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Nat Lipstadt Nov 2024
“We all need a promised land”
Carole King, “Been to Canaan”
<>
the lyric tickles
like the worst itch imaginable
and consequently consuming
demands this
old boy pay attention

it’s so true, it’s so devious,
we strike our temples
for failing to see the obvious,
throw, roll
our bodies on the damp ground,
like the dead of whom
it’s said
will roll to the
promised land
when the messiah will come(1)

but meantime
we thrash about
not knowing
what
is
a promised land,
let alone how to get there

perhaps
the promised land
is within the
states of our mind;
need to travel there,
just prepare
to jump, dive deeper
than living a life
of ice skating upon the surface
of wasted existence's of
grinding grinning
day in, day out

unroll our sleeping bags,
our ruksak pillow,
examine the stars locations,
when morning breaks,
pick up you leavings
behind,
and roll
roll ourselves up,
onto, can~do,
Canaan
(1)
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1127503/jewish/The-Resurrection-Process.htm
Nat Lipstadt Nov 2024
“We should like Nature to go no further; we should like it to be finite, like our mind; but this is to ignore the greatness and majesty of the Author of things.”
—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1715
<>
for my dear friends who amply supply
pictures of the infinity of nature
daily

<>

the comfort food of your
living-loving-eyeshot
screenings  of moments preservations of

the delicate and the roughened,
the mystical and magical of
our creative globe’s ad and mis
ventures,
oft far from the paths of human ruination
trafficking

these photos

the first of the day,
signaling white smoke rising or
the full fledged regular milky
insertion photographic
into the mine daily awakening
of the
purpled majesty of the world
when ******* pleasure of
first coffees of life’s days


and how it pleases me,
that there is no
conceptual conceivable,
that there will not be an
finishing enthralling,

a last never-before-witnessed
visionary submission
without
a never finite ending to this
infinite processional!

thus no need to say with
them ordinary wordy pleas of/to:
“keep them coming,”

for by your read acknowledgement of
this here poem,
you have cosigned this
contractual
o b l i g a t i o n

and I say
an ecstatic
Thank You
11/16/24
Nat Lipstadt Nov 2024
this semi-seemingly sad refrain~reflection, more truth than
one can even understand,
for my physical self slowly
disappearing, diminishing
though no visible pieces
as of yet,
gone missing

few of you have come to visit me
in NYC, so you cannot be sure of
anything you’ve been told, for the
great liar claims, the internet bleeds
disinformation believe this
if nothing
else

for I’ve been a dream from my very
naissance, a vision imaginable by
those who contemplate my whereabouts,
my visages, we bemused, while
you imbibe, tongue |taste
mrs
written bouche amusante

well,
if you want them pieces & parts,
poems in the fleshes,
seek outa one eyed guy patched
by a rivered walk path,
see a troubadour on his soap box
amusing the real peoples
who pause to reflect
cause
them
give respect to his peculiarities,
listen to his truths bout
himself and them
selves too

if you can’t camp this far,
then believe in your dreams
cause my come and go,
fly out the window
and have reached as far as
the Phillipines, New Zealand &
the Land of Oz

I’m their break from the news,
indeed call me ‘the new news,’
which so cool, makes us laugh,
cause there ain’t no much new
by this foolish OG, ‘cept for the
rhythm of and blues, I spin, the rhymes
that they fet/met/net me with dollar bills,
loose change and half used joints in lieu of cash-is-trash

So I dream, they dream,
together we scheme,
each of us composing,
in separate and equal
prepositions preposterous
and share all who to be heard,
especially those who wish to also
have their dreams be
seen
Nat Lipstadt Nov 2024
she pretends~polite irascibly
enquires:

“So far, and so early,
when your day begins,
when the main brain
rebels with that creature of energetic ether,
be it midnight or any hour
thereafter,  
before daylight

brings you new clearer
and brighter brilliant visions of the
hereafter,
and the earnest hours allow your disquiet
pre~tense that you’re going about you busyness, which is a plain brown paper wrapper guise,
to write more poetry’s
that thy thine, your
“eyes~command, nay, demand?”

“And where are my love poem daily promised, premised that it’s a requirement
for our cooperative living arrangement?”

“I am familiar with your many ways, poet,
all your names, viewpoints, specialties,
your secret personas, insider insights that
fool no one, so start your every twenty four on a left foot forward, questioning us, yourself, where shelter lives, even inviting any and all passersby to come inside your scheming mind, and stay awhile, jointly


compositing

upon your uncomfortable
Adirondack thrones, while permitting the sun to burnish brown caramel your inner sweetness, and the wind to bring you scents
from faraway places, to pluck and insert in a variegated languages plurality, to spice up
those written words you ridiculous store in your tiny iPhone, typing one letter at a time,
trying not to fall behind what the mind is
churning and breeding?”

“Furthermore and finally. confess, confess,
your shame, shame,
shame!!
it is my
name
that
deserves the unvarnished truth,
without my
everything,
your poetry will
wither like
a week old roses,
that she/me/da boss
is the one true
authoress
behind the
boy/oy/toy/pretender
to whom I give my very
soul’s inspiration…
11/15/24
Nat Lipstadt Feb 2015
Feb. 2015

this writ,
content so obvious,
it begs,
why even bother...

Pen Man Ship

this is who you are,
this is your scent, scripted,
the parfume that memory triggers
declarative self-examination passing grades

if pen and paper
are your skin and blood,
then you, man,
ship to shore,
skinned alive,
in poems verbose spill all

ship in ship out,
the glories and the dreads,
expel ink oceans glorious India blue,
rivulets of tributaries,
spillages of what~where,

you are pen
you are man
you are ship

where intersect these routed things,
one is voyage~bound
for parts unknown

the pen be the oar,
and the man, the ship,
and when the sails raised,
the wind never fails,
only there is no
dead reckoning -

for there are no
landmarks observable
when sit~stand
to commence sail~writing

each writ a latitude recorded,
each poem a longitude drawn,
all together, a
body of work,
all together,
your life's coursework
is the captain's log

Pen is the Man is the Ship

in everyday words
he answers
the questions life poses,
in everyday words,
he realizes
the answers he (doesn't) posses,
with each passing poem
the ship, righted,
though the heading
remans unknown
Nat Lipstadt Jun 7
Britt slang: “to talk continuously for a long time without any particular purpose:”

blame my parents; I do;
the endless poems,
unforgivable; staccato~static,
much preferable! saying things thrice, a plague, a blight; just ain’t right; even extra spaces, a time waster; slimmed and trimmed
my vocab,
by order of constabulary:
doing
away with ******, no if ands or butts; no more pronouns, unnecessary;
who needs them, just use nouns; think of the mega-millions of seconds saved; now called just firsts; got the point? this is what happens, when A”I” inhaled some excellent grass; my intelligence, not worth a pence, so i say arrivedecci, so long, farewell, see ya,
to run on sentences of marathon poems,
timed saved by over poetic~slaving;
stop you plead? show no mercy, ha!
pleeze!
ok ok u big cry babies, saynomora..
recently written  advise typos
Nat Lipstadt Nov 2024
a single word,
rejiggered
refound in the endless, floundering
someday~possibility bin of my
unbalanced brain, noted forlornly
on March 13, 2017@5:28 pm, the
trigger unpulled, the triggering,
long forgot, but my sense of duty
quizzes me, howling,
“how long you gonna run
that body’s words~worthiness down,”
leaving it orphaned, I’m surrounded
by finger pointing, some grand waggling,
and my genetic J-guilt is overwhelming,

rejigger my schedule,
rejigger my responsibilities,
email excuse~me apologies


and think upon the vastness
of the worded task, an eleventh
commandment that requests
a close examination of your
life’s intentions, and begin to
curse my two thumbs stumbles
in to files, chapters, notions
best forgotten for reasons quite
good enough

**** this uncovery discovery
and my sense of injustice that
now condemns both of us to a
tirade of remorse reminiscences
removal and so many re-verbs
-erations shaking me up that
this task now demands is
an old battleship
recommissioned,
a ship now
forced from retirement,
wantingretrofitting,
when I’m, my useful life
way past
my/our sell/use-by-date

so I do what any good theater loving
fool do, start singing
“Tomorrow, Tomorrow,
you're only a day away”

and beg for a one day extension,
a 24 hour forgiveness pass,
cause pressing matters
demand my immediate attention, like
finishing my epic life’s œuvre littéraire!

“How I Procastinated My Life Away”
lucky us, the next word was “unhinged”
Nat Lipstadt Nov 2024
~for Paul & Art~

<>
melancholic, contemplative, introspective,
put on the songwriters of the Sixties,
looking for the comfort of old songs
that I once knew complete, from the days
when I believed, knew my own true self complete,

the tablet lifted, the spirits keening, a forth
will be coming, to soothe and purge, commence to dress my own wounds,
Whitman would be attentive, perhaps
a tad sympathetic, tho my wounds are
entirely self-inflicted

and alone, cry out for an assembly
of words, well chose, smoothly chaotic,
mirroring the lathe of my sharpened
disarrayed confusions, two old troubadours
come to comfort, with sweet harmonies,
and simple, but novel rhymes &
syncopated rhythms that all can
carry, sing along, all of us smiling

with ease, we cross the borders of each
other’s mind, paring snippets into
poetic clasps that keep us well attached,
filing away the roughened edges that
we all in common posses, and like
jigsaw pieces, we finish each other’s sentences, and we emote satisfaction
with smiles, laughs, sighs and sarcastic
groans, our words grasp, connect and

ease is in the air, there but for this grace,
we go together, you and I,
sailing away from
troubled waters
8:19pm 11/11/24
Nat Lipstadt Nov 2024
i love that word, puttering, my adjective
of early morning rambling, world examining,
in the early AM, treading barefooted
from room to room, a list prestablished,
+ tidy up the prior evening’s laziness,
unload with complete silence the
prior nights dishwasher, homework,
prep the couch back to pre~beat~up presentability,

make the first 16.5 .oz of Blue Mountain
Hawaiian coffee, in my art history
McIntosh mug(1),
prepare the first of the day’s bitesized
edibles,
a:k:a, Kashi crunchies, so the coffee all
falls down  to a well~recv’d internal welcoming

the timing is off, the clock has changed,
it is early but not really, I’m constantly
recalculating ‘real time’ until confused,
substituting the internal locked-in clocking that ultimate divination of right and wrong,
the betting app informs us of the
under/over hours really slept line
set by Las Vegas oddsmakers

but as usual, the digression omens come
fast and furious, up in the sky apartment
is an oasis of cloud quietude,
(where the latitude and longitude
inter-sec, where the cleansed sun softly)

ah quietude, an envelopment noun
favored over the pedestrian quiet,
my ears,
fulfilled by music via noiseless earbuds,
fills the soul, it is the milk in the
morning coffee brew of the
crossover silence, tween the skyed division

check on the woman, deep asleep,
(pronouns: she/her/mine)
her arm thrown across my empty pillow, as if holding my place in line,
like besties in second grade, a warning to other potent interlopers,
so
withdraw silent to finish the routine that
is so comforting, the polit~noise chatter has
not yet invaded, all of its associated
malice’s tumult, kept away at bay
with forethought,
and instead, thus, I, write,

in this quilt of solitude, not alone,
write of this companioned morn~born~rituals that
will be one day,
be renamed,
as a

mourning ritual,

when
when life ruefully states in its
arrogant ~ don’t ~ care, no ways,
now that,

When,
one of us, be
sleeping permanent, and the
silence be reformatted, recalculated,
the coffee will taste different, and
the footfalls no longer unsqueaking,
no need, cause the solitude is just
renamed as loneliness, and though
the tears emanate from same tear ducts,
the causal reasoning is reversed,
no longer
celebratory, and with no one to show it off,
to share,
no punch in the arm gasp
of loving recognition,

I perforce new habit,
will read this puttering,
now stuttering poem


someday as a new summary,
a substitutable morn chore,
absent
a chorus of a
singly
singular
beautiful quiet but only
memorized,
silenced applause
7:50am
Nov. 2024
I guess i do really love the puttering word, for lo and behold, stumbled onto a long forgot
predecessor writ in 2012,, at a different home  
I am an unconscious serial repeater (sigh).

https://hellopoetry.com/poem/397440/puttering-muttering-in-cahooting/

(1)  Paul Cezanne’s “The Card Players”
see https://mcintoshmugs.com/products/post-impressionists-set-of-4-mugs
Nat Lipstadt Nov 2024
the thought seizes me awake,
after a heart powered hour of sleep,
rise in silent reverie, nary a peep,
though my heart rate breeeches
150 miles per hour, each beat

yesterday wrote of the eloquent
sensibility of simplicity, its natural
native appeal, and when I think of
things that world needs most urgently
which is, for poets a de rigeur activity,
fyi, that more common than uncommon,
sobelieve in my expertise,
we need badly, another Hobbit movie pretty please!

we need rallying after the tallying,
we need fellowship among the species,
a crossover inclusive of the animal kingdom,
require fearless leaders who value selflessness
over personal gain,
less optimism rhetorical,
and some plain honesty to give the world
the equity of equality,
what it wonts,
and not what pro poli’s
tell you think
which slogans sell…well


whent to the corner store,
bot all kinds of fall
colors of berries and tiny flowers,
went all-in unreasonable
on clot colossus seasonal,,
oranges, yellows and quiet quilts of
hardy little greens,
bread, OJ, larger uncaged eggs
a-dozing,
and though my impossible orders all fulfilled, the boss,?her list defeated,
by crossing off
my abbreviated illegibility scribbling,,
it was still insufficient for missing was this:

what the world needs a fresh Hobbit triumphal,
where self~sacrifice always come first, and duty rightly prevails, over evil,
always a close call,
and the chill of fall,
the dint of wint-
er
is warmed away by
love,  justice for all,
besting every close call,
and for a replay of the
World Series where them
Yankee underdogs emerge
victorious and the city lifts
its chin, and says OK to the
new day, week, and that
extra hour of…mmm…
daylight
sleep


call me naive,
it is an honorific
terrific,
great fully
accepted
a chill Nove three 948am
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