Paulie Lipman
SchematicsColorado
does not hold the patent on tragedy, but we understand its machinery The rest of the country can complain about the casting of Ben Affleck as the new Dark Knight but Batman means something different in Aurora, Colorado Everyone else can debate about bullying but we’ve already seen one version of the end game in Littleton It is a first person shooter Y’all can watch Kobe get off a jumper while we have seen him foul, get off, and then get off for it Ours is a place still recoiling from a time when the Klan used to march so deep down Broadway you’d think the White Tide was in and everyone leapt in for a baptism We are haunted and see the same phantoms behind the eyes of Boston Sandy Hook Oklahoma City All of us praying for exorcism and that one day the spirits will finally stop howling Hideous PotentialSaying you’re Jewish
is a panic fire that beckons every frustrated artist come to render you, unwilling canvas to their distorted impressions Portrait your feet with Mel Brooks’ tap dancing Hitler Abstract your nose, hideous Shakespearean caricature Pointillist legs, in flight from Egypt Norman Rockwell across your eyelids an unpretentious H O L O C A U S T Their medium chalk, spit, or ash never bothered me Even shit washes off It’s my own blood that frightens me Within it a most hideous potential My body a breeding ground worthy of Mengele threatening to birth from my shoulders the snarling heads of Orthodox Brooklyn slum lords eyes boiling profit margins teeth locked ferocious around the word schvartze as if it were their life’s meat My savage ancestry concocts the hands of every money lender Jesus evicted from the temple, resurrect rip cesarean from my hip bones hoarding every wish-cast penny back into my own pockets Mouths welt up, pox along my chest jabbering: “Don’t bring that Shiksa home” “Mind your mother” “Marry your own kind” “Obey” “Chosen” “The Chosen” “We are the Chosen” Benjamin Netanyahu may be the anti-christ but he doesn’t live in Hell He bursts full form from the knot in my forehead covered in viscera, roaring Zion’s will to power in a deformed glossolalia of Yiddish, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Mein Kampf every jagged syllable translated into: “Uprise the Holy Land, even if the flames devour us all!” Even weakened by fanaticism, blood don’t wash off Not without taking some skin with it This vestigial freak show in all its sloganeering, not once mentioned God Not one Omein among the lot of them Adonai, Hashem, no prayer not never I will not have my voice stolen for abomination nor uplifted eyes bowed head or bent knee These are all reserved for God, no matter the name I re-claim these frail insides flawed they may be I have enough, the limbs given me Hideous potential, I carve you out cast your poison from my blood I will give my skin leave your screeds and bare the scars as a reminder of just how far all of us can fall UntitledWar breeds
strange ingenuity a savage intellect limited vocabulary bark/howl/shriek all to mean: My Kind/Over You My Land/Not Yours My God/Only God Resistance will always be
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BellowsThe human body
is an accordion constructed by an unseen craftsman Perfect in form, but hollow until a musician moves it to beauty Buttons for a mind that can shift perspective and mood Ivory keys bones when struck in different combinations determine an existence major or minor Bellows, for lungs that can scream wail lullaby or weep And when the last tarantella is wrested from its frame it is laid to rest in a velvet lined box and the song the legacy is laid to rest in the wind A Jew and Vocabulary1.
Holocaust: A sacrifice consumed by fire Read with the right pace and intention it almost...sounds sexy holocaust is ready for prime time pops all the right demos holocaust worldwide crushes Instagram Oscar nomination locked #hashtaggameonpoint holocaust bodies Facebook holocaust bodies museums bodies mausoleum holocaust bodies are museum holocaust lower case holocaust notsingular Have been many many many Not proper noun No “The” holocaust has been going going Germany This country Allcountries all times all burning all sacrifice No ownership No one We Jews don’t own holocaust Not proper noun just common ash 2. Pogrom: the organized killing of many helpless people, usually because of their religion or race pogrom punishes the tongue comes out strangled, limping dust tongued Yiddish We Jews owned this Language/memory forever escaping us like us, forever escaping pogrom is not/never sexy, not go-to simile pogrom is plural lowercase pogrom is pre-film 38 A.D. 1066 A.D. 1113 1563 1821 1881 1901 1938 no pics no monuments pogrom is Warsaw is Kishinev Bialystok Kiev pogrom is holocaust’s unsung older brother no website Google for casual interest Wikipedia required reading research paper pogrom is thousands upon thousands Jews synagogues family trees burned burned still burning No slogan No museum No hashtag No more numbers Not from me not your research paper You go find the burning You get kerosene in your eyes My throat is too full of soot from swallowing all of this You go find the English for it Let your teeth go grey, sifting through our urns gasp our ashes and choke
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