon a continuum with
no ends

~postscript~

<>
yet I believe,
in miracles of
fish and loaves,
and that our individual continuums
will exist beyond the artifice of constraints
of
mortal time and that poems are
the forever chemicals within
our
bloodstreams,
even when our blood no longer spills


yet I believe!
a tribute to one of the best poets around
 Aug 2023 r
Nat Lipstadt
“and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”  

Walt Whitman

<>

having recently been on standby for a permanent-entry residency visa
to over & just beyond death’s door, Walt’s prescient prescription strikes my broken breastbone even harder much, than the persistent
periodic pains confirming the breaking and the healing
of this man’s mending of the human centric poetic *****

for this warped heart mine, now rejoicingly rejiggered with some threads and wires to deliver a new but fresh bloodied wisdom,
begs me, eggs me to torrent word streams, but Whitman’s wisdom cautions a new slowness, the wisdom of mortality’s hot breath urges careful consideration of every letter that my second chance, consignment shop flesh, eagerly embraces, to both prescribe and proscribe inside-insights tween the deafening sounds of eyelashes beating synchronized to the revived heart rates rapid renewal and
last second-chances….

torn tween minute torso sensations and the running silence of
a new battery’s internal rapid intervals, the silent timing gaps tween beats leaves-just-enough-space to ask over and over again,
from whence will come my richest fluency? (1)

at 300am, I lay carefully caressing and chewing well each transitory
thought, absent the former energetic ability to just spill,
though highly desired,
now requires, like me,
steady re-piecing together

the steady drumbeat of now-nearer-my-god-than-thee Titanic reflections
demands a slowing rapidity

this I thought before and now ken, even and ever better, that our primary endeavor shall always be the giving, the disbursement of the act of love…for therein lies the healing of each, and wet eyes,
make necessarily concluding this poem about nothing and everything
and I comprehend Walt’s dictum:

my very flesh is a poem,
every sensation a lyric,
every breath taken and returned to the atmosphere
so unconsciously
are my oldest
and newest
3:00 AM poetry companions
(1) I lift up my eyes to the mountains— where does my help come from?
Psalms 121:1-4
 Jul 2023 r
onlylovepoetry
how do you paint water, or clouds?

I could read poetry for the brief,
of my of remaining life, however brief,
and never be satiated, of love, and streams of water,
never stilled, always running in patterns that exist,
but for milliseconds, admired by clouds born in, of,
a moment of re-formation that is perpetuity long:
unending shape shifting, like the freedom of flowing water
currents, forming, reforming and unthinkable, nay,
inconceivable that human eyes or their spoken words
could capture their shiny white foamy essence

But of love, that we can do, paint, design, recreate its
endless loops of undulations, like the radiating circularity
of a pebble dropped gently to its burial sight in a quiet pond.

Humans know, understand and excel at clasping and grasping
at the synapsing of human cells from differing bodies: the
exogenous erogenous of human touch that like the clouds
and the water, who could paint that, who capable of capturing
said sensations that wrack and enliven the body with invisible
interior chemical reactions. I cannot. Thankfully better men and women have treatised  their entreaties to the powers of the universe and been rewarded with the skilled delicacy of weaving human tapestries, the milliseconds of connectivity, eclectic and electrifying of different currents and differing amperage’s forming and reforming like water moving, just  like the clouds changing in response to the externalities of wind and gravity and all the forces of nature that encourage us to study and stare at these flows, hoping to entrance them into standing still for but a moment, and instead, mesmerizing us into standing motionless for hours in awe of their freedom.

Love’s undulations too mesmerizing, and freezing us into
place, or alternatively caucus to run endlessly arms extending,
flying though not airborne , rocketing us upwards while feet never budging, but finding good wards, masterful metaphors to recreate and thus to share the fabulous mystery of this thing we know as love.


2:58AM
Friday
jul 22 (jewel 22) of the 23rd year of the 21st Century.


O.L.P.
inspired by the police of Oxford, Lewis and Hathaway
 Jul 2023 r
Nat Lipstadt
those of us in the middle muddle,

do not know from sides, boundary lines,
drawn by others, right-sided, left-leaning,
mean nothing to us, who seek something solid
upon to rest, when the clarity others profess,
more than evades us, even escapes us, and
the muddles of life seem to require simplest,
middling answers that are unacceptably refused
by grail seekers whose cause for cause, means
cause to cost others regardless, for regard for
the middle is disdained, by two-sided posts,
the know nothings, and the know betters

irony of irony, the rigidity of imposition makes
me more adrift, more aimless, and the task of
meandering through seems almost holy, for the
obstacles of society, requirements of modern life,
are so damning, wild expectations superimposed,
truths not just hard to find, almost indiscernible,
so I lay my pen down hard, awaiting for the
whatever-while, for to return, to go walking with
only the simplest grids to guide, meanderings in
general directions, ahead, always ahead, keep moving,
keep touching and when optimism returns,

I shall be relieved
once more,
I shall be released
once again,

good words will be caught,
released, returned back
into the atmosphere so
they will grow in size by
the very act of sharing



undated
————————————————-


Everyone must leave something behind
when he dies, my grandfather said.
A child or a book or a painting or a house or
a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.
It doesn't matter what you do, he said,
  so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.  The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime. ~Ray Bradbury

(Book: Fahrenheit 451)
 Jul 2023 r
Nat Lipstadt
Stroking
 Jul 2023 r
Nat Lipstadt
Stroking


<6:56 Am>

this petite gesture, glorious in effect,
impervious to aging, speaks volumes
of storied nuance and sun powerful to believers,
inherent messages much refined by its singularity

all that can be, will be, transporting the living,
calming effervescence by simplest of motion implanted,
its sensory powers long lingering, instantly, uncovers
the furtive child in us all, tho well we hide it

stroking my woman’s body when errant dreams,
disturb the early morning scheming, returning a placid,
to her steady breathing, exhaling the disturbing,
erasing the fearful that wanders inside our night boundaries

stroking the cheek, of my six year old granddaughter,
pulling back the hair locks that impede her vision,
the whirlwind passes, her body sedates, and her
totality merges into mine, born, borning a Godlike oneness

these fingers air the words that my chest pervade,
there is power galore in their communicative physicality,
but nothing more powerful than skin upon skin, in motion,
continuous, circular soothing the giver and the receiver equally


<7:09 AM>
Silver Beach
Friday June8
2023
 Dec 2021 r
Sara Went Sailing
Slow recognition comes slithering

from the back. toward the front

It's parasitic cynisim

tunneling into brain

segregating pockets of isolation,

blockcading joy as fear

rewires optimism and

hope becomes conspiracy.




Sara Fielder © Nov 2021
 Dec 2021 r
Sara Went Sailing
I watch the autumn day delay its close,
as if its clock had stopped, wood shadows froze,
I feel the gusts of wind begin to calm,
and quiet to a whisper blowing balm.

The suns fat sleepy face an orange ball,
of friendship warming tears as they would fall,
as do the black elm leaves come snowing down,
and cold crows caw away November brown.

I sit and watch the red squirrel hopping by,
a woodpecker taps bark wrinkled and dry~
If I could only hold this scene in place,
a smile would remain permanent this face.

Sara Fielder © Nov 2021
 Jul 2021 r
Nylee
Non-existent
 Jul 2021 r
Nylee
Little by little
every shard of my work
will disappear from this world
and the time will erase
my existence
.
yet this year I celebrated my birthday
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