letter to elana

for the poet elana bell

~

in a different cafe,
on a Manhattan streetscape where once, years earlier,
violence was the purview of West Side Story gangs,
ruling their internecine non-intersectionality territorial blood lines supremely

nowadays, violence replaced by the frenetic
noises of Lincoln Center theater goers,
student dancers, actors, musicians and poets joining the throng
of those who sup and run,
all hearing their own frantic
curtain calling, saying, announcing,
music dance voices words require your obeisance,
needy for a mutual worshipping reassurance fiat that:

life can be made transcendent
if even for just 90 minutes or 120 pages,
or a 3 minute poem reading

this city of millions requires billions of poems that spoon stirred  
and yet, almost always fail, to squeeze, all of the human essence that is in its ultimate source, clarifying nyc tap water,
containing the storied remnants of a hackable continuous,
single human stanza cell osmosis - a blockchain like no other

two poets sit side by side each in their own lapsed dreams,
she, a published poet of prize and rank, ^
he, a rank amateur whose only prize is his unpublished anonymity,
poetry, is his just a nightly soul cleansing,
an imported remnant of his Marrano piyyutim ancestry

one turns to the other,
in the inexplicable daily crazy miracle
of city fashionistas

in a city where stealing a parking spot, or the
forced squeezing creation of a subway seat space
where physics proves none exists,
are oft the roots of slashing and stabbings faithfully reported
on the 11 o’clock news,  
and trust and/or other encouraging words
are seldom heard and even less demonstrated,
the make-no-eye-contact of Camus’s L’Etranger anomie is the
normative, paranormal, paralysis cloak of we city separatists

“Can you watch over my electronics and stuff?”

Sure says the grayed and grizzled,
an all life long veteran of nyc,
judged to be trustworthy
based on a few seconds of being upsized and downsized,
a car wash (exterior only) perusal
despite a
“no direction home, like a compete unknown, a rolling stone,”  
this signage, yellow star permanently chest-affixed,
conveniently ignored, as it seems impossible
thieves don’t look like me,
don’t likely in their possess,
a distinguished head of gray hair (yeah, sure)

a thank you reward of (or did I imagine it) a lean-in,
a momentary head on a shoulder,
the chit chat now grows earned and earnest,
she confesses her cardinal poetry profession,
eliciting an ‘Oh Boy’ utterance from the poet
of a thousand names
and a thousand textual emendations

a fastidious nyc boundary is brief crossed for one short meal,
till the end when time sensitized IMRL intrudes and
the showtime calls out,
if not now, when? if not me, then who?

I read her poetry later in the praying supine first position of
three AM, and laugh with delight, at the contrast and no compare,
the styles clash and tho the stories told
are both writ in the aleph bet script,
there ends the Ven diagram overlap and
into the night’s coming of a Elvisian blue suede coverlet,
we both disappear, and if not for this recording,
history says, you old man confused, never happened,
just an imaginary poetry ink blot dream breaching...

~

postface:
another poetry book is no longer homeless,
comes to shelter upon my shelf, close to Angelou, far from Whitman,
now all the book’s nooks eyes collectively
reassessing the new old-owner, parsing his syntax,
undecided if his readership is worthy of them,
concluding that all these books are the
man’s owned roughened stones,
to be placed by human hands on the
serpentine curvature of his literary tombstone,
and until all stones fully read,
they all agree,
will they and he
be fully freed,
smoothing his legacy’s edges

Evil & crime so predictable & stale.
Stupid how arrested suspects get bail.
Convicted when their victims tell.
Prison is where some stay & are jailed.
They have to communicate by mail.
Sometimes their focus goes in another direction.
Where probation happens after correction.

Child & spousal abuse, drug use, & rehab that is no use.
History repeats
Wives & children still get beat.

Their isn't always a Superman or Batman to be your hero.
With a sword or crossbow.

Details of armed robbery , drug dealing & smuggling.
Stabbings & muggings.
On the inside homosexual love with cuddling.
Human trafficking & prostitution.
Violating amendments & constitutions.

They are how they are from how they were raised.
If their victims could speak from the grave
Or had they been saved.
They could explain & describe how their rapists & killers behaved.

Male & females do their time.
Years in custody for their crimes.
Seriousness of their offenses vary.
Some educate, get jobs, or marry.
Behind bars is where violence belongs.
To be punished for all that they did wrong.

Some from death row are now dead.
Similar to the wildlife in a zoo behind bars they get fed.

I told this
***
a life-long necessity
of mine
more or less.
But first I said,
before anything, maybe
it’s just a life-long exhaustion
of mine I’m
expelling needlessly, okay?
I want to make sure you
know that
so you don’t go thinking
I’m weird or nothing,
though honestly  

it all drops hard like
iron
faster than
gravity
to the same
place
anyway.

But this is what I told him:

Sometimes I wish the world
would roll up all it’s got.
Roll it all up in one unsettling
heap of heaviness it can
toss on me like stock from the
deep. O I wish to God it’d
give me the torturous insanity
and every inexplicable loss
it can conjure up—just one
catatonically tremendous
slap to my stupid little
face, flushing it with
cosmic humiliation
and fear I don’t even
notice I ****** myself.

So that, at least, it’d all be
there, you know? And I wouldn’t
have to ask where it is and
what the hell’d I do
to get spared.

I told him give me the
holocausted ashes smelling of
Zyklon B, the crawling away from
sawed off shotgun shells
catching friends hiding under
the library desk anyway, the
running over of your dad by
a drunk who lost his wife to
the cancer that took the brother of
somebody you knew whose
mother had

suicidal depression, hadn’t
smiled really in years, she’d
sat with cold coffee
for years, and around her
had been worse than
darkness, for a reason she
never ended up knowing.

I said to him give me the
harshest words a child has
ever known against him
and have them rest upon
my spine like a freezing
brain spreading electric
wild fires across
my vertebrae, give me
burning skin really
burning, and cheating wife seen
moaning, and drowning baby now
dead
and beaten wife now
collapsing, another baby now
beaten and
thirsty wino keep drinking, and
a stranger with his face
blown off red and
brown and tattered and
I don’t know how but
still hanging there like
boiling chicken fat, dripping,
but the doctors
able to keep his heart
beating and his organs
pumping too, so now
people can see him
and his whole face
as an indication there is
something in the air
that deserves pitying.

Give me it, I said,
with homicide and
double homicide, and
a side of
stabbings and
chokings and
bludgeonings
and guns and rope and
gas and asphyxiations
and love letters and
love-making giddy ***
and flowers for the
love of your life
who is cutting herself
because she can’t stop
cutting up souls after
she *****.

Give me everybody’s
******* loneliness
that is lonelier than
a thing lost before it was
born, and as it was
being born, born into
losing itself, its slow
destruction, and there was
not even anybody there because
there was never going to be
anything to help you, there is
nothing to be achieved and
nothing for which
striving is
helpful.

There just is a memory of
a hazy possibility of
happiness, that one
felt once
in a senseless dream.
A memory that is
always fading towards
non-existence or
existence that has
no place for it, because
it is already full of
something else, and you,
your “transcendence,”
are wasting time,
waiting.

What are you waiting for I
said (with just a little irony).
Give me the heaviness, don’t
hide it anymore. Show it
all bare and give it all
to me. Tell me, here, take this
and hold it for the sake of—

What?—what is this?
Is it this? Just
the universe drooling on itself? Or
is it more? Somehow less?

Well, for the sake of
whatever lies here (lies here!)
and is too ****** in eternity to
delight us with a clear
answer to the
question that all the
living creatures on this
sacrosanct dirt, in some
crevice of their being, I know,
are asking it.

And this ***, when I finished
telling him what I’ve just told you
didn’t say anything back.
His brown face was treaded terrain,
crumpled cracked ditches,
broken dry grin.

He looked elsewhere, smelling of
decades of drunken alcohol
and lice and yellow toenails and
******* alone against
brick walls at night

and also his brown hands
adjusting the dirt-drenched
cardboard bed he will surrender to
tonight, after who knows
what else.

Expatriots await the nights in Kuwait
where the dingoes and dominoes and salamanders bait
the ladies in purple to their eminent doom
of sleazies and stabbings and babies in womb.
Don't get me wrong,
I enjoy a good time, if friends are around and we got a dime
or two
and a fire for the masses and we're shaking our *****
as if we are actually aware of the outcomes of our actions.
I know we haven't the slightest clue
what a Jesus Christ is, or if it hides under our beds at night
or if it was a Jew.
What's written in books can be written by crooks,
because literacy and knowledge are ******* beautiful
but can give one more confidence than the world has to share,
and the whole theory of Relative Pride falls to pieces when one has more self-efficacy than ability
and the children with their sweet little ideas and purity are not humble but fall victim to humility.
So what's in a name?
Letters, vowels, consonants and connotations
traffic tickets, family vacations
****** and protests (though not necessarily related)
teenage boys and ***** minds and those who have masturbated.
But who hasn't?
Those without names, or faces
or honesty or hands
probably have their members ******* in steel-spiked rubber bands.
I'll see you again in retox dehibilitation
and we can converse and create
while under the crutch of sedation.

Through all this strife
We create life
It's not wrong or right
It's humanity's plight

Whether it's with a wife
Or a stranger
We create life
Despite danger

There is a new addition
He could end repetition
Of negative patterns
And social ladders
But there is a competition
Between the new editions
Of positive versus negative
He'll be the one ahead of it

In a world plagued with stabbings
By the greedy money grabbing
Not to mention the beastly bombings
That endear retribution wronging
And elusive peace longing
There is a birth
Amongst death
That makes it worth
That first breath
Which provides hope in promise and potential
When they could be the positive differential
That could change this planet
And the hearts made of granite

We are born screaming
And never stop
We find ways of teaming
To be cops
Imposing our will on others
Through fascist force
There are many ways to cover
How this ruins discourse
But I sense a new sheriff in town
Our old ways he'll bury in the ground
He might be one or two now
But he'll change the world and I don't know how
For he brings hope
To a world with none
He helps me cope
A compassionate son
He'll make the world brighter
By not being a fighter
In a world of strife
He'll create life

Is the world a pleasant place?
Or in reality a nightmare in disguise?
In my opinion the second choice makes more sense.
Is life carefree?
Or one more possession that will be taken from us?
For me both seem right.
Life is carefree, but it was given to us and can be taken away just as easily.
Why is there destruction and killing?
Stabbings and beating?
People being abused and children turned onto the streets?
Is it because the human race is selfish?
Or have we just not tried to fix the problems and enjoy making more?
People think the world will get better,
     Thinking doesn't make it so.
The world is filled with violence, in my opinion it isn't going to change.
Life is a never ending circle.
Life is a nightmare.

Mother Nature is swaying in the breeze, her branches strong.

Her life full and alive she sings with flowers and dances with the bees,
But her mind is boorish to the oncoming threat of November.

The startling entrance of Fall is like fire to her leaves,
New electricity attacks her arm’s protectors; prepared with strong green shields.
Yellow, orange, then deep red bleed into a burnt, crackled brown and black ash.

As her melodic hum of green vanishes, a starling yellow spark leaps,
Ablazed chaos now runs on her twisted, knotted, and wise branch-arms.
Eruptions of heat and confusion Mother Nature is seen screaming,
Raptured coldly, her green peace is painfully and hollowly attacked.

Her first shiver yesterday revealed her weakness,
Her shade flees, no longer able to stand the icy-sharp stabbings of winter.
Her annual sigh of defeat inevitably followed, thus beginning her hibernation,
Her tired arms creak and break, letting down their burnt sheaths,
Slowly spiraling down, down, down to the hungry ground.

Closing down to mourn Mother Nature is unclothed and shamed.
Her once green body now dried, bare, and cracked.
Withering winter brings blue death and ice to her brown skin.
Naked she shivers and freezes for three months to come.
But Spring will bring her a new strength and humility.
Mother Nature’s momentary fall will only chill, not ****.

I. The Fireflies



There was once

a time when the fireflies

had made a home out of me.



One evening,

long after the sun

had surrendered itself

to the hazed horizon

and the pregnant moon,

they had come to my window,

golden freckles of light

twinkling playfully

in the dimness.



What exactly

prompted their gravitation

towards me,

I will never be entirely certain of,

though I have my theories.



Maybe it was the

warm glass of milk

sitting on my bedside table.

Or maybe

they had simply mistaken

the peppers of stardust

laced atop my eyelashes

for their own kin.



Or perhaps–

and most likely–

it had been

the murmur of poetry

on my lips:



…watch how they dart about the trees

in whimsical harmony,

how they rise up towards the dark sky

in the hopes that, someday,

they too will become one with

the constellations that blink

so brilliantly in the blackness.



Yes,

Perhaps this what had captivated them so–

a homage to the fireflies themselves.

Perhaps this is

why they had drifted towards me,

as if in some fanciful trance,

weightless as paper lanterns.



And how sweet they were

as they twirled about the ringlets

in my hair and

nuzzled their small frames

against my cheek

and fingertips.



How sweet they were–

that is,

until the bees came.



II. The Bees



They made lightning bugs

of my fireflies,

whose soft luminescence was replaced

with a violent stream of sparks,

one resembling something close

to the bursting of a fluorescent bulb



And so came the lightning,

the firefly’s only defence against

the approaching swarm,

their only ammunition

in the impending battle:

fireflies versus

bees,

both in want

of my nectared

marrow.



But the lightning

was no reasonable match

for the bees,

with their

large, gelatinous figures

and the persistence

of their stabbings;

annihilated were the fireflies,

carcasses crumbling to soot,

their innards,

still glowing,

smeared across my collarbone

like war paint.



Victorious and

humming menacingly,

the bees then crawled

into my ears

and my mouth

where they proceeded

to feast on their spoils and plunders:

the honey,

that they so cruelly

stole from me.



And once the honey was gone,

so were the bees,

bellies full,

antennae sticky,

their use for me

fulfilled and therefore

discarded.



III. The Spiders



The final hosts

were drawn to

what the bees had left behind:

the inconsolable emptiness

of my being,



They marked their territory

with cobwebs–

spun carelessly

into my arteries

and windpipe.



Breath dwindling and

heartbeat diminishing

I tried to remember the fireflies–

the light–

as the arachnophobia

threatened to devour me.

I hope you won't
Wear wind chimes that always annoy the cat,
Or wear that ring, you single gal,
Or wear your box of shame,
Or wear that smile.

I hope you won't
Wear a look of exchanged stabbings,
Or wear an open-hearted pendant,
Or wear anything at all,
And certainly not that one red dress.

Maybe I'm a little twisted and dark,
But I thought you liked it that way.
So I play with scissors and knives and darts...
Is the blood on the wall too much for you?
Is the blood on the wall too much for you?
I draw graphic stabbings and maimings,
You never said you liked your girls sweet.
Why did you ask for fresh strawberries?
I've always been more of a rotten lemon.
How was I to know you wanted a nice girl,
When you always loved to call me a ***** girl?
I thought I was your dark girl, dark angel.
You used to love the way I wanted to bite,
Bite you until I made you bled warm and red.
Now when I write you notes about butchering,
You abandon ship off the starboard side.
I wanted us to drown together darling,
But I suppose I can drown you alone...