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Nat Lipstadt Apr 19
Ah, Mesdames et Messieurs!
you 99% who number themselves
in the know-it-all category, the
largest subspecies of human animal,
fail to appreciate the vast eternal plan
that flexes & fluxes with gravitational
pulls and pushes, sunspots unpredictable,
can you ever predict the AM headlines?
have you checked your bank balance today?
always look both ways when crossing a one
way street, twice, just to be somewhat sure?
have you told you loved ones dryly and
routinely of your affections after every text,
emai, and even the most dreaded phone call
(tyou borrowed the car and left the tank on E)?

you’re an A+ student, prom queen, a cheerleader,
a high school football star, till you wrench that
knee because you were too busy admiring yourself
in the reflection of your selfie and didn’t notice
the open grate, the potholes or the orange cones
that appeared overnight, a cause for fright delight,

thank you so much for providing he fodder for this
pink sapphire of a poem, and please continue to
forget to utter your morn prayer to whatever God,
you entrusted your soul while sleeping, cause G. is
smirking at all the fun mishaps planned on today’s
agenda!

Is
you zipper open?
your blouse on inside out?
your metro card in the wallet
of your best friend who forgot
to return it?
What! you forgot bout the cheshire
grin on the Biology Prof’s face, when
he said “Anytime, Anyplace, surprise quizzes
are graded at 0, if you should  fail to appear at
your 8:00am class…

ah well, check your sneaker laces, try to recall
why that string is tied to your index finger or
take you chances of random probability that
having read this missile missive you’ve already
messed up and be careful our there, there are
very dangerous natalino poet~prognosticators
out there ready, william and able to take advantage
of  idiots who fail to be properly superstitious!!!

Salt, anyone?
tapping the well
Nat Lipstadt Apr 17
the good old nights^

roam the recesses and the abscess of
our too small apartment in the the very
large, very long, very inescapable wee wee
hours of the dark session of the day, lifting
my tablet to inscribe/ reorder/ recorder her/
this one more in my personal history, with
rant, word elixir, a note to our plural selves,
thinking of English gardens drinking up my
water freshly flowing and flying to you, via
nighty nite storm clouds, or your rural falls

and white clouds cumulus do  not return, and I too,
as my mind ***** and slugs but all attempts to
pierce the walled in somber slumber FAIL.

The creative comes besty beast like when I am driven from my dreams to wakealate (dream+speculate with eyes open)
dream of our realities and the tv (she never
remembers to program to shut down), drones
on about some product with XL in the name
that will make the unsleeping walkers feel
so much-better.

but not, not us, for we turn exploratory and
listen to the humming, beeping, tiny little diodes
of Joseph’s colored coat, all the mini stimuli,
the lights that mark the modern blacker hours
of rhythm, even those who can’t dance, can sleep,
‘cept for me, for I am a tune disturbed, needful of
minding, all these a rhythm busters ghosting me,
as a prelude to a poem vision now freshly etched
on my mind and now upon your flesh, an animation,
of reanimated images of ancient statues, ancient
advertisements for fertility, the dream continuum
of our lives, beyond our clearly demarcated time
line, the human, gene based need to outlive our
bodies in-the bodies of our progeny are a recurring
motif…female fecundity,  statues, many cracked or
missing limbs, come to life and move around, wailing
with grief and anger and hope and desire

alas, alas, another ole good time night ramble,
amidst familiar places and new abscesses,
and I wonder, how am I writing this when both
hands cover my face, and yet I still envision?

Tuesday Apr 16
3:08am
(the year escapes me,
for notions of big times
are measured in multiples
of I can’t remember)
^ there was a time in my life that many years I woke in the middle of the night and wrote furiously. Less often these days, but nonetheless, the Devil *** angel ***  Genie comes, to remind me, who is the boss of me
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/16/arts/design/israel-pavilion-venice-biennale.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Nat Lipstadt Apr 18
Dig deep poet;
You too reader;

Commandment One:

Both must obsess to possess,
Air the curvature of each line
shape with two hands, creasing and
no ceasing not till the air waves have filled
your flushed face with compressed comprehensions

You weep as you compose!
Good!
The well of tears where hid
the pool of emotions
in cavernous reservoirs
in the center of your
gravity,
needs a daily tapping,
a draining, a purification,
a quenching sweet and
raucous

where you dig, salted water will come

in the soiled, imperial but imperfect body/mind cappuccino,
there are swirls of treasures, sins and histrionics
that need discovery, expiation, expulsion,
when~then, object is surgically removed,
accept surging water will desoil,
and you can revel
in the revelation
of honest effort

Debate Commencement:

reveal, which, what and how
much, how much? how much?
(this reverbs)
what must be shared,
what must be reburied,
what must be refuted,
what must be reconstructed,
refurbished,
and what must be
demolished & deconstructed

ah, but as soul judge,
you hold yourself to a higher standard,
but in all of this but two constraints rule:

the quality of the recalled data,
the quantity of storage space delimitation

do not tease us with rivulets, nor bury
us under thunderous rushes of memories
spilling and cresting with a reek of abandon,
unless, you’re abandoning the memory en tout,
giving us your newly orphaned all innermost,
then, we must accept the product of your labor,
whether it be spoiled fruit or glorious
                            truth

Tuesday Apr 16
8:32AM
(the year of pollard, a/k/a 2024)
inspired by dancers and choreographers speaking about the sources of creativity @Guggenheim New York
Nat Lipstadt Apr 14
East River: The Many Calories in Water and Words**

this weighty obsession, counting the energy
consumed and disbursed,
to be lean but not mean,
traverses into its third year

a late start does not forgive
over Forty years of transgressions, that damage,
sustained and in part irreversible,
yet I awake this Sunday morn,
all quiet on the East Side front, observing the East River flows
on the surface, contented and uncontested,
strongly bound for faraway Oceans unknown, and it tickles my
imagination that the rain from the nearby Adirondack and Catskills mountains might soon be quenching thy flora, fauna and your parched throats, confirming and conforming our connection and threading our interwoven tapestries, our unified aqueduct, carrying
with more than poetic words, but poetic water!

this notion sustains in multiple manners, and I deep drink the calm and the power as if it were,
for it is,
a daily vitamin,
calorie free,
God  delivers

Delivering
us with
its contained and contentented potency,
to all
in equal dosage

and now the script finished,
the water imbibed,
this baptized, scripture loving
mind and body
as/is
wholly holy
refreshed,
as are we,
my friend

8:38AM
April 14, 2024
by the East River
Nat Lipstadt Mar 31
mine own psalm musings

living between two broad, sea-emptying rivers,
a Majesty’s sentries to mark the differentiation~
division tween divine and a moderate human’s
moderating steps, as his stride shortens as the y/tears
lengthen, and it is accepted as an inevitable musky must,
no matter how the sweet spring day refreshes, the newly
planted trumpeting shards of bright yellows daffodils
pinch his yellowing eyes, few notice the tiny tears of
discrepancies of an annualized emboldening, a grand
heavenly rebirth and a slow man’s body self~editing,
shedding of a life’s~ending~of~story psalm musings


the man looks for the terrible swift sword, but its
failure to grace us with an appearance, is but a
modest disappointment, for a deferred delay is but
a causation to eke out a few mordant, pungent, caustic
reminders of all that is yet to be, to be accomplished,
though the smirking lips of the necessity of yet, one
more unloved poem extant, tilting the Earth’s axis
benevolently toward the open palms of his beneficiaries who
,

you,

are among them numbered, is but, a green shoot in a city’s
hopeful earth planted, by summer, will shed seeds to come
thy way, as an evocation, a good consternation, a joyous
provocation, an asking kingly~gentle, a royal polite inquiry,
would you care to add a a verse to this eternal verse?
before time shreds it too into a yellowed crumpling,
and to the earth it is returned, for the mine of this
psalms is only generic, genetic,  and what is mine is well,


and truly yours too.


nml
<>
March 31, 2024
NYC
9:16am
Sunday Mourning Service
Nat Lipstadt Mar 27
“ The reality is that no medication or vaccine
is 100% effective, and everything has risks and benefits,”
(Bloomberg article on the efficacy of vaccines)

<<>
this the larger/largest query,
if not the largesr grandee
of all questions and querying,
is it has no equal!

hopefully
you place expectant parenthood
off to one side
for soon enough the daily double trouble
of learned birth defects
yours, theirs, ours
collectively,
of the most ordinary human variety
will be self-disclosed,
no needed writ of disclaimer,
just a legal
exclaim,
of a suitable profanity curse…



better than who what when where
and it’s a first cousin to
why?,

and begins the conversation
intimating the process,
goal setting,
mostly failing,
cursing your self oft out-loudly
while think-walking,
and the nearby know it all’s are thinking,

what was I expecting?

you don’t understand?
99.9% of us doomed,
doomed I tell you,
to fail…

What were you expecting?
Sabbath Saturday Mach 2 2024
9:35am
Nat Lipstadt Mar 8
Tennessee Williams, once said, “The world is violent and mercurial—it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love—love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”

<>
how succinct, successful a summary
do we require, nary a word excess,
only love comes at ya slap-dash-
across-the-face, to make the point
its presence in everything and every
human touch point juncture, is a
conjunction,,

be a writer, even when muses en masse
desertion seems overwhelming, query
with love this conundrum and fill the
open yet tiny interstitial space with a
soup of creamy hope, inspiration is ever,
never late, for it runs on its own schedule,
which is forever unpublished and happily
irritating us when we least expect its timely
birthing…

wet the eyes, remove the shadowy slumber
residue, with vigorous water splashes, flying
drops everywhere- is that not a poetic command?

rinse the mouth of the failed taste of insufficient
sleep, or the countervailing dry excess of too much,
when we hide from the challenge of game on,
and the liquid sloppy of the premier
day~light~enunciation…

give birth to conjunctions, attach the independent,
linking the minuscule to the primary, and write of
it as if you were the first, indeed, you are this moments
first…

to exit the permanently burning building…you must
run to it, enter willingly and save it and by dousing
yourself with love, save more than just
thyself

9:11am
3/8/2024
Nat Lipstadt Mar 3
8:28 Sunny Sunday Marching 3rds
(3/3/23)

<>

as per usual,

(tho my fingers strangely type ‘per Isaiah’)

commencing at my beginning with no
direction home, an entitled title asking
for complete composition, and your
attentive compensation, threatening
to sue for “failure to finish,” a crime
for which I’ve served many a year behind
the bars of my ever increasing
TO DO file

but struck am I this morn by the poetry
of the common place, the phraseology
that we use without momentary cognition,
the every~day verbiage that, within lies
perhaps veins that deserve mining for
nouveau riches

and we get what we deserve,
no more, no less, but when
I inquire who has decided this
measured cup of justice and
painted the lines of liquid fluidity,
or just vanilla inspiration, a one
hand clap and a mocking hoot is
returned  reverberating as in an
empty spelunking cave

we are all experts in the ordinary
diurnal doors that require opening
by morning, closing by night, while
waiting for that “break that would
make it ok…from the wreckage of
your silent reverie”^


yesterday was my birthday,
no, it was not, but I’ll pretend
to have that right to make the
summary judgements that the
spirits and harlequins, who,
now revealed as my silent mockers,
none
the less, no more, no,
lessening,
I am rendered,
split asunder, by the sentence I’ve self~
impose down on my conscience and
constitution

balance does not require balancing,
more bad than good, wrecked and wracked
by the un~proportionality of my unbalanced
imbalance, what flaws, what traits,
what genetics,
what misapprehensions, foolishness, led me into
this straying straight life, of no more, no
less

and I quit here for the answers do not appear,
and that voice says you need a shave, go!
look in the mirror and revelations will dance, emanating from your eyes who bear witness to all,
no more, no less




^ Sarah McLachlan, “Angel”
Nat Lipstadt Mar 11
“I write blurt by blurt, edit once, then post and send it out like a puppy”
that is learning to walk, impossible to walk straightly,
thank gawd for walls and laundry baskets and single sneakers
that obstacle us into trouble, opportunities always a near
but never fatal crashing,
and our whisking swishing tail is an ever
countervailing, counterbalancing
waving gesture of
“oops,
there we one goes from nearly, nearer, almost another
nearest disaster

that is the style of substance of how I write
headlong smashing, bouncing off walls,
regrouping spindly words into a balletic
clown show,
startling off in a new and unforeseen direction,
scrambling energy like three sunny side up eggs,
whistling and crackling and popping,
god, this writing stuff is **** tiring,
so much easier to respose,
chew there upon,
selectfully taste and spit~select
a single word,
picking the appropriate apropos,
taking a nap in between,
then
recommencing
blurting
blurts
of escapading words
that tumble out,
falling all around,
requiring reassembly like
an impossible-to-put-together
new toy,

anyway,
here for you to play with
for your sensory pleasure
is my latest greatest
blurt,
which rhymes with
dessert,
which I will imbibe
after eating all my

vegetables.
commenced 3/3/24
11:55am
Nat Lipstadt Feb 29
“I fear that many people are put off by poetry because they don’t know where to start. If I have any advice for them, it is this: find what you like.

Who is to say what guides this process?

In my own case, it has simply been the fact that certain phrases, poems, and figures have acted like flare-lights along the path of my own life. Sometimes you see a flicker in the darkness and know that it is saying something—often something of great importance—and you sense that you have to go toward it, to get near to it, all the time looking out for other lights.

My love of certain poets stems from a single phrase they wrote that hit me like a great freight train of truth.

At other times, I have been attracted to a poem or a poet because I am taken by that feeling of recognition that someone else has felt or thought exactly the way I did. As C.S. Lewis says, as a character in the film Shadowlands, “We read to know we’re not alone.”

Sometimes, we read poets because we want to be like them, or because they are arbiters of good taste, or have been through something we want to know about. Literature—poetry, in particular—offers us a way to become different from what we are or might have been otherwise.

In the end, I suppose the question is: What is the purpose of all this? Why is it worth making our heads into a well-furnished room?

I think it’s because what we have up here—in our heads—is the only thing that cannot be taken. So long as we have memory, we cannot be made into automatons by man or machine…”

Which brings me back to Shakespeare.

The Tempest is the last play Shakespeare wrote on his own. And because of that—and because we know so little about his life that we always look for clues in his work—a lot of autobiography has always been read into the play.

It is about a magician, Prospero, at the end of his magical days. At the end of the play, he promises to drown his magic book and break his staff. It is impossible not to read a certain amount of biography into this, Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage.

Every now and then, somebody comes up with a new theory about Shakespeare. All have been heard before—for example, the vivid description of the sea in The Tempest indicates Shakespeare must have spent time as a sailor.

My response to this? In that case, Shakespeare must also have been a Roman emperor, several English and Scottish kings, a Danish prince, a shepherd boy, a teenage girl in love, a murderer, and almost every other person who ever lived. It is a reductive argument, because it forgets that in the realm of the imagination, you can be all things without actually being them.

And, in any case, at the end, it all disappears, falls apart, and comes together again somewhere else.

This speech, by Prospero, in the fourth act of The Tempest, is the finest farewell of any I know, and one I hope to keep in my own head for many years to come.

**Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep
excerpt from
https://www.thefp.com/p/a-second-year-with-douglas-murray?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=260347&post_id=141539442&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=1njhw&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=emailwaq
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