Poems 2012 - 5772

See also: I hold me


My poems could definitely benefit from some more persona "attitude" - a bit of strut and a bit of playfulness and a bit of gesture...
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Poems and Aphorisms
Immanuel Suttner

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I could get up and walk out
and never come back
just keep walking
past the trucks and houses
garbage bins and trees
junk mail softened by leaves

I could get up and walk out
without turning off the computer
and keep on walking
and never kiss the brows of my boys goodnight
I could walk 'til night falls
and my body shivers in the chilly air
so that all I can think of
is warmth and light

I could walk past the loud
the troubled the stony
until they lost interest
and left me alone

I could walk through green hills
down vaulted dusty roads
past olive groves and spinifex grass
and kangaroos killed by cars
I could rest awhile amongst dancing cosmos flowers
til small crawling things
tasted my flesh
and my flesh walked on
shoes in my hand
gravel piercing my soles

I could crane my neck at the clouds
or stare at the drinks in the back of a shop
so simple these choices
the joy of the road

I could try to leave leave these habits behind
the habit of waiting, the habit of regretting
the habit of fearing what waits on the road
I could walk to a grave yard

where cold winds blow the autumn leaves
and sit and weep at the grave of my longings
for the phantom what-might-have-been

and then I would walk
to a maternity ward
where small beings babble
and despite my accretions
be seduced and make plans
for a wonderful world

and in that walking
that resting
that walking
come to a place
that hangs in the balance
stripped of illusions
kneel in the dust
or stretch to the sunset
and gather wood for the fire.

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The General Theory of Ephemerality

There is a heavenfull of household pets

stocked with time struck love objects

a well worn shoe, a well worn song

that lingered before moving on.

You, who were once, who filled this house

where a phantom cat mauled a phantom mouse

where a phantom dog caked with garden muck

stained the rug, but left time untouched

have gone. I hear time trickling through

while I wonder what else was I meant to do?

Vanished the ghost, and also the wall

into which it fled. Coherencies fall

gravewards, lured by gravity

to weightless amorphicity.

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the toffee apple of the world

turns out to be an onion

but an onion when alchemised

is also quite sweet.

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I am teaching Yehuda
with a wave of my wand
I pull out the last line
there are oohs and ah's
- an exhalation of emotion
you can always rely
on Amichai magic  

_____________________

she holds down two jobs
gets the kids each day
somehow puts
her anxiety away

washes the dishes
and sobs in the sink
collapses at night
but then can't sleep a wink

goes for a run

_________________

I want peace
to see
what looks out
and becomes disturbed

___________________

 

We are playing tennis
at the time of the third meal
tennis balls whizzing like tehillim
up to heaven
others caught in the net
of earthliness
 _______________
scenario: 4 people are on a tennis court, all of them crouched down,twirlng their rackets, bouncing from foot to foot as if ready to receive serve. This carries on for several minutes with no change - no one serves or receives a  ball. Eventually one of the players "breaks" and says "all right I'll get the bloody balls this time"....

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When someone you were close to dies
there is paradoxically a heightened sense of life
the petty concerns
of the daily grind
dissapear from view
and a strange kind of freedom
pulses within
inviting Itself to be taken up
before the gates swing closed

_______________________

words are historians
inside breakfast
is break-fast
inside shabbat is to sit

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you do not need poems
to make you special
and you do not need 'special"
to make you valuable
feel the solidity of
family, home, an income
the power to acknowledge
express yourself
more fully
to those you meet
every day

life signs

traces of margarine in the jam jar
a to-do list receding into the unreachable distance
ants devouring a

dehydrated worm

bird poo on the

brand new car

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 "Why don't you Jews stop moaning about the six million and just bury you're dead and get on with it."
Oh you can't bury your dead because they were cremated or you can't locate the mass graves where Lithuanian and Latvian collaborators shot them ...well then have a memorial ceremony and move on"

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God is the Joy
that dissolves name and form 
I will not die
and I was not born

 ________________________

a plea to suicide bombers:
turn back, he or she
who so chooses
is not a coward
give it another day
don't be so afraid of life
we will hold your hand, we know
though hard and encrusted with bitter thought
it once was soft and warm

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It's OK for us
to have a little hug
and if I find my hand moving around
to cup your small breast
then let us slowly settle into that too

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yes we can hug
and if we find my hand
settling on your small breast
that too is just right
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I exist
in the creative tension
between left and right
secularism and fundamentalism
rigidity and flexibility
body and soul
if one voice is not representedI feel the tug of redress inside me
reject me or make me wrong and I harden
into what you deny me
embrace me and
I dissolve
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Stuck in the cellar
of late capitalist consumerism
and internal contradictions
and running in circles
to be able to look my children and wife in the eye
sometimes the best I can do
is stuff electronic notes into virtual bottles
and set them adrift
on the faceless book

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Sometimes I get a crazy desire to fix things
not the world
for which I don't have a license
but something like an iphone 3
into which a zealous child has stuffed
the sim card the wrong way round
and then i will wrestle with the phone
for hours and hours
until both it and I
are broken

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keep your own bees at home
grow your own mushrooms at home
recycle your own sewrage at home
develop your own space industry at home

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Walt Whitman and Alan Ginsberg were list makers, and so am I

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Sri sea

The mottled sea

The throttled sea

The mottled throttled bottled sea

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the dream of abundance

rows of lettuce heads
the smell of ripe manure
worms writhing their fertile dance in the worm farm
dignified deaths
mushrooms bursting out of the decaying log
enough breasts and penises for everyone
the dream of abundance
reclaiming the desert
when I'm lonely
instead of a tv set or pornography
a circle of friends
a dream of abundance
laughing and dancing
hard work and rest in measure
everything coming into balance
once again
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An ode to balance
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Woman

with a blouse full of

promises

Your nipples

Are the pegs

Which nail my eyes

To your chest

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When I die will fish nibble my toes

Will I die with snot in my nose

Will I be buried where nobody knows

And from my belly spring forth a rose?

will I live in silence and doubt

afraid to go in and afraid to go out

or will I sprout like mushrooms after rain

from doubt and decay emerging again 

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I am both the spider and the moth
I have spun a web of ideas
and now am stuck to it

(tell me beloved
do you know of a patent
that dissolves the sticky cords
of our stories?)

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What can I do
but listen more and more
attentively
to the river
that flows within

(is it the Ganga
is it haYardayn
or perhaps best of all
the one with no name)
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If I weren't a Jew
I might also say
"you Jew you"
or "you Jewed me"
or "don't be such a Jew"
in that comforting
banter of mateship
where we're us and they're them

etc etc

Does a person
falling into a mass grave
like ae tree in the earless forest
make a sound so feint
that after six decades
it cannot be heard at all?

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At this point
the biggest projects
I can conceive of
are buying a house
and trying to be there as a resource
for my children
ending the predjuidices
outside myself
and more significantly inside myself
seems to big too tackle

_________________

I don't want to die in the middle of things
I'd much rather die when everything has been folded up and put away

________________________

I

If we could build old aged homes
facing the sea
some of the inmates
might be soothed
by the changing constant water
bathing their eyes
on the simple true elements
and if it could not be the sea
then outside the window
birdsong and tree
and if that too cannot be
then a potplant on the window sill
that has been there for years
hardly attended to
a friend indeed
very still and quiet

and if even that is too much then
let it be a mass produced picture on the wall
or if not
perhaps a vivid memory
will bring comfort without even or ever knowing why
and if memories will no longer be summoned
then
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The Israel=Apartheid charge is unhelpful and will not decrease the suffering of either Israelis or Palestinians. Like all charicatures and stereotypes, it settles upon and exagerates a few features, while ignoring and minimising all evidence to the contrary. Far more important than the validity or not of the charge is to ask: who are the accusers? Who are the people who associate around it? Does their self declared concern for "justice" manifest universally, or only re this particular issue? What are their true motives? Before you read the history, ask who the historian is.

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James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake might have said something like this: Sordid Arabia is using ItsRreal as its stewge to fight a closet whore against Iranium

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NEWSFLASH:
A 47 year old man has escaped from work. A massive man hunt has been launched. residents are advised to stay indoors.

UPDATE
The fugitive has been found. A community member tipped off the police, who surrounded the escapee. He was on a parkbench, feeding crumbs to the sparrows, but they managed to subdue him.

By the time I turn 50 I would like to have:
ended world hunger
liberated Tibet
made the unconscious mechanism of projection so visible no one could vomit the disowned parts of themself onto the "other"
paid of our large screen television set at which I stare blankly should I not accomplish the preceding items