5.30.11: E 88th St. btwn. 1st and 2nd

Crickets and cicadas
buzz in fuzzy yellow sun
Flowers sweat and wither in the hazy Summer noon.

5.31.11: E88th St.

Barefoot on a six-p.m. sidewalk
The heat of Summer's day hovers 30 floors above.
around me
fat mosquitoes circle
but do not bite.

5/25/11

The neighbors are fighting again;
slammed next doors shake our bedroom walls.

CPW@86th St.: C train platform

Uptown bound
ground above me quakes
On the DT tracks, a woman’s hat.

Big Bang

Where is our big bang?
Where is the creative chaos who’s
cunt will bear our true brave new world?
Bogged down in the racket of a
hundred million iPhones
Lost
in the pages
of Facebook

i
am not a Phone
a Mac
or a PC

My face
may be a book,
but for my status
you’ll have to ask me

Hey
Step away from that screen
Look up
The world is burning!
Chagall’s horse has
long since shat out
Nero's violin
but just for us
they cleaned it off
electrified it
and plugged us in
and noone has noticed
the bitter stench
of our collective burning
ever since

Jerusalem is Beige at Noon, and at Sunset, Gold

Jerusalem is
beige at noon, and at
sunset, gold.

But for
mattresses laid out on
flat summer roofs
sheets,jeans and washrags flapping on
laundry lines
blue and white flags or
“HA'AM IM HAGOLAN” banners
hanging from open windows or
draping from balcony railings
_____________________(for whom?)
Jerusalem is
beige at noon, and at
sunset, gold.

But for
souvenirs heap'd up on sagging card tables or
hanging from walls in the tunnel like shuk-
_____________________Jewellry, and sandals,
_____________________narghilla and t-shirts
But for
wind tossed trash dancing
down three-o-clock-alleyways, &
cats who dart out from
cool parked car shade

But for the
long and slowly stretching
dark shadows of inevitability,
Jerusalem is
beige at noon, and at
sunset, gold.




_________________ha'am im hagolan - "the people are with the Golan"
_________________shuk- open air market place heavily frequented by tourists
_________________narghila- hookah

Shoko beSakit

She’s going to Jerusalem she says,
next month, end of June.
“Bring me a shoko besakit” I say,
knowing she’ll never get it through.
Inevitably, the bag would explode,
_______dousing
underwear and t-shirts in chocolate milk.
Plus, a Palestinian, she’d
never get it through customs,
a matter of grave national security! So
she suggests instead, she’ll enjoy one for me
there, snipping off the corner of the
baggie with her teeth, sipping
cold chocolate milk in the
Yerushalmi sun⎯
maybe in Independence Park. Finally, I say,
“Don’t forget the lachmaniyah.”

______________shoko besakit – chocolate milk sold in a sealed plastic bag
______________Yerushalmi – pertaining to Jerusalem
______________lachmaniyah – a roll, often eaten with shoko basakit

Girl

Seen from the bus
whilst at the bus stop
Sixty Second Street
through opened back doors
across busy sidewalk
girl sitting in Starbuck’s
window papercup coffee
looking out at me
Now the doors close
but the gaze isn't broken
though behind two sets of windows
she’s a galaxy away.

things missed in exile

Things that are missed in exile:
The shape of the sky and that "certain slant of light"
Specific fruits and ways of eating them
like watermelon with salty cheese, and
cactus pears
peeled and cut on the roadside, or
fresh from the cactus with
invisible glass needles
(only way to rid them from your hands:
rub them together with dry sand)
Ways of drinking coffee: black and thick as mud
Sheets of eggs sold by
old men on the sidewalk
Artikim on the beach and
sunflower seeds from the kiosk
Brown dust that coats everything
The ease of washing floors:
hot soapy water
thrown from a bucket and
squeegied into the
corner drain
News on the bus every hour on the hour

In New York, you don't hear
the news on the bus.
On second thought,
that's something I don't
really miss at all.

Mud

Children of brown bear
children of puma
Dig for dried berries where
Coyote has lead us
Under new mud
Under dry needle blanket
under bald bush
Under the pine
We steal these from the birds
the hungry Winter birds

Letter to C

Micro tornadoes of
white hole punch gingko blossoms
_______whorl in the cobblestoned park
The heat of the sweat drenched day
_______is subsiding
Wishing we were sitting together
at our sidewalk cafe
swiping at evening flies
drinking limonana

These Things By Their Names

Calling things by their names
is not the same thing as
calling them by
their nature. For instance:

to say,
Gleditsia Triacarthus
& Quercus Rubra

is not the same as saying

Honey Locust
& Red Oak

which once again
say nothing so much as

________________“Majestic outline,
________________ filtered sun
________________ copper in Autumn”
____________________________ (Honey Locust)

or

________________ “Symmetry and color
________________ street or shade tree
________________ a shelter for wildlife”
______________________________ (Red Oak)

Dogwood
_______does not bark
&
Crocuses
_______don’t croak

but Cornus florida Rubra
explodes with fat, pink, spring blossoms

and

Crocus Sativus L.
sleeps through the Winter
under snow covered earth
to finally rise, a
flaming yellow phoenix
when the world begins to stir

4/16/2011: Mt. Sinai Hospital, 11th Floor

How I love high Windows on a
dark rainy day when the
city's colors run like purple
fount'n pen ink on the
pages of a notebook left
out in the rain

Shitty Day

Shitty day
the computers crashed
All the way home
you stood on the train

Take off your hoodie and
throw it on the chair
kick off your sneakers and
hand me that scrunchie
I’ll stand here behind you
sweep back your long hair
make high-home-ponytail
and kiss the back of your neck

Your hair smells like winter

Shifting Sands

With the most sincere effort I'm able to muster, I fail to understand how socialism could be construed as anything but a common benefit. At face value, it means nothing more than taking the necessary steps to support one's society, ensuring the well-being of each and every one of
its constituents. It's a holistic approach that takes into account both the needs of those who are able to provide for themselves- without diminishing their ability to succeed financially, and those who are unable to provide for themselves, and therefore require assistance.
The problem is, we have been duped by the "American dream"; the promises of a mansion with rolling green hills, a seven figure bank account and garage filled with elite status symbol cars has kept us salivating over a reality few of us will ever see. In fact, we are so invested in the idea that we will one day be wealthy, that we preemptively guard our theoretical future wealth from any potential threat (such as taxes,) at our own expense. We fail to understand that by voting for or supporting the plutocracy (read: “G.O.P."), we are actually ensuring that we'll NEVER find ourselves with any more wealth than we presently have, and in fact are likely to lose even more.
Part of the problem is this proclivity to divide everything into "us" vs. "them". Society is a body, complete with interdependent systems. When there is an infection in one part, without proper care, it will eventually spread, ultimately causing catastrophic systemic failure. Our current society is infected, and thus far bereft of proper care.
In the last century, we were the most upwardly mobile society on the globe. Our diversified economy, built on domestic manufacturing jobs and a strong balance of import and export industry provided such a surplus of well paying jobs that we had the largest middle class in the
world and no debt to speak of. In fact, at the end of Bill Clinton's presidency, we were firmly "in the black".
Flash forward a decade: our mobility trails behind England, China, and even India. Our middle class has all but disappeared, and we are three trillion dollars in debt. Our leaders tell us that each corporate tax break, every industrial deregulation and social program cut is a necessary “shared sacrifice”we must bear, if we are ever to climb out of our current morass. In
fact, it's exactly this mindset that has gotten us here, and- make no mistake, will keep us here.
Unless we change our collective paradigm by recognizing that we are an interdependent system wherein each and every part is absolutely integral, (yes, even a competitive economy,) we will continue to fail. The social body will sicken and ultimately die. We will lose every social support we've come to rely upon; medical care that needn't be paid out of pocket at time of service, public education, even police, fire and emergency, will become things of the past.
Until we rectify our ways with drastic measures such as (a), insisting on a progressive tax for all (b), encouraging corporations to bring manufacturing jobs stateside again by offering incentives to do so and enforcing penalties for refusal, and (c) supporting the regrowth of our middle class by any and all means necessary, this decaying body will crumble from the inside, until, even the ivory towers that are occupied by the plutocrats themselves will crumble and fall,

built as they are,
upon this foundation of
violently shifting sand.

Spring

Mist still blows
______from mouths like smoke
Gingkos litter sidewalks with
______wet white confetti
Cherryblossom & Dogwood
Red Oak & Honey Locust
_________________________Tulips too,
_________________________on Park Avenue


Potholes are also a sign of Spring

D.O.T. workers close off city blocks
and with 450 Cats & 6 ft. screeds
square cut the craters
& pour hot black gravel
poundit all in &
rollit down hard

They've done it for years
_____the exact same way-
this temporary fix they call
_____"hope and pray"
but next Winter the salt,
_____tire chains & plows will
chunkit all up again
& the work will repeat


_________________________Fingers always turning
_________________________the wheel of the world

meditation

National pride
Ethnic pride
Religious pride
Atheistic pride
Cultural pride
Subcultutal pride
Professional pride
Doing well pride
Not doing well pride
Identity pride
Lots of money pride
No money pride
Big house pride
Making do pride
Expensive watch pride
Expensive car pride
Expensive clothes pride
Status symbol pride
Better than "X" pride
In good shape pride
Being right pride
Invested in the shell
The empty hollow shell
All substitutes for self - which is
Nothing real at all

3/29/11: Washington Sq.

In sunspot warm
small body learning
to balance to move to walk
Knees all green from
______falls on grass
Tripping toes stop in
______pavement cracks
Uncoordinated feet
______refuse to cooperate
Arms down
stiff at sides
Laughing
Chasing two fat pigeons

Kerhonkson Haiku

Bad news comes, but
seldom reaches me here amidst
the whispering pines.

but that I had a creek to sleep beside

Apogee moon sits
on a hill, guiding me home
through whispering pines.