;.cSelected poems 5/95-6/96
;.l1,6,60,66,1,0,10,80,192,2,15,20,25,127,10,0,
;.l6,1,90,192,2,15,20,25,127,1,1,

BLAUE REITER, USW...










SELECTED POEMS, 6/95-6/96


                                             sa, Haon







                                             






			"Once was a love turned his head around ... "
                            Few Good Friends, Abode 12125, (1976)
.p
.h2, -- clopclop... 


































The Philsopher at Work in his Study:  A Self-Portrait




Sits 4 hours
twiddling his fingers
Starts up
stalks to the Pantry
announces:
"NOBODY LOVES A CHUTZPADIKE MOUSE!"
Walks back
sits down
twiddles his fingers
four more hours.






--------------------------------------------------------------
.p
============================================================== = =

*"The Shadow knows"
or so supposes.
"The Shadow knows the Shadow's nose."

	Refs: "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men" etc.
          Introduction to radio serial, "The Shadow", USA early 50s
            2nd quote by Frank Purcell of Cambridge Massachusetts.
            Cf. JC on the 2 x 4 
---------------
#
*Trying to build a wall 
Gotta use the stones we got.
So many broken & shattered.
Must be good for something.                  

-----------------
#
*Once I stayed by myself
one night
in a cabin half way up the mountain
and heard the wind.
	Sometimes I unplug the telephone
	and try to get back there.

------------------
#
*I looked up from the starting blocs
at the stands
& said Hell, they ain't going nowhere
might's well walk.

------------
#
*run far enough
might's well set down
& head for the past

---------
#
	
From the Book Maven:

they never told me
that when you get older
it's only the body.

--------------------------------------------
.p
#

Every morning
I send out 100 letters
telling the world what to do.
Every afternoon
I get back 2 replies
inviting me to subscribe
to TIME and Newsweek.

	Harry Truman said,
	Ike's in for a a surprise:
	he'll give lots of orders
	and they won't do nothing.

-------------------------------------------------------
#

Freemasonry Rampant

The gremlins, Sir, conspire
to hide things
from me:  little things
-- eg words --
for they are little demons.

--------------------------------------------------------
#

My dreams, Sir
lie; there I
saw my face
as in a mirror.

----------------------------------------
#

Only that he'd not
expected the dragon
dropped  in for cocktails,
temporarily obscuring (w' sulf'rous breath etc.)
certain developing subtlties of dialectic.

----------------------
#

*I find myself, a bit annoyed
on a slow forenoon, 'fore my door to the V
                                            O
                                               I
                                                 D
                                                   .
                                                     .
                                                       .
                 devil take it; still bustle to be done.         


---------------------------
#
'twas muddlesome blather
rather: 'lived happily ever after-
all'; all
my fault we 
didn't;  anyhow who does?

----------------
#
after Feifer

I was honest:
I said: 
I won't pretend to be grown up
until I grow up.
	Nothing to do now but fake it.

----------------
#

A rather dramatic
one acter, admittedly,
but not much plot; just
one, borrowed
that needs, like any public nuisance, 
(eg being born),
redemption;
too,
why remember 
everyone
for the one thing
they most regret?

------------------------------------------------
The Apotheois of Deconstructionism                       

 The fashion of the day demands
 entropy from open hands:
 a gentleman ought, just as well
 pity the lonely cancer cell.

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

Nobody loves a clumsy villain.
Reagan, eg, walked with unfaltering step
belovedly
into Alzheimer's hell.
Imagine, in contrast
The Black Knight of the Joust
played by Woody Allen.

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

#
*The picture-postcard 
digitalized 
river
is better than real
missing only mist.  

------------
HICKS NIX STICKS PICS; "YOU MIGHT AS WELL LIVE"

The elders of the Eskimoes
split the Styx on iceberg floes

------------       
================================================================
.p
HOW TO PICK APPLES [Repeat]

If you know
where you will be
when the bough breaks
and when that bough breaks
where you will be
then
you can pick apples.
                               
                          (ca. '64)
-------------------------------    
ADVICE TO BASKETBALL PLAYERS

If someone's closer
pass
If you're closest
shoot.
                          (? '80s?)
------------------------------------
ADVICE TO BASEBALL PLAYERS

Don't swing
till they pitch.

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

ADVICE TO CROSS-COUNTRY RUNNERS

Who's behind
ain't what counts.

--------------------------------
ADVICE TO YACHTSPERSONS

When you're done
put everything away
before you go home.

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

THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF BROTHER ASS

My donkey
used to take me anywhere
easy as the wind.
Guess he musta got older:
one  day I heard him saying
Hey buddy
you carry me now.

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




.p
==================================================================
THE REVENGE OF BLEINSTEIN WITH A BAEDAEKER BOOMBERSHOOT

#
*Lines written to J.W. Black

all dead or mad
at me now.
Muse, let's drink

Saint Bogart protect us
from sleav'd heart

Oddly, everyone
wants it --
just a little piece
of something real

Truckdrivers' tora's:
Lots of gears;
learn to downshift.

	Hearts & diamonds
	didn't really want to fracture

                                       Ionian Star
                                        Venice Port
                                        9/13/95

---------------------------------------------
*From a Harvard College Travel Guide

	"It ain't over till it's over."
                                     Attributed to Yogi Berra

Saint Mark,
the retroactivated patron saint of Venice,
was planted in Saint Mark's Plaza
having been by his devotees 
smuggled out of Alexandria
under a very large load of pork.

-------------------------
.a2
*"The sky will get him by and by"  (Millay)

As I from grotto'd nymph did fly
(a bit involuntarily)
a gypsy camp I did espy
and thought: `I'll get there bye and bye.' 
The roadside trail did sweetly smell
of island herbs and gypsy turds --
        Quandry:   Boundary.
I thought again: 'Might just as well
go chug a beer at my hotel.'                       
                    (Kefalonia, 9/95) 

---------------------
#
beside a rich man
eating stale bread
how poor and rushed my evening's feast

----------------                                           
#

Beverly said,
To be Indian
means I can't even walk 
from my tipi 
to the privy
without being surrounded 
by spirits.

                                       Qumran, Adar 96

    "lots of spirits buzzing round my head
     make me glad that I ain't dead"
                       popularized Indian song

----------------------------
#

If that turkey
wasn't born to get my goat
why doen't somebody
kick him out of my movie.
==================================================================
.p
STORY OF MY LIFE, CONTINUED:

#
Family Traditions:

"The lobster
 said my Grandmother
 visiting in Maine, 
"is not a Jewish fish."
 
My mother contemplated
       the image
 of a lobster with kippa
        negated.

----------------------------------------------------------
#                                     
"and just when we get her fixed up
 he comes back
 picks her up
 and drops her on her head again."

                  (?) Vicky Woskoff, Oberlin, ca. 1958

--------------------------------
#
after a remark by Shrager

One day in Berkeley
in the mail
got 2 grams of mescaline sulfate.
Customs sticker said
'No value'.

------------------
#
One afternoon she got out of bed
& said
I want to add something to someone's life, not take something away.

------------
#
Susie Harrison said,
I always knew "someday my prince will come"
and he did 
and now it's 
             Steve.

------------------
.p
#
Nostalgic Elderly Gentleman

She'd always declined
69
One day maybe
but I changed my mind.
She said,
Oh
I thought this time
we were really going to to do it.

--------------------------------
#

impatiently, I honk
behind a woman
driver
in a van
whose bumper-
-sticker's
"Happiness is
 coming."

-------------------
*My aunt smoked cigarettes
it got her kicked out of prep school
& halfway to the grave
When she went for a triple bypass
she said, Go for it.

Every afternoon
when the sun was over the yardarm
she and my uncle
drank like gentlemen fish
and fought like roosters.

One day she kicked the bucket;
so we rushed down to her house
and drank the last of her booze.
                                   Didn't taste as good.

Her neighbor told me:
at a time like this
it's better to have a wife.

----------
#
One upon a time
I joined the army
& flipped out.
Breindel said,
                 "They shouldn't put poets in the army."

---------
#         
Putting on a used denim jacket
just bought
I miss the lined new Levi jacket
I wore 30 years ago.

                        :And now the news you've been waiting for

--------------------                                             
#
On listening to a Beattles' retrospective:

    "Nothing gets better with age except a pig"
                           Reb Nachman

*Reflected in the follies of my past
my present follies.

------------------
.p
HOLY LAND ROCK 'N ROLL
#
*
My dog chases chickens.
Whenever I walk by
the chickens all say,
Here comes that dog.

----------------------------- 
#
The Chief of Police races by
with submachine gun
on a bicycle
persued by my part-time dog
and his private puppy.

----------------------------
#                                   
It is a dull but comfortable world
according to the Chief of Police
's superannuated
   absent-minded
   fat black dog.
Sometimes
a propos nothing
addressing, now,
only the universe
he barks, at length
definitively.

-----------------------------------
l1
#

Member of the Freir's Club

The cat walks in
salutes the mouse
jumps up on the table 
& eats my cheese.
The dog defends me
against lesser dogs
& keeps me well-supplied
with fleas.

----------------------
.p
#

*Behind the red mine sign
red poppies.

                  Golan, Tu B'Shvat 96

---------                   
#

Playing porno disco
the Egged driver stops
the bus
to accommodate
a lady's
child
who pooped in his pants.

---------------------------------------------------------------
#
*
After 5 years
a letter:
	Please find sponsor
	to produce play
	about growing up Jewish
	and female.
 
'   		Reply by E-Mail 
                   please.         

------------------------------------------------------------
#
Just about the time
Tora's coming down
Disco starts up.
Might's well nap.
Read all about it the morning.

			6 Sivan, HaOn

----------------------------------------------
===============================================================
.p
NEWS ITEMS

#
 from a TV documentary

The President of the Jewish University of America's 
elegant old lady
once flew to the land of Israel,
stood up in Zion Square,
told us to give back half
& flew home.


-------------------
#
News Items:  Jlem Rpt 07/13/95 & passim

The Tyrant of Damascus
is reportedly a man of his word
and (no Hamlet he) 
can be decisive:
  eg 
one day
he killed 20,000 citizens.

In a holy day in '73
his merrie men sent he
to the top of yon snow-capped mountain,
where they tied the cooks' hands
cut off their cocks 
and went home.

	When the most powerful men in the world
	come to chat with him
	in his delicate archairs
	they don't dare get up
	to piss.

-----------------
#
News item (Jlem Post Travel Supplement, 1 FEB 96: China World Hotel,Peking)

Dining in China
Americans may contemplate
the Statue of Liberty
as a Four-foot Sculpture
carved 
       in 
           lard.

--------------
.p
#
Lesser Prometheus 

        "he hates him, would rack him to this world"
                              (King Lear, last act)

Whose great-breasted doxy
lately splayed
on daily privy pages
now, racked
is guarded incessantly from rest
by a sleepless company of quarrelsome physicians.

	                               (Pappendreou, autumn '95)
-----------
#
                    After Shabbat, Before Bedtime

Rambo
antiseptically 
zips 
a dozen drug-runners.
Yesterday afternoon
in Malta
two secret agents on a motorbike
zapped a terrorist.
And  
                                I
ruthlessly
squish a cockraoch.

----------------
#
Shabbat PLO vote
atop the air-raid tower
a crow caws
 
                		1/20/96

--------------
.a2
*A Jew in the Morning, Before opening his Bookshop 

I went to see the Incident
to get as close as I can
I was a Defensive Guard:
confronted, 100 yards away,  with a stone wall
I jumped up and grabbed it
finding, beneath my hand
a bit of flesh
which I gave to chevre Kadisha
and washed my hands.

                           26.02.96
                           Jerusalem

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

#
*week begins with a bang again
Cassandra, duitifully
shleps herself back to the looney bin.

                             02 MAR 96
                            :Heretics' Monast'ry

---------------
#

*Passing, this morning, a cemetary,
I think `Well, they're safe.'

                             March 5, 1996

--------
##
*
Clinton talks
Bus driver listens
Talks on
Shuts it off
"Shmegeg."
              3/20/96

-----------------------
l6
#
The pursuit of happiness

before breakfast
the usual Katuyshas
drop in on Kiryat Shemona.

Around the Sea of Galilee
maidens
         are weaving
                      in bathing briefs
                                         on bicycles
                                                      amdist an endless chain

                                                                               of autos.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
l1
#
Citizen soldier:

We bomb Lebanon.
I decide to buy a mousetrap.
We kill 100 civilians.
Ruthlessly
I cut down vines.

                     19.04.96  

-----------------------------------------
#                                 
Daily News 14 May 96

"Yeshiva Student Killed in Bet El Attack." 
Yesterday he was alive.
Now he ain't.
Just like that.

------------------------------------------------
#
5/30/96

Look up at the Golan.
Well, reckon it 
ain't going nowhere.

--------------------------------------
=================================================================

.p
SENTIMENTAL REGICIDES 

#

3 small lead shots
make marble Caesar forever
who had otherwise lived on 
to die slowly
a broken fool

                11/05/95

---------------
#
*Ever higher climbs old Caesar
on usurp'd honors
yet none so greatly so
as the manner of his death.

---------
Really, he was a likeable old bastard and larger than life, but we weretoo busy hating to notice.  He will be missed.

----------
# 
First clear clouds of autumn
he's in the ground now
Left 2 days too soon.

                        11/06/95

-----------
#
Poet on a plastic white horse 

This fretful, faltering night
I'd envy even soldiers
guarding against, at least
identifiable enemies.

------------
#
*the cry of a sleeping child
in a too-still night

----------
#                  
*As if one had fallen
into a movie of stills
by Chirico
people walk past each other
without speaking.

-----------
.p
#
THE CONSERVATION OF INCONGRUITY

on that most historic autumn eve
I
making like a potatoe
was watching TV
Dundee
2
she
                      the overage ingenue
was hanging on a line
her bra
                 of white lace
as his chest filled with blood
O harpies of Babylon!
ever will I yearn
   for that severed revelation.    

------------
#
CONSEREVATION OF INCONGRUITY, TAKE 2:
I was watching Crocodile Dundee 2.  It was just past the point whereshe hung her bra upon the trees.  I shall long regret not seeing theend of that movie.  It was a white-lace bra.

-------
===============================================================
.p
===============================================================
ARS POETIORUM

What depends upon
that rained-upon wheelbarrow 
of Dr. Williams'
is just the delivery
of one small load 
of cowpies.

--------
#
*Doing the best I can.
From a bucket of coloured building blocks
you expected maybe the Taj Mahal?

----------------
#
foxes sit in the sun
but before I finish sketching 
     turn tail                                      take trail

-------------
#
" honesties turned to bile by the necessity of translation"
                                      Carl Shrager

Glimpsed an enchanted fish,
lunged & netted it 
but in light of air
it had turned into an unusual sock
for my private collection.

                              (after a remark by PVK 7/94)

-------------------
l6
#
*
Shrager at 18 again:
OK drinking water.
I still can't even re-invent
plastic Pepsi-Cola

                      :Old Dog Blue with the Bayou Blues
                                                            3/96, Ein Gedi
------------------------------                             
L1
#
*
If you don't like the taxi
blame the Auto-Dispatcher.
I'm just the Logbook.

--------------------------
==============================================================

LESSON FROM RED CROSS JUNIOR LIFESAVING  

If you see someone drowning
run into the water
crawl out FAST!
head up,
and then stop 
                at arm's length
                                   and discuss the situation.

No sense losing two.
                     
                                    96.30.01
--------------
#
She flips,
I'm mad:
chutzpa -- 
everyone wants to.

------------
#
*Haladol phone call:
tete-a-tete w/ telegraph.

---------
#
**Rinata's Family History

On a scale of 1 to 10
my mother wasn't
and her mother was worse:
an iron lady
who could look right through you
with ice cold eyes              
that she got in Siberia
after being dug out of the blizzard
which killed her brothers.
She was a midwife witch
with a bedraggled foxhead
for my mother's inheritance
who put in on our sofa.
We were poor then
but once a week
we all ate fried pig fat
because we were survivors.

-------------
.p
PROSE
#
*Cicero in the Bath

Life is the only boring activity from which a rational gentleman withno pressing obligtions cannot retire in a graceful and orderly fashion.

---------------   
==================================================================
#
*When heaven gave out the brains, all the Israelis pushed to the frontof the line; so then only one was left for all the other people of allthe other nations.  It was awarded by the heavenly court to theGermans, because they said,  `We only need one.'

-----------------
#
*He spent his life in rehearsal for walking off-stage.

-----------
#
*A sad thing of growing older is the realization that there may not be,at least for a number of sub-plots, a happy ending.

-------------
#
Nature offers respect even if it kills you; hell is a furnished roomabove a disco.

-------------
.p
OBJECTS TROUVEES


#
Lines ammended on the MTA


Castrate

RapistsRabbits
Women will winRabbits shan't

-------------------------
#
Other Voices, etc.

Lesser devils
do Purgat'ry
as Lit'ry Crits
crude but true
eg
He'd writ   
                                 'I   love      you'
& sadly she 
                                 'I   you       too'
He                               'Why go        home'

To which the Wit's Amen          'So Daddy can  do U. 

 ----------------------------------------------------
#
*
"... be wily as serpeants,"
 advised Snake.

                (after Mailer, eg:  "I never scored
                                     said Snake."
                       in Deaths for the Ladies & Other Disasters
----------------
================================================================
l1
.p
MORE:  FROM WHOM CAN WE LEARN
#
"Yup, nope, that's not it."

                      Steve Keyes, Antioch, 1965

---------------------------
#
*
Justin Case said,
I always say good morning.
I figure everybody
deserves a good morning.

-----------------------------------------------------------
================================================================== 
l1

Don't grab
in the Fall
at a cat
up a tree
for then
when you call it
it sits
Siamese
'tween the leaves.


                              :"Speak, Memory"

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

not,
frankly Sir
sure
why this  should
afflict me
'aging' they say;
but I 
was never old --
Lesser deities
must be
temporary tresspassers:
they'll soon be shown out.

       : Intimations of Immortality

[pre clopclop]
------------------------

Polite plastic vulture

I don't say times are tough
but today's mail
was an organ-donor card.

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





