Air-conditioned Poems
by Elazar
10.09.94
I know the very moment summer changed to fall
(when I turned off the air-conditioner)
blew in from the sea last night
return of the prodigal, the rain,
watching the rain from Zachari behind a bowl of hot soup
2 months from [now] in November.
In November I [will] eat stuffed vegetables at Shaul’s in the Kerem
walk home uphill past Mograbi
like a ball of thread rewinding.
It will be crisp, the air. It will be sharp,
it will be clear! My wife will ask where I have been?
Will she believe anything I tell her?
Pretty soon the angels will jump out of heaven
to invade Tel Aviv on their way to hell!
If I could write the song of your generation
attached as you are to the State
howl if you must
what poetry can never communicate,
the rush to your age of soft drugs and sex…
mark the wisdom of old men
innocence grown complex…after learning,
reject them.
10 micrograms of Lysergic Acid Dietylamide, ca’66
still walks the ghost of my libido
Underage
When my father first sent me to Florida he was happy
to see me go.
The girl on the beach invited me to a game of billiards
to check if I was underage. It was my scam, and I was good at it.
She wanted to run away with me to New York,
I can’t remember why
but I just got there
and then my brother showed up with only one shoe on, stoned!
sleeping in a garbage can waiting for me to return to the hotel
needle stuck in his arm
emptied my pockets of sorrow and cash
turned them inside/out in the street, old curse of ancient fathers.
escaping from the stream, small fish flapping like a beached whale
in Florida
stepped up once again to the billiard table, to redeem myself once and for all
to make peace with the past,
filled with so many ghosts of hidden angels
and to beat this sucker out of his bread, at 3 cushion billiards.
Made 200 dollars that night, and dumped the girl on the beach where I found her.
I didn’t trust her, she made me nervous.
I can’t remember if she was still alive.
Fragment
Everything in my family was settled at the table, the first supper,
strange lizards amok in a jungle of antiquated Jews on the Lower East Side,
recently emigrated from the suburbs of Warsaw, circa1922
pogromated one step before
the incinerated!
into the arms of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union [ILGWU]
housing project dedicated by Eleanor Roosevelt, 351 Madison Street.
where I was born.
My mother complained the walls were too thin...
It wouldn't be the first time
It wouldn’t be the first time I said fuck it all
and got drunk at 8:00 in the morning,
It wouldn’t be the first time I ‘waked and baked’,
chucked the time-clock for a rhyme
trying to catch up to my great moment in history!
Give me a break, I do it all the time.
I would sacrifice all the booze and wine I drunk
for all the Junk my brother shot!
But there’s a limit to his luck
he was found murdered in a parking-lot
by a garbage truck.
If you would ask me to give up my stash of weed
to bring him back, I would say no, fuck him!
he was too greedy.
What can I say?
I think of him everytime I listen to Billy Holiday.
When I first got here
When I first got here in ’82
I counted 2 murders and 76 heroin-soaked dilated eyeballs
in the piss-alleys of Jerusalem,
welcomed me like the streets of New York.
And the Ministry of Absorption counted
the number of spoons and forks we needed, in Meveseret Tzion.
And when I first heard the Muezzin calling across the desert,
over the hill,
for the faithful to come for morning prayer,
I thought (as I sat in my uncounted chair)
we were being attacked by the enemy.
And all my children were there, huddled nervously together
so far from home, a home away from home, an oasis
in the middle of nowhere
with a garden and panoramic view of Jerusalem.
Then came an exodus of black Jews from Ethiopia,
thinly carved silhouettes, listening, swaying to Mizrachi music
eating vanilla ice-cream cones in the Central Bus Station,
and 250,000 Russians lumbering in from Moskow
and Leningrad, trying their luck on the telephones
Elazar is the pen-name for a New York born poet living in Israel for the last 25 years.
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