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Nat Lipstadt Oct 2015
be ever gentle to thy words
treat them, your tools, well,
cleansing and protecting,
wrapping them in cloths of chamois and moleskin
that they may be well conditioned and
pour forth with a temperament clear and viscous,
reflecting their high honors and a noble lineage,
they are well-intentioned to exist far longer
than your meager temporal life,
upon this ever hasty, ever perpetual, orbit

give them all respect, their fair due,
they are treasure immeasurable,
for which you have been granted guardianship,
custody received from others to be gifted onwards,
yours, but for the duration

so oft we trifle words,
expel them from the country of our body,
without passport and earnestness,
as if they were the cheapest of footnote filler,
day tourists, to be treated as leavings,
refuse for daily discardation,
barely noting their fast comings and faster disappearance,
but leaving not, a mark of distinction

more truffle than trifle,
find them in the dark forest of your life,
use them sparingly, just for soaring,
take them from the roots of your trees,
shave them with a paring knife,
counts them in bites and measure them in grams,
even in grains,
for words are the seasoning of our lives,
agent provacateurs that can modify the moment,
bringing out to the fore
the flavor of the underlying

speak them slow and distinct,
for they arrive slow to you,
a trickling of refugees for your sheltering,
harbor them as full companions,
protected by natural law,
provision them well,
prepared and ever ready for a quick departure,
moor them at the embarcadero,
for the next restless leg of endlessness,
which they themselves will inform you
will last longer than eternity,
long after there are no humans to speak them
Oct. 6, 2015
4:30am
Manhattan Island
False Poets Feb 2018
complexity bias

how you love to criticize my poems
as too long and overly complex

poor me, I’m no genius, don’t prosper by exploiting
unrecognized simplicities, rather deconstruct the
intricate complexities that I flatter myself are the me-sinews

Writing is a **** temptation -
we focus on the 10% that is complex and ignore the easy 90%

perhaps this once I will surrender my bare bones
put aside the rich, satisfying of cave diving, urban spelunking
word caressing tongue verbiage rich tapestry exploring -

give you the plane of plain where nestles my destiny: nesting near motionless where the couch is my kingdom and cold cereal is
easily digested and there are no consequences

I am a member of a discriminated-against minority
we have no charismatic leader, no marchers anywhere, and government programs say
hey you’re free white and twenty one plus, get the crap out of
our faces,  you useless piece of rhymes with **** and includes dirt, though I shower twice a day to keep myself occupied

25 years old, a high school dropout, of course I’m white,
my occupation is playing video games and making sure
my supply of opioids is adequate in these great United States
where I was born

there are fewer jobs than none that my application survives
a first glance discardation, and now my disability preempts
any demand to pretend there is gainful employment in store in
my future

this reductio ad absurdum is a technique to expose the fallacy,
ah what’s that you say no interest in hanging about,
on your way out, of course, of course,
we are the wrong flavor of downtrodden

my life is simple - simplistic in its a chaotic entropic way,
order slowly declines into disorder

my rituals are a fight against slip sliding down, falling off the
the Herzog continuums
and the poems are desperate hand holds to prevent my
going, gone under

so forgive me if I tax you without possessing not the
requisite taxing authority

you hone in on the obvious disparities and my contradictions

resenting my sending you this bill of extravagant length

compose with me and a mean will be located and to sleep I go,
perhaps to undress my dreams and explicate the wealthy multiples of complexity in the simplicity of a junkies life
Nat Lipstadt Mar 2019
a quote of Bernard-Henri Lévy

~~~

the divers’ recovery, diverse,
shipwrecked salvage from different locations,
auctioned to the highest bidder,
tho the excised excerpts are exceptional,
none come to do the bidding,
for the provenance of words
belongs to all, and to none

~~
“so oft we trifle words,
expel them from the country of our body,
without passport and earnestness,
as if they were the cheapest of footnote filler,
day tourists, to be treated as leavings,
refuse for daily discardation,
barely noting their fast comings and faster disappearance,
but leaving not, a mark of distinction”

“the addicted pleasure words granted to we privileged few,
like every enslaved soul to the mind, which I am, I am,
evening dreams, midnight thinkings, sunrise seeings,
how can I infect and thus protect the young to the liberty
to love the crafted content of our human essence to better
comprehend that a moment caught on tape of our shared
words is a holiday, a celebration for the ages...and every molecule,
becomes a human tuning fork in concert, in pitch identical, in blood tainted with the simplicity of we are all the same, only words, this will transmit”

“murmur me, with soft downy charms,
these words discovered
recoursed and intended well to
pointedly offset and contradict
their very own tumultuous discovery uncovering,
tear tongue me
with calming, lapping word  wages,
hymns harmonious and fine homilies,
a call, a request,
a bequest
to sedate my shrill life

“some cells, microscopic, preserved digitally,
aged to imperfection, thrash my eyes,
making me speak in tongues I do not recognize,
but fluently possess, no wonder there,
the memory place fairly empty,
room aplenty for passerby's and the imagery
                                                         ­­ of the vaguest of dearly departed

skin is not the only mot shed,
                                                sloughing of woeful words

“speak them slow and distinct,
for they arrive slow to you,
a trickling of refugees for your sheltering,
harbor them as full companions,
protected by natural law,
provision them well,
prepared and ever ready for a quick departure,
moor these words at the embarcadero,
for the next restless leg of endlessness,
which they themselves will inform you
will last longer than eternity,
long after there are no humans to speak them”
excerpts from a few old poems, after reading an interview with Bernard-Henri Lévy
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/bernard-henri-levy-on-the-rights-of-women-and-of-the-accused
March 27, 2019 4:48 am
Still Crazy Oct 2019
“High in an ingredient called allicin, garlic can help stimulate circulation and blood flow to ****** organs in both men and women. However, because of garlic's mood-killing smell, eat it in moderation.”

while researching mold, stumbled on this factoid,
the one that’s asking
what is moderation in love?
and where in the oddest places, we find answers...

oft thought that pure love is extremist,
and any extreme needs to thrive on its antimatter,
so goodness, needs speckles of unkind,
and ****** promotions, aides that aid,
present an invoice needy for stamping “paid!”

such is the casino we play life in,
you cannot leave till you’re paid up,
paid in full in heartbreak joyous,
so the odor of love, keener, fruited,
when absent and the green grocer
no longer smiles when his ex-best garlic
customer walks by(e)

I toiled in seduction fields, gathering fruits and flowers,
now, reduced to a window-sill gardener whose
crop will grow from citified rain, small stunted,
leaden and ripe for discardation

troll me not, your stuff is your stuff,
mine is mine, when we meet, you will be slow to recognize,
but you will smell my garlic, and know it’s

that poet
exactly

au revoir, no!

it’s not your eyes that will acknowledge
my existence, but the dirt beneath my fingernails,
and the perfume of what might have been therein contained
if you, sadly unlike me,
are!
s t i l l
crazy after all these (tears) years
onlylovepoetry Nov 2016
(I) Love Thy Neighbor As Thy
self

~

how I would
honor this with
joy effervescent,
this simplest of methodologies

if only I,
could permission myself
to love myself

if only I,
knew
how to love


~~

(II) redemption: the city of man reinventing himself

busting bursting, this city,
ceaseless change,
old discardation,
how blind am I,
skyscrapers built in a day
how have I failed to notice

the estate changes
a master plan unknown,
the reasoned limits ever stretched.
in defiance of taste and sense,
obedient to Babel tower's net-result,
the miscegenation of language

but this is a ruse issue,
an example of me/man,
this new born spawn,
a wagging tail of

a man I know,
a failed inventor,
nary a patent
to his name

years on years
he patiently awaits
for one true inspiration
a redefinition, a redemption,
a reinvention, a new cornerstone
to lay upon it a new foundation

just a clue, a single block,
he can clean erase
start over, inaugurate
a recommencement celebration
to  begin the same mistakes

here be the rub,
the irritation,
the seed comes implanted
and then
wind spread
can be only repaired, replaced
when cross pollinated

with the love of a foreign body
and his only crime, love poetry,
his crime alone, for unopened
it, and he, both-awaiting the time
when others come impatient

to bulldoze him aside

~~~

(III) Three

three

an oddity
an uneven symmetrical imagery


"only love poetry"

a three sum,
- three legged stool-

there is nothing new under the sun,
whispers the Psalmist


this I whisper
only, alone, one,
be no such!



only love poetry
until


~~~~


postscript

*if only I,
knew
how to love
Nat Lipstadt Dec 2019
”so oft we trifle words, expel them from the country of our body,
without passport and earnestness, as if they were the cheapest of
footnote filler, day tourists, to be treated as leavings, refuse for daily discardation, barely noting their fast comings and faster disappearance, but leaving not, a mark of distinction”^ nml  2015

<|>

these very words, the issue of my Old Abraham body,^^
children, these, young children, now four year olds,
but
so ancient in word years, for they,
the product of decades lived, lost,
wisdoms now sudden unearthed by teenage poet siblings,
youthful all, who, stumble on,
uncover and resurrect as accidental tourists in a foreign land,
these very words to:

surprise me, remind me, recall to me,
how the words were cherished, tenderly loved,
now newly loved by those tender only in their years,
grasping pen and paper to diary their youthful travels and travails,
witnesses to their new early days,
exploring the boundaries of body + mind, exciting pleasures and

even more exciting,
their heartaches,
as they dabble in the unexplored,
the trial and error of life

Like life itself,
my writings follow no meter,
free in form, lineage and linage, to wander and to wonder,
follow machete carved new paths,
each essay, composite of the drips and dabs of a human,
a pastiche,

a composite
held together with spit and tears, reflections fresh on old memories, an accumulation of past deeds requiring final payments,
all stamped overdue as if we knew life’s actual due date,
when we draw the double line of final summation,
uttering, here, here are my totals!

it is the wee hours of the early day,
nighttime of the prior,  the when we humans pass
back and forth from the real to the spirit world,
when the unconscious and the faint hearted scheming merge,
when bare remembered imagined and real life dreams blend,
a potpourri
of our unique treasured immeasurable, red rich soil for our mining

this years land’s end draws nigh,
the belt drawn tighter though a new notch,
just now punched and prong filled, the airy atmosphere rushes into
spaces that did not exist moments earlier,
our belts, the tree rings of a human’s life,
our waist expands and mind shrinks simultaneously,
but one metaphor of our journey to ebbing

enough ramblings.

young poets, look forward and new, by screen refreshing eyes,
by visiting the trails cut by your predecessors,
like the breadcrumb words left behind with you in mind,
paste them anew in unforeseen combinations,
valued for being both prime time polished and real renewables
just “reborn”

our, nay, now your precious words,
precision tools to shape new dies, your poems,
for mine are almost all expelled


Dec. 18, 2019 2:30am
^ https://hellopoetry.com/poem/1425812/oh-poet-be-ever-gentle-to-thy-words/

^^ Abraham laughed, and "said in his heart, 'Shall a child be born unto him that is a hundred years old? and shall Sarah, that is ninety years old, bear?'"[Genesis 17:17

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