A nightmare on Jay Street...

So many dreams.... so little peace....so late...so many poems demanding voice.......How can I sleep?????

                                   I am without relativity...
                                   For me the world moves
                                   not like the streetcars
                                   in some distant fantasy
                                   or legend passed on among
                                   an agnostic elite
                                                            (eager
                                   to find God in the equations
                                   they've scribbled hastily across
                                   the face of an impassive universe)
                                   
                                   but like a song
                                   whose mathematics sing to the
                                   beauty of the mind
                                   and for the joyous posture of those
                                   declared unfit and dressed
                                   in the loose fitting garments befitting
                                   apostate lovers of God.

                                                        *
                                  "If God made the bee,
                                    the wasp is surely
                                    a creation of the devil"

                                    If there is nothing more to fate
                                    than the prophesy of a broken mirror
                                    then the devil has had his way, for
                                    I was never the loving child of God
                                                                       (as I pretend)
                                    but then, I am never as I pretend;
                                    so why do I continue to sweep away
                                    the broken glass.....
                                    undoing fate with a lie.

                                                         *

                                    The rabbis speak of two windows,
                                    one faces east, dispersing the shadows
                                    cowering in that uncertain space
                                    between morning and night.
                                    The other, pasted over with yesterdays
                                    headlines declaring war and screaming
                                    improprietously of whores yet to be stoned,
                                    reveals little of the world beyond.

                                    At times, a path leads between the two
                                    deceptive in its simplicity, the geometry of
                                    convergent planes offering clear answers
                                    and drawing life from its occasional inhabitants
                                    who will soon tire of its clarity and
                                    once again long for the wisdom
                                    of their discarded sages.

There, I feel better already!!!!!!  Don't know where they come from, but they bubble and churn up from within, demanding expression...So for now,  I have fulfilled my obligation as scribe to those insistent forces  that allow me no peace.  So hopefully, for today anyway,  "to sleep, perchance to dream".

                                                      Pablo,  guerrilla poet

Insomnia...

Its 2:25 on January 17, 2001 and I can't sleep, for a change.  Nothing new for me.  It has not been an issue on the blog thus far, and why should it be, who cares.  Been laying awake thinking about turning older next month and all the things I've done and haven't completed  that need to be put in order or they will not exist (or by extension neither will I) , just in case.  Just the right thing to be putting your mind at rest when you are already wide awake with a  head full of random stuff, just bouncing around in there.  Got me thinking about this guy who was kind of tracing his Jewish roots (an effort in futility I can tell you, unless you will settle for the biblical version with a few thousand years of silence in between, then pick it up when our grandparents made a hasty exodus out of Jew hating eastern europe to the lower east side of NYC where life was barely tolerable but there was no one out to kill you for killing christ.)  Anyway, he found and traveled to the village where his grandparents lived before coming here prior to WW2.   After asking around, he found that there were only a few old surviving Jews, one of whom was this 80+ year old woman who was glad to see him and invited him in, but could fill in none of the blanks he was looking for regarding his ancestors.  While talking to her, he noticed a grave stone in her house with Hebrew inscriptions on it.  When he asked about it, she said she had no idea whose it was or what it said, but stated that she intended to have it placed over her grave when she died.  But its not yours!!! exclaimed the visitor.  What difference does it make said the old woman, nobody will be able to read it anyway.  I loved that story when I first read it years ago and for me it remains a metaphor for our transcendent yiddisha neshuma in spite of all odds.
Mortality....insomnia...life...immortality... yiddisha neshuma...sleep....but hopefully not quite yet...the dreams...where do they come from?

                                                                 *

                             In the morning you come to me
                             and tell me of your dreams,
                             at first slowly
                             in the measured words of a child
                             uncertain of his first confession
                             but soon the devils find their tongue
                             and transport you...
                             no longer does the morning light
                             soft and pale green through lace
                             play in your eyes
                             which have turned the color of death
                             as your ashen lips twist
                             and struggle to expel the demons
                             which have recently come to inhabit
                             your waking hours.

                                                                 *

                             Its hard to go home, just now
                             where the smell of death still lingers...
                             a droning dirgelike lament, puddled in the
                             grease stained corners of Hell's Kitchen and
                             plush Persian rugged hallways of Park Row,
                             acid eating away at the smooth, lacquered
                             veneer of denial.
                             A caustic presence etching madness
                             into the memory of those
                             who can still recall warm summer
                             rain washed nights, children running wild
                             barefoot through oily torrents of
                             Eighth Avenue runoff...
                             soaked and screaming headlong into a neon
                             nighttime endless dream of dark eyed girls
                             whose moist forbidden pleasures blinded us
                             to the possibility that we would one day
                             grow up to preside over the "Death and Transfiguration"
                             of all that we once held sacred and holy.

                                                  Pablo the gutter rat