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Nat Lipstadt Aug 2023
The Fatigue

is newly familiar, but familiarity breeds
surrender, not contempt, for its powers
are overwhelmingly secretive, coming anew,
stealthy like evening fog, all encompassing,
departing when it chooses, only by choice,
fearing not day or brighter burn of sunlight,
or even the insistent rules
of the mathematics of a timepiece


it hides within the ordinary, the mundane,
the onerous lifting of the fork, the exhausting
chewing, chewing until sleep offers distraction,
but not necessarily relief, for the chores of
living, are an endless looping, and the fatigue

does not recognize the clock, the body’s rhythm,
only its own schedule, I proud man, am but its
vessel and vassal…
Aug 22 2023 11:03pm
Nat Lipstadt Sep 2023
From Pradip:

”The place you occupy in my heart leads me to worry.  Please take good care.”

<>
the wonderful mystery of loving art,
which is shorthand for loving the
artist’s soul
which, a revelation and a relevation
of one’s humanity, and character, is essential “essence” of poetry,
the true power of the written word

this man I likely will never meet, offers me
a place in his heart, which is concomitant
with responsibility of giving loving, obligatory!
the one and only commandment
within his  incredible simple unintended  poem on the power of
giving love, or giving life

through each other’s scribing, we each worked, wormed
into the others heart, the repository of the energizing,
acts of loving, so,powerful that they cross
approximately 7300 miles as the crows flies

perhaps my pessimism is unfounded, overdone,
and we will yet embrace and I will (gently) bounce
his granddaughter upon my knees, something,
with which I possess a modicum of experience

yes, I think I’ve changed,
in a subtle ways;
in my new heart are thousands of rooms
eager awaiting roomers and boarders
who need pay their voluntarily rental
with simple words and even simpler
acts

yeah, you understand…
Augustus  18 2023
S + 2 weeks
Nat Lipstadt Aug 2023
“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
Nat Lipstadt Aug 2023
My Woman, My Partner

we need today it seems identifiers moreover,
as we slice, dissect, and categorize the W’s of our
individual experience,
by defining ourselves as pieces of categories

Today, woke with this title-to-be-poem in my head,
My Woman, My Partner

I like particular, individuating descriptors that distinguish
rather than categorize, summary’s that capture the
roomy broad and small strokes, the subtleties of capturing~
encompassing an image total, and yet intuitively tasting and
comprehending the depths and flavoring of our totality,
a combinatory humanity

my choice was My Woman, which was comprehensive
and distinguished, yet upon consultation with said person,
for pre-authorization approval, it was returned to me with
an engine-heart additive, that was both a word that denotes a
binding, ties, equality, and takes it to another, even ever
highest level,

this essay on how I came to title this poem, well, is the poem
in its entirety, it is the process, the point, the summary and the
minutiae of all I wished to convey.



Sunday Aug 13 8:03 AM
Nat Lipstadt Aug 2023
~for Isabel, Alex & Wendy, Theo & Rose~

be reading Whitman and Hafiz,
adding some Shelley and Frost,
for (no salt) seasoning, might add in
a biblical, King Solomon’s be-loved,
sugared Song of Songs…

won’t need to go far, on my nightstand,
search & reach, to love and preach to
generations next, a lesson last & simple:

read, read, read there by learning,
how to first define, then preserve the
variety of feelings rising from within!

here’s a starter morsel from Walt,
sort of a summary of how to do it,
all well and proper…
poppy

”This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families,
read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life,. re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem 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

Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855.
Walt Whitman, c.1887.
August 2 2023
readying for surgery
Nat Lipstadt Jul 2023
Semi-
——-

Something new, in our years of partnership,

during

the early morning semi’s, the half awake, yet
mostly asleep, passageway from rest to wake,
as per usual, I am awake before her, to write,
to think, to read, to do my variety of early morn
chores, but today, her semi is populated by a
new concern, an alert, mind programmed, silent,
no chirp, no beep, just human punctual new instinct,

let us
check if my man is alive and breathing, rub his
thankfully copious-headed hair & air supply,
rub-a-dub,
once, repeat twice, thrice, sense his beating brain,
confirming the night passage, always dangerous,
completed safely, for she feels my warmth, hears
my eyes-crinkle smiling, and ascertains, the
continuation of my existence and the statistical
probability, (her occupational hazard and habit)

that when

she crosses fulsome into the living day,
awakensgladly, that her not-too-hot-black
coffee, will be
mister milkman delivered on schedule with
a bedside delivery like clockwork-blonde, with a
half sheet of enwrapping paper towel within some
morning fruit, to  ensure that her coffee will have some company…

while she dances a beloved tango in her semi-,

I am:

in my only~pretending post-tense,
semi complimentary state,
mentally scrambling scribbling half a dozen
eggs of new poem ideas, mad pursuing these
very words, my way of saying good morning girl,
my beating heart muscling me to be sure I-remain,
in the good company of the Oompa-Loompas,
and yours too
!
Nat Lipstadt Jul 2023
The Nighttime Skies have altered, altering us…

The nightly showing of twinkling heavens, fulsome,
brimming, as can now be seen but only in a planetarium
program, always was a delight to our ******* citified  
visitors, who received this free reminder of Earth’s  
non-centric role in the universe, happily, for it jived
senses with common sensibility, confirming an assumptive
reality with yes! my-eyes-can-see-it proofs, that many city
folk only hope & assume are yet true someplace  else
‘out there.’

Night light pollution, a life feature just assumed as
a costless cost of doing business of our modern
population distribution, has horrendous mental
consequences for a generation of me-me-me
young ones, who lack the lessons in real awe,
not by way of a video game, but by never having seen a
Milky Way,
constellations and planets
that were so necessary to
critical cortical thinking p,
human beliefs,
re the totality of
existence a mere
two hundred or
so years ago.

The star’s disappearance for so much of our population,
reenforces the notion of our own centricity, get it?

A world centered on the city.

The truer star studded sky knows not
of gender neutrality,
racial disharmony,
through a
“I am not the universe “ perspective,
for in this large than life realer than real
exterior externality,
which why, by the by,
is mega black and white duopoly,
makes who is bigger no better than smaller,
for all but magnified speckles
all now more of a minor
irrelevant relativity.

When all the worlds are watching, not just the world, but
a Universe of unknown worlds are judging, studying us,
and maybe our lives are mighty picayune,
but amore humbled and yet precious, do we not need to be
always on our best behavior?

the fact is that we who are but 80 miles from nyc’s borderline can no longer sky-testify, be reminded of our planetary’s liveliness- uniqueness and our proper place on the largest tapestry
of the always, of the forever, of the
majesty and harmonious coexistence.

I am naive and a proper fool, and I do not know if it is the new smoking of the planet, spread of the seemingly innocuous
city boundaries encroaching on our rural existence, or a new physicality condition that makes our nights a pungent blackened cloud, and that so many can not say of the awesomeness
mystery above us, and think
with humility
our destiny,
our alignment
                         “is in the star’s.”

Alas poor Yorick, even your creator, the poet William Shakespeare, who understood human frailties too well, conceded that,

”it is not in the stars to hold our destiny, but in ourselves.”

But the again,
he could nightly gaze
upon them,
and we cannot!

He also conceded, to attempt to balance
the imbalances of our
visual scales,
and magnetic moral compasses,
writing,

indeed!

”there are more things in heaven and earth*”
Nat Lipstadt Jul 2023
the **** dialing, ain’t it grand!

~for Mike Marshall-

the government made so much money off the tech giants,
it decided it could do them better, making even more $$$,
cause where there was misinformation, hatred and suppression, racism, and fanaticism, not to mention, true stuff criticizing them, and a lot of bad poetry,
even,
good old fashioned hooliganism which what they called us when  cool fourteen year old idiots, roamed hot summer city streets, back in ‘64, doing cool things like knocking over garbage cans etcetera etcetera…
Big Tech could fine/find their way into extra few billion bucks
to finance greater inanities…

here’s hoping they don’t throttle the goose that laid the greatest
egg ever invented,
**** Dialing
that has caused and healed wars, rifts, love affairs, by facing up to making the calls you’ve been puttering and  putting off, to long lost siblings, just internet fiends and old, old, friends, where courage was lacking to make the first or last step.
to sealing the deal,
or breaking the ice!

Long Live **** Dialing!

5:45 pm
7/23/2023
Nat Lipstadt Jul 2023
early daylight across my face sweeping,
gingerly ginger-yellow heated by the low-
risen sun, it confirms what my beating heart
yet signals, granted us, a new twenty and four,

but no more,

for certainty is not a human condition, so we cover
our eyes, not from the sun-rays, but in deference and
thankfulness and  gratitude, that we have one more chance
to the world distribute, blessed human loving kindness, unique,
the greatest gift most excellent we human possess to give away freely!

Jewely 23, Twenty Twenty Three
8:30am
Nat Lipstadt Jul 2023
And So the Day Begins (Bring Them Home)

~ With love for T.R. & S.R., my friends ~

<>

Their spirits, sensed, well kept,
in a sudden breeze, a sudden sneeze,
at the precise exacting, millisecond,
when skin, mind intersect, coinciding,
Mine, Theirs, and wet eyes and
smile traces arrive unbidden but both
together, always simultaneous and I know,
full hearted, full throated gasp grasping,
my soul and hands, touching, clasping,
in the kitchen odors, morning coffee,
early daylight across my face sweeping,
on the tongue, their taste on mine,
and I am present in this moment
as they are too, with me forever if
but just for a heartbeat, maybe two,
stilled yet, my heart trembles as it fuses
with Them and Everyone of Us is renewed,
and so the day begins,
Oh Our Children!
remembering, a point on our journey,
our always unbroken continuum.



<>

7:17AM
July 22
Two Thousand and Twenty Three
but one more day until…
mine eyes wet, can’t be dried,
and all around no one notices,
but there is contentment even
in that,
as it is my private momentary placement,
in Heaven on Earth,
all together,
merging…
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