Open Letter to a Lost Love

Space, the final frontier, between us –

An abyss of falling stars, with wishes

Unbidden and ungranted. Our tongues hiss

At the hurt, shapeless and undefined,

Like the nucleus in an amoeba of sorrow.

Love shouldn’t have to hurt so hard, so

What was that thing that broke our hearts,

Ripe with passion and charm, joy and pleasure,

The smoldering embers of a matchstick

Next to an old gas stove with a failed pilot light –

Waiting to explode? And then like fools,

We would attempt to rebuild the sepia-toned nostalgia

Paying no heed to the reality of jagged edges

That cast this saga into tomes of memory…

Yet fondly now, here I sit, missing what was good,

When the alchemy of our elixir bubbled and churned

Into something sweet, and lovely, and desirable.

Alas, the universe still expands – never contracts –

And we are hurtling headlong, in different directions.

But I think of you, and I savor the pain,

Despite knowing that there shall be no return,

Because of all the ports of call along my journey,

You were one who made me better, and

For that I am grateful.

Describing Myself in Three Words

It was November 15, 2018 when the instructions were given; Describe yourself in three words.

Of course, I chose to comply...

There are three giant words standing in a triangle at the middle of a town square. Concrete slabs extend fifty feet in every direction. I am standing in the center of the words. My brow is furrowed. I am wondering who put the words here, and why. 

With my right hand I reach up to scratch my forehead, but at first touch my hand flattens and slides backwards over my close-cropped hair. It was long once, undulating over my shoulders like a waterfall in the night. Now it looks more like a thatch roof after a wind storm, flecks of snow sticking to the side walls.

The white letters of the words are reversed from my perspective. I turn clockwise to examine them. Two of the words have three letters, while the other has four. 

The letters are taller than me, maybe ten feet high. They are all capital letters and all the same height. If I stretch, I can reach the inner underside of the arc of a letter "O."

It's late in the afternoon. Yesterday I was at work, but today is my day off so I didn't bother shaving this morning. The sun is bright, and I have been outside all day. Most people think my eyes are brown, but when I get a lot of sun, if you look closely, you can see that they sometimes turn a greenish yellow. In college it was sometimes more of a yellowish green, but that's all I'll say about that. 

I'm wearing a flannel shirt with a checkered pattern of medium to dark grayish orange. The top three buttons are open, revealing a red t-shirt with a frayed neckline. An ink and sepia image is emblazoned across the chest. An oval of flowers frames a surfer riding a cresting wave. I've never surfed but I like the spirit of the image. 

The shirts drape over my waistline, concealing the forest image edged on my belt and my late father's eagle belt buckle, which together hold up my loose-fitting Levi 565 relaxed fit jeans. On my feet I'm wearing mesh grey Sketchers. 

As I spin, I make mental notes of the letters and how they fit together. I stop spinning. The word to my left has the reverse letters; U-O-Y. The word to my right also has the reverse letters; E-R-A. In front of me is the reverse four-letter word; E-R-E-H.

As I peer beyond the letters, I realize that the concrete slabs are not gray. They are painted with long parallel black lines, boxes, and rectangles. Different shapes are coded with different colors. There is a color key at the far edge of the slabs, but I cannot make out what it says. 

Clearly, I am standing at the center of a map. I recall a joke my maternal grandfather used to make; "Wherever you go, there you are."

Indeed grandpa. Indeed.

A Bull in the China Shop

A mild mannered, elderly gentleman, worked for many years to open his own shop. From childhood he had held a fascination with fine china. When finally, well into middle age, he had amassed enough savings, the man purchased a little shop with big glass windows and filled it with china and other fine goods to sell. The shop had been his pride and joy now for twenty years.

It was a day like any other when the bull walked into the china shop, lumbering up and down the aisles, knocking over merchandise at every turn and in between. He did not know the difference between a crystal vase and a water glass, between a sugar spoon and a dessert spoon, between a butter knife and a cake knife. They all fell to the ground with similar consequence. The metals clattered and the finer wares shattered.

Presently the bull careened into the counter-top and paused. He reared up and revealed that he held the shape not of a bull, but of a man - a bull man. The bull man looked directly into the eyes of the china shop owner, who stood behind the counter, and he said "Nice shop, but a little messy."

A LITTLE MESSY! The china shop owner dared not speak. He simply smiled meekly and nodded in agreement. How the shop had become messy did not negate the fact that it now was indeed a mess.

By now a crowd had gathered outside, and they were all staring on through the shop window. Some were furiously taking notes, while others filmed the exchange on their smartphones and cameras. One mustachioed man held a cardboard banner that read "PLASTIC-WARE BEATS CHINA!" Footage of him would surely go viral on social media. An official PBC movement was already underway.

At that moment, something caught the eye of the bull man. He reached down into a pile of fine china, where a tea pot and a gravy boat had both shattered together. The bull man picked up a shard of shattered china and held it up in front of himself. "Shame. Too bad so much of your stuff is broken. I might have bought this. My wife would have loved this gravy boat."

The shard, of course, had come from the tea pot. The shop owner was an expert on fine china, and so of course he could see the disparity. But most of the onlookers were not experts on china, and so they took the bull man at his word. Some of the late comers even nodded, "Too bad."

"Why," as the word stuttered out of his mouth, the shop owner could hardly believe he was speaking, "Why did you come here?"

The bull man stared at the shop owner, as if confronted by the innocent inquiries of a child, as if he were being asked to explain the pigmentation of the sky. "Well of course, I am here because I love china."

"Oh." It was such an inexplicable response that the shop owner could not fathom what else to say. Surely most people who entered a china shop did so because they liked china. But it was also true that most people did not choose to destroy those things which they claimed to admire. What was the appropriate response wondered the shop owner. "Thank you for coming?"

"My pleasure," exclaimed the bull man. "We're going to fix this for you. We're going to make china great again."

"Huh?"

"I'm going to put a tariff on all imports of china from China so that you can rebuild your shop with American china."

"American china?"

The bull man reached out and slapped his hand down on the shoulder of the shop owner. "Glad to have you on board." And with that, the bull man turned and strode out of the shop, the sound of china crunching under hoof.

Deep in his soul the shop owner felt something gurgling, something he could not define and had never felt before. His blood felt hot. He dared not confront the feelings, lest they overwhelm him. Something had happened to him, to his shop, and there was no going back to change it now.

The shop owner's first instinct was to go to the supply closet and grab the broom, but then he paused. The insurance company would want him to document the damage. He set down the broom and picked up his phone.

The line rang a few times before the shop owner was transferred into an automated answering system. He patiently navigated the menu options until he reached the option to speak to a person. After fifteen minutes on hold, a claims person answered, and asked for information to verify the identity of the shop owner. At long last, the shop owner was given the opportunity to explain his claim.

The claims person was pleasant and understanding. "Don't worry," she said, "we handle insurance for a lot of shops in your neighborhood."

The china shop owner looked out the window. There was a crowd gathered now outside the barber shop. "I better get my claim in quick," he thought.

Next Shakespeare

I've been writing fairly consistently in the month of July, and I'm expecting to type some pieces up over the next week or so. In the meantime, looking back through the old manuscript, the following was page 4 of the book in 2005 that I never published...

Next Shakespeare

To write, or not to write, that is the question:

Whether ‘tis nobler, thy voice to silence

Knowing full well the breadth of fortune stifled,

Or sputter words upon the waiting, white sheet below,

And in so doing, to burn naked on the page;

To be praised or reviled, and either way to smile,

To withstand the heartache of a thousand critical knocks

Invited to the doorstep of the soul sharer,

While shrouded cynics eager to perform battery

Meanly disguise jealousy with snobbish bromides;

The quest for praise will not sustain the erstwhile scrivener,

And yet his heart beats, and still his parched lips thirst.

Selfless existence promotes the perpetration of a fraud,

But to tap the coursing veins of creativity, bleeding black ink onto white pulp

Represents the whisper of a scream, gaining echo into print

Where screaming is hushed by satisfaction;

This fruit of life is knowledge, savior of mankind,

Aware of self screaming for attention from self,

For there can truly be no question among the pantheon of poets,

The pleasure of the process displaces accolades to elevator background,

The name of action must be retained in un-ebbing reflection

And the Elysian Field of words becomes the goal

Where only we lucky few may flourish and persist;

To write is to breathe, and to breathe is to write, this is your mission:

Flourish and Persist, Flourish and Persist – You Next Shakespeare, You!

Blood Face Back

The poem below was written way back in 1992, when I was sixteen. The inspiration for this poem was my grandmother, Ruth Bernstein. Though I did not know then, much that I know now, I will convey some significant points that were unwittingly relevant to my perception of her when I wrote the poem.

Ruth was born the middle child of three sisters. Both parents of the sisters had immigrated through Ellis Island, but met in Manhattan. Ruth's father was a young man named Isadore Siegel, who came from an affluent Jewish family. (He was second cousin to the infamous gangster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel.) Isadore married a poor girl from the tenements, Rose Greenberg Siegel. It seems clear that Isadore and Rose married for love.

Isadore rejected his family's influence and went into business for himself, running a fruit and vegetable truck. His middle daughter, Ruth, had eye problems which required an expensive surgery that he could not afford. She cursed him. Shortly after, while working on his truck in the rain and cold, Isadore contracted pneumonia, and subsequently died. Isadore was twenty six years old. 

Ruth never forgave herself. Her relationship with her sisters could be characterized as loving, but conflicted. One might speculate that she struggled with being loved because of the guilt she carried over her father's passing, and because of that constructed emotional walls between herself and those whom she most loved. 

Rose went to her late husband's family for help, and was rejected. She raised her daughters on her own, beginning in the 1920's, becoming an example of sheer determination and moxie to the three sisters, that would transcend the generations to come.

Ruth was wooed by a charming mechanic named Jacob. After the war, Ruth and Jacob had two daughters. Her parenting style could be characterized as demanding but also fiercely protective. She loved her daughters deeply, but often pitted them against one another. One might speculate that because of her own conflicted past she saw this as the only way to protect them and prepare them for the cruelty of the world. 

Ruth became a social worker, specializing in child advocacy. As her grandson, I once observed to her that sometimes it seemed like she was nicer to other people's kids than she was to her own. She responded by pointing out that her girls never faced the same obstacles as those other kids, who had no one else to speak for them.

Grandma Ruth was never one to shy away from saying something that made people uncomfortable, except perhaps when the uncomfortable someone was herself. But because of her I learned to be comfortable, from time to time, asking her questions that made her uncomfortable. And she was always honest with me. 

Most of my insight into my grandmother comes from our conversations. In the final week of her life Ruth reconciled the burden of her childhood with a statement she made to me and my mother. Some portion of my insight into human nature in general, must be attributed to Ruth's influence. She is still one of the most fascinating people I have ever met.

The following poem, is one of my mother's favorites of mine. My mother, Ilene, enjoyed it so much that she used the text in a work of calligraphy for her short lived business venture "Accordion Books". The accordion book with "Blood Face Back" in it was donated to the Center for Book Arts in Manhattan, where it remained on display until a theft in the 2000's.

Love can be a brutal thing, but like this uncomfortable work, it endures.

Blood Face Back

They tell stories of you.

Once upon a time we met you.

You wear a terrible scar,

Of hard times and memories of evil lore.

They told of the grandeur

Of the personality that you are,

But that was to your face.

They speak about you,

You seem, to mine eye, to hold yourself with grace.

They think poorly of you,

And voice it in their speech.

Behind your back they raise the knife

Drooling, preparing for the stab.

You are soaring like an Eagle, when they grab

The gun raised to shoot you down.

The ammunition seems to draw forth pain,

But standing at the pinnacle

It doesn’t wound or kill.

Well that is what they tell me.

How can I find truth in the words of murders?

I wait upon the hill.

When time has gone to meet with space,

When once again red seas are joined in blue,

We will meet, face to face,

To start upon the day anew.

Then all those winds of fury

Will blow on open prairie,

And we shall speak

Of the futility of anger.