Here Today Gone Gemara

For Michael Wex

“Carpe verbum”

Oh go on, just look these words up and down
like an Orchard Street tailor.

May meaning burst like the tzimtzum

And there always be an eruv over your head.
and an ervah --

you look as hot as a herring.

May you be blessed with poor assimilation
And suffer from enigma

As the wise always say, what good is writing it only once?
Like, what does one shoe give you?
A limp.

You should be ashamed in your far neck

have no no pep in your schlep, no tardis in your PaRDeS,
have salt in your corners, in your eyes; may they
crawl out of your head

She’s got as many brains as a church has a mezuzah.
No furniture in her attic.
But a big backyard.

You think meaning is just gonna rise itself, like a golem?
What do I look like, a canaanite slave?

Oh just come look
into my fat palimpsest --
but I’m not keeping my top buttons open. 

You think you’ve got troubles, don’t knock me a teakettle.

I’m deaf as a bedbug, and screaming into the sky.

Go on, just hit me with the short end of the shtick.

What, you’re gonna shmear me with poor man’s jam?
Pee on my back and tell me it’s raining?
Look at the ceiling through my hair?

Just wash your myth out with some kosher soap

and give it to me baby as hot and slow as a cholent.

Kiss me like a mezuzah. Light my menorah.

Hey, I like those lines. Are they going my way?

All repurposed like hand me down panties

Stuff my mouth with letters, like the Wall on a shpritzy day

For, the sign upon your doorposts say

Sleep faster, we need the pillows
Sleep slower, I could use your dreams.

**

This is nothing more than a piece of diffused affect.

But from it whole towns could be erected.

Thankfully one can’t fill a torn sack.

The tongue is the pen of the ear.

An idea with connections is still self-conscious.

Thistle sticks to clothes as dis-ease to the poem.

Two things cannot be hidden: meaning and coughing

To every answer you can find a new question.
To every song you can find an old tune.
So spread your mamaloshen
under the khaki moon.

For, as I always say, to make a poem is easier than to read one.

Too much modesty is half conceit.

With a split tongue anything is possible.

And if the stanzas of swirling prosody grow with their feet

climb with crooked feet  --

You can grow corn on the ceiling
But you can’t make cheesecakes out of snow.

***

As the wise conceptualist always says,
the smoothest way is full of loans

But, you can’t squeeze blood out of wet news.

No lock on that myth

For truth lives like a beggar
surfacing like a popup on a homepage

while the letters swallow up the head with the screen

May you write ten books, each book with ten poems, each poem with ten lines and you should roll from one line to the other
and palimpsests should grow on your tongue

May your thinking be as twisted as a challah

Well this is as helpful as cupping a corpse

Sometimes I feel like some shprintz who’s just rinsed her blintz
with the word still in my mouth

The ploy is the patter of the man
So, stay healthy, you can kill yourself later

****

If these words were a stick
you could lean on them
If these words were a bridge
I’d be afraid to put them in your mouth

Look, if this poem had wheels, it would be a wagon

And i care like a cat cares it’s Wednesday

I admit – some of these lines stink like an outhouse in the cholera, sprinkled with a side of plague

Did I swallow an umbrella?

Sometimes, it’s easier to get a drunkard off the ground --

Yiddish Blues for the new millennium:

They call it stormy Monday,
Thursday’s just as bad
Siri’s not responding
My GPS’s lead me to Riyadh

So just read like you’re swimming with an axe

And see it with your own ears