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Arthur Benjamin Franklin: my Unca Artie, my favorite. A High School football star, known as Red Franklin, he was famous for his dark red hair.  He used to chuck me into deep water at Chrystal Pool to terrify me for 5 seconds, then hoist me onto his broad shoulders.I suspect I was his favorite too.  War came and he had to go.  I cried and cried on the herringbone patterned bricks at the train depot in Kelso. I have a v-mail he sent to my mom, his sister, dated 1942.  He was a belly gunner on the B-17’s that  were flying the area where Rommel was fighting.  He brought my sis and I back little leather suitcases, tooled in wonderful designs by a skilled artist somewhere in the orient. I still have it.  A treasure.

Grover Cleveland Franklin: My suave uncle, joined the Navy in WWII and became a deep sea diver. The kind that wore those heavy suits with the big glass bubble head.  He helped detect and destroy mines around battleships.  In doing that brave work he lost his hearing and came home as a lip reader for most of my childhood. I was always  a bit suspicious because he seemed to read lips so well. He even got written up in the newspaper because he could sing while putting his hands on a phonograph and feeling the vibrations of the music he couldn’t hear. We kids would always try to make loud noise behind him but he never once reacted to it.
Many years later I learned that he confessed that his hearing had gradually came back.  He was a hero nevertheless.

About their names: Both being born in North Carolina, back in the 1920’s it was common practice among the country folk to name sons after famous people.  I also have another distant relative named George Washington Franklin. I love having hillbilly DNA.
So proud of them. Ordinary Americans who did extraordinary things.
Still Crazy May 29
~for M. G.*~
who discerned in a

witty three words,
my essence, perfumed~

<>
we all have in our own(ed)
personal debtors prison,
a chained inner child
asking always:
Am I there yet ?

sad smiling,
a 'no you are not,'
for to freedom day to arrive,
the child must unlock the chains,
no one else can be
permissioned!

someday he'll, rebelent,
will comprehend that
wishing insufficient,
asking nice,
once, thrice, millions
can’t break
the padlock,
And you have to walk away from the inner child,
Leave it to starve
Leave it to die
Leave it to be free
And just a regular grown-up guy!

So saddened
There will be no return
There will be no funeral
No keepsake memories
For the keeping
No capital letters
Just a path
Large yellow arrow pointing
This a way
Bluntly and without fuss, un accompanied by any special invitation,

You leave behind the writhing child
plodding forward,
Slightly offkilter, slightly off balance,
But no longer writhing,
Just drifting from the course,
Ever so slightly
Which is drama plenty,
But there is no morning mourning for the child left behind
DEC '24
market report: spinning on an axis of complexity

phrase captures and enraptures, buried deep in one of the
countless market reports that arrive every minute out of date by the time they press the end/send button but this rises
up from the forged gorge throat and all the rest falls away

spinning on an axis of complexity

sticks like Elmer's glue, white viscous, good for paper & skin,
cause you knew precision revision incision instantaneous,
they are intended for your eyes only, pasted to your eyes,
tinged tongue screaming you man, you poem
there is no
difference, for both at 1:55am 
 where time is sleep verboten,  
when words are blood platelets in a mystery entitled

spinning on an axis of complexity*

human must eat
human must work
human must love
human must sort the juggling orbs,
too much new information constant and brain incapacitated

while falling-spinning
when eyes now fully glued shut by the
complexity of clashing algorithms
writing this market report on the state of me,
the passionate impartial analyst who boldly reveals, he proclaims
he owns stock in himself and issues a
sell recommendation

the complexity-situation trending signals crash a-coming,

and at 1:59am after composing this hissy fit writ,
he downgrades the official outlook to sell and
lies down on the kitchen floor and laughs
with the angel dudes eating bagels and holding their sides,
cause they have  been running a short position up in heaven*

6/22/17 2:05am
nyc
  Mar 27 Still Crazy
Nylee
It's a reality when it is observed
It is unreal if no one sees
Even imaginary is unreal
but feels as if it is not.
If real is not real, why do I feel
we are running to acquire nothing
Are we onto something being
driven to see nothing sticks for long enough
If what I have doesn't make me happy
I manifest things with great yearning
But when I acquire, it just loses its lustre
Becomes painfully ordinary, are we onto anything?

we are participating in this life
It is real or fictitious, maybe both
we perceive it in our mind
Likely we have different insights
The echoes of our actions in a fleeting sound,
We bark out like a wounded hound.
We chase the shadows, of a promised light,
And grasp at substance, that dissolves in night.
The questions linger, in this hollow space,
Is meaning woven, or a fleeting grace?
Perhaps the journey, is the only truth we find, we are onto nothing,
A constant searching, of a restless mind.
  Feb 17 Still Crazy
Nat Lipstadt
~my poet friends and friendly poets~

(written in anger, then sorrow,
tinged with regret, but in the end one
has no choice but to forgive and forget)

<•>

the ghood poet knows no boundaries,
lays down tracks of a New England
pond of nirvana,
or across Siberian froze wastelands,
another
salves the wounds of dying soldiers,
and gives away comfort to the dying
with the freeing oxygen of
comforting words

the world of self,
that thing we know best,
thus encouraged by the textbooks,
well,
to have at it, plays whacamole
with your  owned flirtatious emotions,
none too imperious or low down or
garbage dump *****, that yet
cannot be validated by exploratory
over-the-line words pithy

even the florid, tiresome nickel & dime ing
rhyming scheming crutches,
we so oft employ,
yields up stuff that ain’t half bad,
periodically,
though, the blunt of words well crafted
needs
no such delimiting amusing playthings
or imprisoning
I-am-amoebic-pen-tata-meter

take you inspiration from here and there,
the proverbial deep dark of the mind’s recessed corridors of
corrupted consciousness,
or, the
contrail whiffs of the steaming steaming of the contradictions of a
newborn first day’s contrast of-
the wet dew on toes cooling,
while the simultaneous sun warms all
the cheeks,
heats the blood with
a thanks-god-I’m-alive
overwhelmingly overall tickling,

or
not.

write with the tools you have, but keep
them well sharpened, with
insight and revelation,
exploring the rain’s windowed
navigable rivulets,
the musical tempos
of waves and their multi-mystical variations,
and the readers will come like
pilgrims to your  holy land,
wearied and yet so delightedly hopeful,
with tingling contrasting dictions,
to capture and release,
by shattering any
stale notions of adulation
will bring your
audience of holy voyagers and voyeurs
to imbibe so deeply your creativity for the quenching, and the
amen gasp escaping tween
their lips is just a simple holy,
gentling thank you

discard the bad words as ornery and
distracting, veiled in pomposity and
highfaluting, self-saluting, arrogance of
those deeming themselves critical thinkers,
who thrive in the low mud flats of
self-pretension and the reassurance
of a mirror’s reassurance

write straight from the heart,
fill our eyes with the
complexity of the simple
and
grant us the write to share,
in your humanity

craft the work
and
the work
will repay
so stealthily
by secretly
crafting you





                                   nml
3:43 am 2/16/25

p.s,always fixyour typos
  Dec 2024 Still Crazy
Nat Lipstadt
12/18/24

I choose fingers,
among the array
of many wonderful
parts on offer,

the other sensory emissaries protest,
but the multi-fluency of fingers,
fluent in all Romance languages,
nay, in every dialect, tongue,
tippling the balance in their favor

for the fingers are wonderful conversationlists, trumping the
cooing coyness of sweet wordy
verbs, fingers defy nouns, pronouns

and are fingers the finest conjunction
that was ever conjured ot conjuncted?

the ears hear poorly when upom it
a long  slim finger casually traces outlines
slow~sensually and the eyes shut tightly,
reflexively, the tongue froze to the
mouth roof, muted into inaction

even the the sense of smell lies powerless
should we block the nostrils with but
*******, and breathe mouth mightily

we do not diminish the orchestration’s
totality, the blending of sound ‘n sensation,
but the blind and deaf all must bow before the power of fingers speaking to
every part of the bodies totality
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