;.cPoems profane, 1985--1987--1989
;.l1,6,60,66,1,0,5,75,192,2,15,20,25,127,5,0,
;.l2,4,75,192,2,15,127,4,0,
;.l3,10,75,192,2,15,20,25,127,10,0,
;.l6,22,49,193,2,42,127,22,0,
;.l7,5,124,192,2,17,42,127,5,2,

.h2, HOC!(HIC                --
POST
                                   HOCK AND SODA WATER:  
(Collected Secular Poems, 1984--1987--1987)

                                  =

[Hock & Soda Water
(Collected Poems 1984--1987)

-

In Search of the Ox with the Gilded Horn)

+

PostHoc
(Collected Secular Poems, 1987--1989)] 
            
                                   -

(Satires, Metapoems, From Whom Can we Learn)
                                
L7

HOC!(HIC = [HOCKSODA - GILDEDOX + POSTHOC] - [SATIRES, METAPOEM, FROMWHOM] 

l1

                               

                                            Steve Amdur
                                

"Hock and soda water!"

George Gordon, Lord of Byron
Introductory Preface to his_Poetical Epic Don Juan

                                                   
                                
       ("but oh, you lords of ladies intellectual
       tell us but truly, have they not hen-pecked you all?"
                                                               Op. cit.



.a7
 

"so sometime lords of ladies intellectual
bow out, unmanned by bawds' love;
gay boys, ineffectual." 
                         hic.            
                                            
                                     Input & Output at Sadya Press
                                       Kibbutz Ein Kesef
                                       ("Silver Springs")
                                       Forest   Benshemen

                                                                                                                        	                                   "I bet you owe me money."                                                        I bet I don't."
                                              "Ok; double or nothing."
 
.p

                       OLDER POEMS 

*
 the way your cat                    stops
eating 
       some unexpected delicacy
and looks up
              quizzically
as if to say,
"you know, this is really quite nice."

(West Medford, 1983)
---------------------------------------------------------------
*flying toward my home
mourning a lost love
but oh, the stars

(12/4/84)
---------------------------------------------------------------

*after a sunrise rain-squall
white storks on a field
of fresh-cut alfalfa

(Mehola, 1/30/85)
-------------------------------------------------------------

yearling yaelim
curious as schoolgirls 

(Ein Gedi, winter 1985)

--------------------------------------------------------------

*the halil I lost -- 
how I want to play it now --
lonely winter evening

--------------------------------------------------------
BETTER OR LONGER POEMS

*The Poet as Movie Extra

"Fools names, like their faces
oft appear in public places"
obviously; but why?
Consider the matter in abstraction:
Kilroy was everywhere
yet never was...
or all those plaques
grasping for imortality...
and don't overlook concealment
(autumn squirrels hiding nuts)
the charm of buried treasure,
however trivial.
----- 
*Pity the Egged egg
I ate, I thought, for breakfast:
all morning it demanded
additional recognition.
----- 
*Punk Pandora

don't; though it's not     
ineffable, inscrutable, or even
ununscrewable;
indeed may  yield
innumerable layers of rational answers
to unimaginable questions
and acquiescently trail off
into exponentially infinitessimal madness, 
!unhand that screw-driver!
don't uncover, don't look;
call a computer repairperson.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

                       NICE SHORT POEMS 

*Sacked again
I regretfully recall
things I wouldn't steal.

---------
Enduring a  Spinoza Colloquium
I recall dawn at Ein Gedi.
----------


*Rain and Miles Davis
Torn lily drifting downstream
Brandy in the glass

         23.02.88

-----
.P
                IMAGES OF AMY

I told myself, disengage
and answered myself, ok;
yet last night, in several guises
you entered my dreams.

----

ballerina kedusha
plie baby
middle way to the grocery
the statliness of grace
in a "true marriage" of  beauty and honesty

----------
The ballerina's postulate 
is Bach; the possibility
not merely of harmony but
the stateliness of grace.
Wings would be merely diversionary.
Behind the tumult & tumeh
as house-lights die & scrims fly
arises, appropriately clothed in white
the premise of
a universe of dignity.

----- 
(After Botticelli's Birth of Venus)

     Spying  Venus born of sun and foam, Midas Miser thought her madeof gold & claimed her as promised land , until the winds brought acloud to clothe her in  shade.

-----
.p
EVERYDAY LIFE


*The charm of sin
is simply its
illictness,
like the warmth of stolen sleep
after the alarm clock rings.

-----
bit of sin sans doubte
this
most convenient social tool
hypocricy -- conspiracy of feigned deceit...
No one wants to know now
how you do do;
we blame the beast
denudes truth...

-------
Why not live in dreams?
Mists blow through the valleys,
Sea wind, wind off the land
----  
    
In a museum of art
regretting my previous lack
of a third sheet of toilet paper
I tighten my belt.


     Footnotes:  "...and judge each man favorably" (Pike ha'Avot)
---------

Jaywalker1

the repititiousness
of a stream of taffic
repeating 'CAR!'
and...ah...um`
'CAR!...CAR!' 
-----                        
His Philosphy of Jaywalking

It's the stupidity
of clumsiness' darkness
or intrposed obstacles
that, unable to conclude,
occlude my
  laboriously selected goal.
----
.P
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL

*Quintessentially macho
our cat Spunky
padded purposefully down the road
each morning
and returend in stoic dignity at evening
having slept all day
behind the first big rock.

------
Muchado
"Much a-do About Nothing" that is...
-----
*One day
when I was 10
my father treated us to Pizza in the Italian Seciton.
I said, "I suppose I should thank uyou."
He replied,
"Of course; it was very nice of me."
-----
"Don't hoard the wine,"
my mother warned us,
"pleasures are real,
and good memories last forever."
----
* American Moderns

Grandmother safeguared our heirlooms
after the Crash
but fifty years later
she got sick;
so we called in an Antique Dealer
& took her to a Home.
She got better and said,
"Well, that's that obligation."

----- 
.p
Billy-goat Days Gone By


*On practially my last acid-trip
as the posse of my mind was closing in
I commandeered an Apaloosa
from behind the Placitas Adobe
mounted and headed out
for the high air of the Sandia
except that I spend the next two hours
trying to get through the junk
of my own back yard.

--------------
*Truncated poem

Myself when young
in quest of truth
with a capital  T  LSD
did take to cinema and stage
& from that lofty vantage viewd
The Bible and The Magic Flute
shlepping a chick behind.

Shows shlock; dates disaster.

------
American Romantic

One afternoon, when I happened to have remarked that I was sucidallydepressed, a chick invited me to the hot springs                    
& fucked me standing up
by candlelight.
I cheered right up, and made a play for her sister, of course.
It's 20 years later,
Thank you for your compassion.

------------
.p

*The Poet Contemplates his Lift

      "I had it of Leah..."
           Shakespeare, Merch. of Ven. III:1

Just a yekke or family fault
to throw nothing out, no doubt;
yet to lose these unused objects
imbued with memories
or enclosing unrealized dreams, never disowned
breaks me up.

-----
Everybody knows of 
the crusty old man with a heart of gold...
I never thought to be one.

Contexts constrain,
I find myself disguised
as a trashcan bear
hiding from the beckoning high-wires'
   fragility of gentle passions & delicate emotion
and so left with only a secondary obligation --
Play the cards left in your hand as best you can & leave politely.

--------------

say
it's scarcely
the taste
of an aged red wine, nor texture
of a fine-lined late quartet, but merely
an acknowlegement of complexity,
that all-but-forgotten want....
-----
.P
HOMILIES

"In Adam's Fall
we sinned all"
'Old Adam''s rise
to our surprise
directs our soul
back to the "skies"

    Ref:  Quote from a Puritan alpha-bet book
          'Old Adam' is, of course, the patrilineal portable progenitor
           & Plato's seven heavens, as always
          
------------------

 ...Moon pretends to stars' domain,
retires and dies, re-born again
as Brother Ass continually prepares his meticulous heshbon in     infinitessimal detail.
Soul the Butler presents, at moments of grace, familiar     opportunites like calling cards...

-----
"so we all sit around like dumb Indians..."

*look dumb
stay loose
and try not to swing before they pitch

------
Gotta play the cards you're dealt
can always pick up a few points
or find the combo to a jackpot.
Anyhow, can't play anyone's cards but your own.
-----
For every 'No' there exists
(somewhere in the universe of possibility)
a set of bullshit words
to overcome it;
-----
Don't ask for what you don't want
or more than you need;
and if They say yes
better take it.

   Ref:  #3 I heard from the Taos hippies, who got it from 
         the Indians.  Hence, I suppose, the Indians say
         "pray [petitionary prayers] quick" 

-----
Ridng back-seat on a BMW-500 doing 60
"If it ain't one thing, it's another."
-----
.p
To sleep through the cold
find a sleep-sack
to hide the clear sky;
won't wake much
until daybreak.

     :Happy Lonely Man

------------
In port at last
the boat bumps on the wharf, back and forth;
lights too bright, talk vapid....

--------
      
*In a shallow harbor

Too late, as usual
for afternoon repentance
he takes evening absolution
on the rocks
with a squeeze of lime.


.p
ASPECTS OF POVERTY

*Bewailing povery
awaken to birdsong --
summer daybreak.

(7/14/86 -- Ein Hemed)
-------------------------------------------------------------

*Some
things
seemingly take too much time
but
't ain't so much the heat as
the circuitious logistics of poverty.
     
------
*Supper of bread and garlic
my boss walks by and says
"Good appetite!" 

-----
A  banquet of praise from Generals and Ministers
leaves hungry troops unfed.
    (Binyane Ha'amuna, 5th Ann. Sar-El Celebration)
-----       
Poverty's curse is
not simplicty's virtues, but
comes from things that
like a waiter filled with rebuffs
defy being taken for granted;
e.g. W.C.
suddenly revaling itself to be
paperless.

-----
Some gifts last, perhaps, too long.  So, from the mountains ofSwitzerland to the rocky stones of the Dead Sea, often, in myeconomical sleeping bag, I wake and think of you, cheapskate.

-----
.P
AMUSING POEMS


"It don't do nothing
it just sets there"
Reilly the One-Eyed Cat
who should be out hunting
one-eyed mice....

-----
Dreamer, Awake

I:

Remembering all her mother taught her
she flies in on attack run
eavasively, aims for the head
      above the brow -- 
the mosquito I smeared on the whitewashed wall.

II:
Take what you need and be gone
Amale'ek or Baby Dracula;
why must you sustain my entire attention
with your interminable trivial agenda?

-----
*The feel of a swallow
from a warm dark
half-bottle of beer
in which a bee had been trying to swim
makes me long for home.
--------
Poem with prepositions

Snuck into the nahal
shoved a 3 1/2" shittim splinter up my leg
tugged it out
but the tip stuck in.
Doc cut it out;
set me back $130
less the $3 I saved   
when I snuck in.

----

.p
MISCELLANEOUS

On Seeing "The Color Purple" 

 with chopped noses or ironed hair
 and all our depressing successes.
 free at last to fight each other...

-----                      
*"The legend'ry Lawrence of Arabia"
reminisced the old gentleman
"once told me,
'Machine-gun everyone.'
"I enquired,
'Who shall do it?'
and he replied,
"You will.'
After which I ate a stout breakfast."

      (from a documentary on Jordanian TV).
-----
dazzling ingenuity at evading escue
moths I mean
I just meant moths; or maybe say
that castle I was going to build --
the cornerstones snuck away
-----

*In a Latin mode

Only at my poetry
not old affairs
do I look back now in admiration --
how well I spoke then
and how childishly we acted.
-----
.P
BLACK & WHITE KNIGHTS


Black Knight Errant

The scorpion in black hat & white gaiters
disguised having disguised, of course,
preferring stiletto calling-cards.
My own modest costume
stuck like super-glue;
the ineffable word, SHAZAM
remained unuttered.
-------

The Poet Precipitously Changes Lodgings

In th' good old days
if any
men were Knights and women girls because
we slew indubitable dragons --
patchwork demons pieced from one another.

---------
The Knight's excuses; he'd
anticipated, nay, trained for
a more
traditional dragon; something in scales breathing fire & the like
presumably; so rather
taken aback to confront
only a next-door neighbor waving
xeroxed lawyers lists & slavering over
no pale-skinned chained maiden
per se, but (enchanted perhaps)
merely a young wife in pumps & curlers, bouncing squalling baby
and trying to hide
her fear and herself
in a black-&-white maze
of television soaps.

-----

*The great white horse halts
mightily whinnying
gulping in air
and dreaming of water
while rider relaxes knees & reins
removes a mask, and rubs his brow:
"Shit," says the Lone Ranger,
"lonely night with no TV." 

(:White Knight off-duty)

-----
.p
I imagine ny French Dumpling
wearing white
mini-shorts & halter
entering Rehov Mea Sharim
like a jousting white knight

------------
*Embarassed by that uniform,
Superman regrets
his granted wish:
to masquerade
in blue-serge suit and tie
as Clark Kent.

------------


.p
 COLLECTED COMPLAINTS


Neutering

Against that longing which langorously 
writhes like an echo of sunset
between dark and sleep
and again, as intended dawn
soothingly conducts from the luxury of disembodiment
to the first affronts of the day,
              is
a reluctance to resubmit oneself 
to the intercourse of involvement;
  (a certain distaste to e.g. say
  those common-denominator cliches
  the sentries of intimacy expect
  before the sticky details and excuses after)
a protective fondness for too-long-nurtured
pet plants faults or habits
that, though harmless, really can't be taken out...
Inertia, that powerful ally in reserve
subtly afirms its residence;
one's reign remains.

-----
The Death of Half-'n-Half Man

Zeno, that mere man
of mathematic
paradox can't imagine
the consternation of the hare
he's doomed to do everything by halves
(or more precisely,
infinitely increment each intended act
and so, confined to finitude
forever find he can't get back)
Too, the secret terror of mind/body
is that the latter might, in stroke, strike.
     May I ne'er endure as baited bear
     in intensive care.
---
OK TSE, it's Apri againl    

Albeit  unpleasant
frostbite's endurable;
only thawing's excruciating,
a meticulous recollection
cell by cell,
of all that was lost.

---
.P


UNPACKING
                               
But after all those sun and rain-wracked days, blows of cold spray,found home only a Siren's song, out of place on Ithika.

-----

I cannot curse the city of Athens
more greatly than this:
'stay as you are.'

-----
*Boogie-Woogie Self-Destruct

Athens has so polluted itself
that its marble temples
turned gray from shame. 

	*Cf. Mondrian, "Broadway Boogie-Woogie"
	**  more precisely, from the reaction of iron impurities toauto exhaust.

----
Riddle of the Winged Sphinx of Delphi Solved

Though of a graceful woman,
soul soars as an angel
and she fucks like a lioness.

----
*Jew Posing as Exiled Roman
                        
Having, in imagination
myself most dutiflly flagellated
for all adducable errings
I find that I most regret
the costs of my few good deeds.
                                      
l7

            	for the Centennary of T.S. Eliot, O.B.E.

	                         "    "fifty lashes with a wet noodle."
l1

-----

*"Left me high and dry"
Skipper sailed off north.
Sailed off into the rain.
Glad I ain't out there.

      Sami, Kephalonia, Oct. 6, 1988

-----

relaxing into foreign chatter
birds before sundown.

-----
A group from Wales washed up on  the quay and lay there, in the sun.

                                                Sami, Kephalonia.
----
Before his behading
Ali Pasha drowned many concubines
in the lake of the city of Iannis
which, having killed the lake
now would send its pollution
downrive to the Islands of the sea.

-----
On reading too may eulogies of Byron

    "the Admirals quarreled, and the Turks laid siege"

old goat-foot Don Juan
how revellously they lament
now, your inept sacrifice
freed from final irony.

-----
*T.S.' B.S. Revisited

Bleinstein in knickers
but armed
with "Let's Go to Corfu"
I shamble past mopeds and all the goyim
come to do their thing
and blunder in front of the Old Synagog
built 1537, obsoleted 1941.
Only the names remain
on mistransliterated street-signs --
Solomou, Koen, Kaplou...

    Refs:  T.S. Eliot, "Beerbahm with a Baedecker, Bleinstein with a   	    Cigar"
     "Let's Go to Greece", 1988 p 206 (research by Ellen Goodman)

----- 

On leaving the Church of Santa Maria della Agneli, Lugano

They'll have him
  hanging out
    as usual
(Nazir striding the Galil)

-----
.p
X-RATED POEMS

To his Coy Mistress

Ah love you're like a pinball game,
all turned-on and a-light,
until we'd get it on, or in,
and then it's -- * *  T I L T ! ! * *  -- "Goodnight."

     Arroyo Hondo, ca. 1969; pub. Snowmen & Scarecrows

-----

*A Pornographic Movie

gives the Devil his due:
the set of sex sans residue
of love, and freed from complication
or art, angst, or even procreation.
 
----------
     Just so the Princess
      Grace of Porn
      gentles Scorpio's Unicorn.

l2

     Refs:  Marilyn Chambers was called "The Grace Kelly of Porn", GraceKelly became Princess of Monacco, Kenneth Anger made Scorpio Rising, and"The Taming of the Unicorn" tapestries depict the medieval legend that aunicorn can be tamed only by a virgin. Ok?  Get it?  Swell.
l1

-----

  ....wouldst, wanton, waste thy nature;s dower?
I even scored the pad for an hour
or two, maybe more
I can't afford or find a whore
It wasn't, was it, something I forgot?
     When you're hot you're hot
     and when you're not, you're not

--------
2 fragments utilizing colloquial cadences 

(imitation of snippet of Imitation of Prologue, Canterbury  Tales)

 " ...I perceive upon attending to mine own inflections
  that I am an itsy-bitsy tipsy;
  so if, from time to time,
  I stick my fucking foot in my mouth,
  you cocksuckers will, I prithee,
  o'erlook my lapsus linguae."   

----------------
Bullshit my epigrams "ain't even Juvenal"...

-----
X-rated cubism, Take 2

       "And so I give myself to him --
        society says I must.
        Damn society."
                from a poem by a Harvard College freshwoman

She "gave herself"
or, more precisely
whatever came to hand -- 
t's, a's, and the expected accessories.
Undressed but not naked nor nude
screwed in acceptable sport-gear.

-----
    
 Progress

Caligua's horse's ass            opp-osed    Romans
Ciciolina*                       con-fronts Italians 

*pornographic actress elected to the Italian parliament.
-----
 Fragments from an Imitation of Carmina Burana 


 ...Rex sedet in vertice -- caveat ruinam (Carmina Burana)
  ...alter in altem sequiter....

 ...ground round are all the minions
   another one is lofted up
   in a vulture's pinions...

 ...Let King Kong noblesse the throng
 Lotsa luck, Big Daddy 

------------
Imitation of Catullus 56

Oh Daddy-o dig it; no, it's too
outre and intricate  but
oh, anyhow 
to make the whole thing short
having happened to chance upon quim come
Bim Bam the Sandwich Man
unzipped & zapped buddy's bud.

-----

.p
PHILOSOPHICAL OBSERVATIONS

Candidly, it's
Pangloss after all
for all is most in order
as it all falls out
    Eureka! cries the suicide
    for falling past the 14th floor
    he's vindicating Newton's law.
-----
The Kindly Philosopher

"I'll kill myself; then they'll be sorry and give me what I want."
Nu; anyone can overload
     --  and today's smug sendoff?
Come back tomorrow
    -- you don't know where I'll be?
  Nu, nu; so hook your right forefingers in your bootlace
  & take just one step toward Heaven
  out of your Black Hole;
  they promise to do the rest;
  good luck and good b''ye.

------

*Hume's dam'd fallacy:
anything could always happen
or, if you prefer,
might never --
e.g., the gambler's creed
and consternation of bereaved.

-----

and Fat Larry said,
there is no problem too big
to run away from.
No challenge you can't sell out of;
no hand you can't play to win
   at least a few points;
and for every 'No' there exists
   somewhere in the universe
a set of bullshit words
to transmute it into a yes (that's Kaballah).

------------



.p
SECULAR SERMONS

On the Beach at Tel Aviv

Twit Eliot today;
text:  "April..." etc.:
   Buridan's Ass Prince Flip-Flop,
   impotent center of the Treasury of Options --
   -- dreaming olim 

L7
     Refs:  "When that Aprille" "is the cruelest month"
                Chaucer               Eliot
             Equidistant between 2 bales of hay, Buridan's donkey starves to death
             Prince Hamlet, that spoiled brat
             A binary circuit is called a flip-flop since it's either open (flip) or not (flop)
             My poem "In search...etc."
             -----
l1
A 10 AM Beer recalls Auden's wraiths, asking only a neutral space andhiatus in time. 
Not life's challenges but their disclaimable anonymity wracks me; eager to please but called only by equivocal echos, in a misted maze ofmirrors.

"A box --
	      a large cardboard box
                                                 to hide in."
         
-----
An automatic garbage disposal will, without garbage, chew itself:  feedyour monkey mind junk.

-----
Riff on a cliche

"Ships in the night"
dark upon dark
marked only by 3 lights
   red, green & white
   Christ's mast cross.
l7
Ref:  Navigation law requires a ship on the sea to display only three lights -- red on port, green on starboard (theseusually on the yardarm) and white on the top of the mast, to warn low-flying seagulls to do it in the sea.
--------
l1
*Each sunk in his own mind
looks up at other bodies passing by
suspiciously courteous.

------------
    Ref:  Cf.  Heraklitus, Fr.By1:  "Though the logos is common to all,    	     each acts as if he had his own understanding"
      
-----
Not clumsiness but honesty baffles the bull in the matador's maze
patiently trying to paw loose all his adversary's knots of sham
----

OBSCURED POEMS

    "on Rilke, who found living such a hassle
     he laid the bread to hang out in a castle..."
          (from: Ludwig Wittgenstein as "Don Juan")


Orpheus, of course
warned her not to look
but couldn't say
they'd told him not to speak.

Morning bird flying to day
on the blue-green line
between sky & ridge
crying down the yearning of heaven
for turned earth.

-----
.p
*Cubist Sirens' Song
l7

"Oh 
    Escape
into modalities of tings
  by escalator parameters
  to indifferent objectives
and everywhere
the abstract peace
   of a personalized value-free well-closed universe.

                                              "Forget
                                            et al., etc. -- e.g.:
 
                                                                    necessity of care-
                                                                    ings; incessant interdepend-
                                                                    dence; omnipresent heros                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         	                                                        and all your watchful, reproachful dead.
                                                                    
                                                                    The wistful disillusionment of betrayed lust
                                                                    Magpie echos of a squandered mind
                                                                    Futility of re-re-re-re-re--repealed vows
                                                                    Too much unanswerable longing
                                                                    Sadness of abandonned nostalgia
                                                                    Obtuseness of tools, these too
                                                                    and too, too many says of self-condemnation."
                                                           
l1
                                                            but
the mythos lied;
it isn't as they say:
the Sirens are chained,
we drift away.                                                         
.p



FROM THE REALM OF THE MYSTO-CREEPY

*Flip-Flop Song

at 'sixes and sevens'
or 'sevens and sixes'? it
mixes me up
whichever it is &/or ought
to be or Akiva:  if it don't matter
and you can't decide
go back;
water flowing over alabaster
will wait.

    Ref:  Zohar?  "If you come to a place...."etc,
-----
the second-hand sugar-plum fairy
works miracles ineptly;
delivers the goods, but nothing quite fits

----- 
Ok, ok, 1 more Sermon:

When Van Gogh
entered Heaven
he said,
"Oh shit,
what did I shoot myself for?"

Our poor confused dead,
under house-arrest, at last
by one's own summation                         
Last Judgement by a pocket adding machine.

They try to call back to us
to tell us they must "go away"
and say good-bye
we can't hear, don't believe, won't listen

I have heard from the Wise:
that Heaven & hell then are right here
there's no fairy-tale world to go away to
and the shit in one's own nest
turns to perfume very slowly.
They contradict each other, I think.
.a5
Little Joe said:
    "dead don't need our prayers"
    "you only get one"
    and
    "know what they'll find when they get to the Moon? -- dead Indians"

The Indian kids sing:
      "lots of spirits buzzing round my head
       make me glad that I ain't dead"
and walk down by the stream to make love.
-------------------------

a bewildered child in a a world of complacent pygmies
--------------- 

*Sinner expecting demons

HST OK'd
the A-Bomb drop and
"slept like a baby" but
ever after
wouldn't go anywhere,
saying,
"When they want me, they'll come and get me"

          from an article in the New York Sunday Times Magazine 
-----
FROM THE WISDOM OF  RABBI KORACH:

Wrapped in a sanctified negligee,
he rises from the wet embrace of drooling sleep. 
----------------------------------------------------------------

.p
SURVIVORS AND GERMANS

Bully-boy breakage
don't grow grass

    Cf. Jesus, "Which of ye by taking though..."

-----

*Quickly the Germans ruined everything
the Jewish bride would ever have
so three times a day
the old lady triple-locks her door.

-----

*Mark- and mock- ed by German tourists
the prosperous old Yiddishe lady at the Dead Sea Spa
discreetly stuffs leftover
  bread eggs cheese and fruit and a few napkins etcetera
into her handbag.

-----
*A Poem in German

Disappointingly, the stupid
most diversifiedly tortured etc. children
could to their perversedly evil desire
not be introduced;
their eyes said only
'we would have wished for nicer lives'.

-----                                                    

The Poet Visits Iniquity

Rosh Hodesh Av '47
I almost forgave Germans
for being German:
in gesture reconiliationus
stole a camper's can
that said 'HEILEGEFRUHSTUCK'
but the fine print read "Schweinfleish'
so I put it back;'
for another generation.                      
l7
 
   Refs:  Bible:  "...visiting iniquity unto the 3rd & fourth generation...."
           Tanya:   but we are forbidden to emulate the Attribute of Din.
l1
-----
.p
 
50 Germans overland from Nuremberg have come
to holy Phalestine.
Nu? Penitents on hands & knees?
    Pilgrims with staff and sandals?
No....
    Tennage tourists in a SuperAutoBus
     that passes Shabat ------ train autobahn opposing lane. 
We can't forget, must not forgive;
they won't admit
our German version of Original Sin --
universal inherited guilt, unexpiatable
but by grace of our whim.
These innocent children
enamoured of the frogs they killed
expect their tea and jam.

      Bet Zayit Campground, mid-August 1987
------ 
.p

*from SELECTED MEDIOCRE LONGER POEMS:  April Fool's Song

On the Terrace of the Hebrew University Faculty Club
uninvited, I sip imitation Vermouth
this mild summer evening
and contemplate, far below
the fairy-tale veil
of mercury- sodium- -vapor glares
disguising all the old stone walls
as only the caterwauling factioned blares
recall the frantic ancient feuds
that wait for daylight to resume.       
------
.p

*Sitting, I suspect, opposite
the old family hotel
blown to rubble 36 years ago,
at a table for 4 --
what ghosts invited me today?

     Cafe Nash, 10 Ben Yehuda St., 9/21/86

-----
Gems, I'm told
hold it
within poker-faced facades --
-- an irrepressible exhuberance of light --
Inherited trash makes opaque walls
hard to polish.
-----
         *
       t h e
    3---in---1
S   T  O O G   E S
SUPPORT        OUR
P A N    T H E O N
mudhead deities who
see     say   &  be
NO             EVIL.

-----------
l6
           
-----
*
t h e
3---in---1
S T O O G E S               SUPPORTOUR
P A N T H E O N             mudhead deities who         see say & be                NOEVIL.

----------------------------
l1

-----


.P
IMITATIONS OF POEMS BY MAVRA'S SISTER IN HAIFA, after Mavra'stranslation:

Ain't seen dawn, yet
some chick down hall up all
night with
my G-d

I
ain't
even seen the light but
boyfriend split me for an angel...

I've not heard a sound
though somebody
who sold his soul for rock 'n roll
's caterwauling damn pandemonium catastrophes.

breath sea
feel sand
enjoy discoursing voices
oh, the blue light

congregation of birds
responds "boker tov".

-----

So we're only our own favorite snapshots,
but, having coming back, we believe in the softness of our shared game.
Trying to bring you things, I discover you were for me.
Trying to solve you, I fall into our double secret.

------

to give
to let you see
to see
to let you know
to know
to let you see

sat exhausted
before your heart
my new home

------
.p
FRAGMENTS & LEFTOVERS
LEFTOVERS

Pa- and Ma- -familias 
can straighten everything out
in anyone else's house.

-----
That 
stray cat
that
(admittedly, it's starving)
jumps
onto the table to steal my cheese
ignored my charitable bread.
-----
*Occasionally to sketch in a few clear strokes some minor useful act...
-----

From one perspective, it's
quintessence of obsessiveness --
searching for cookie crumbs by candlelight...

----------
One is indispensable only insofar as they are too dumb to realize it.
----
.a4

Thrysamachus and his impeccable revenge again:
duly repaying favors,
but happily shafting anyone
who happends to step on his toes.
-----

Home is a place in nostalgia, not space
--------
haredi and horrid indeed

-----
Touch and Go

Touching lightly on life now
in only the community of ideas

--------
.p

REGURGITATED POEMS

A Brief History of Empiricist Epistemology

King Henry's unwedlocked, barrel to stock

at length they ask LOCKE
from yesteryear's Kissinger this answer comes
and for 200 years pedants prance to its drums

Light
comes in the 
I   YOU     SEE


(though mons veneris
dominates more primitive eras)


a Titan or turtle, the ancients say
held the world on his shoulder;
Hume, bolder


but where             think
will we be if he blink?

   "The unblinking Eye must sustain us, I see
    cries the Bishop, for surely sustained we be"

 ................................

.p
Delia contemplates Kant's Third(?) Antinomy

When as on wings of thought I fly
to the edge of the universe, bye and bye
and stop, at some imagined boundary
what do I see?  Friend, that's my quandry.

 ...
I posit a telescope, 10 cents a peek

 ..................................-
(from 33 variations)

home to mother a-smother in love
and dis course on what that's really of:
"I'm beset by a drake, 
he won't slaken his makin'
unbearable; id est, a pest."

-----
.p
IN THE GOOD OL' ***U.S. of A****

TEYAZAS DIP-THWONGS

Forebearance, poor Clarence; 
that ostenatious Austin Texas wench's outrageous;
this Fu Machu, our foe-man, Chou,
may come and go;
and so to Juarez, where the whore is....

-----             
Aspects of the American Way:  Capital Punishment

Perhaps it
(- 'exquisite obscenity'? -- 'catastrophic irrelevance'?)
's encapsulateable
in ("another demned") poem:
with attentive indifference
to put another
raging with "lust for life"
or humbled as an old cow
to death....

-------------
News Item:  October 1988, Nashville

3 stacked women in a car
sang bluegrass to Bush, who said:
"Ah thought ah'd diyed ahnd gone to heav'n."
Respectively, apparent & unlikely.

-----
Shuttle Diplomacy

Rising, the great plane circles
and the USA Secretary of State
sits down on the can:
with favorable winds
he may grace 3 capitals.

-----



American Identity Crisis

Yossi Bellin's
Peres' poodle;
who are you?


                                                     SADYA PRESS
                                                   Kibbutz Ein Kesef
                                                   Forest of Shemen
                                                   April 11, 1989  

 