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 nowMortality....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.
*
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
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