For Wayne LaPierre and Uncle Sam

What is stronger—the mind or the gun? Yes, the gun can shoot at point blank range

But the mind made the gun—No different than the egg who made the chicken—

A genetic SNAFU, whose controversy caused bangs and made the people crazed.

“Guns don’t kill people,                         people kill people”           

you say. But if the                                     mind made the gun,

Then the ones to fear                                     are the minds

who promote that the guns be mainstreamed.

But their criminal intent

has been absolved

by their corporate lobbying,

by their inordinate sum of power,

and by our outdated constitution.

So I am sorry Uncle Sam,

People do kill people. And

the people whose hand you

shake, the one whose palms

are sopping with blood,

Is that of the N.R.A.

In case I need to spell it out for you:

By virtue of this logic,

They are the people who kill people.

Bang. Bang.

Solo

Solo

A girl no more than ten years of age,

Has decided to take center stage.

Her father has promised, “I will be there this time!”

Her reaction: elation, she will be seen in her prime.

She practices and plays for hours on end,

In front of a mirror that no one will mend.

And for dinner she sits at a table surrounded by chairs,

But without anyone to look at she simply just stares.

At night she is awoken, many a time,

But hums back to sleep with a special rhyme.

The song was sung as her mother lay dying,

Sadly no one could save her – eventually people stopped trying.

After the fact the violinist sat in a vacant hospital room,

Where she stifled splitting waterfalls of gloom.

But as life kept moving and she found her mother's cracked violin

And chose to master it so she could commemorate her kin.

***

Finally, the concert has begun at half past eight,

Her performance is next, and her heart seems to inflate.

They call her name and she walks up alone,

And by the fifth step the spotlight had shone.

She approaches the center and hopes her nerves will be eased,

Luckily she finds comfort in believing her father will soon be pleased.

She steadies her hand and takes in a gulp of air,

Then strings the first note with magnificent flair.

Minutes flit by and she continues to play with such impeccable cadence,

That even she is impressed by the fruit of her patience.

Eventually her instrument grows weary, and the music slows,

After long last the number has come to a close.

The roaring ovation could easily cause great fright,

But the young violinist beams with delight.

She skims the crowd and their eyes meet,

Alas her gaze falls upon the empty seat.

Kismet

I wrote this poem for my best friend/frosh roommate in college. Today we are no longer close, but I still think the truths of this poem will always be applicable to those each of us hold dear:

In summer we bid goodbye to those who bloomed with us,

In fall we were greeted by a surprising warmth supposedly known as the Indian summer,

In winter we were comforted by changing colors emanating from those around us,

And in spring we wailed as we walked back out into the cold again,

As we simultaneously watched the year evanesce.

Our seasons were altered this year:

None proved a foreseeable outcome

And they were all somehow manipulated to become their predecessor,

In symbiotic tune with earth’s providential but cyclical nature

But perhaps this is the beauty that seasons propel for any life we know

That ineffable excitement and misery we reserve for the future

And the knowledge we always acquire after enduring the seasons that pass

The reality of what I learned throughout the multitude of seasons I have lived,

Is that all of my expectations were radically unmet

And the best part about it

Was that it led me to you.

Gross

The poor man shits

The wealthy man finds a bar of gold at the basin of the toilet bowl.

The poor man pisses

The wealthy man finds a flute of urine topped with champagne bubbles.

The poor man bleeds and guts gush

But the wealthy man has no blood to bleed.

The Antithesis of Fear

I was not afraid to be nourished from my mothers breast.

I had no qualms with her cradling me as we rocked back and forth,

both silenced to sleep.

But I have always been terrified by the sound of her beating heart.

Confined: A Poem

I wrote this poem for an English presentation a couple months back. Religion and Politics always seem to spindle the same web...

Confined

“Shabbat Shalom Kinder! Rabbi Krause has come to tell you a story”

He came every Sabbath to my young class—all of us greeted him with glory

We gave him a special chair, and fussed over who helped him each week

The contained candles, cushions, and kippot made his sermons unique

He recounted mythic parables about many a Jewish knight

Majestically darting across lands to bury their plight

As babies we sat entranced listening to such fantastic tales

Encaged by the “history” the Jewish culture unveils

Ultimately we believed everything he said to be true

Why would he lie to us? He was a teacher, a Jew.

In class we would recite prayers of all kinds

The teachers explained these brachot would expand our minds

Blissfully confined by the naiveté that we children possessed

I delivered these invocations, honored to be so blessed.

I believed in the sanctity of morning prayers like, Modeh Ani, and I chanted

I agreed that God was watching, my convention would never be recanted.

In T’fillah I would Howl beautiful melodies with one ringing lung

In violent harmony with the children who loved the songs that were sung

I believed that God loved me and was proud of me as His creation

I thought I was customized by the divine, Adonai, who did not capacitate detonation

I was blindly imprisoned into a sect that thought the world of me

My community embraced me securely, determined that I would not flee

At home I was greeted by parents who relished the Jewish faith

Feeding me with tradition, our ancestors from Old Country came alive with great wraith

My mother sang Yiddish songs while she stood in the kitchen, cooking

She happily made blintzes and kugel, while I sat restless but still looking

My father would attend morning services at Synagogue quite often

He encouraged me to go too, knowing my agenda was easy to soften

I believed that our Jewish ideals delightfully incarcerated us as kin

Protected by Latke walls and Pesach Seders—we never wore thin

However, my family always made the importance of my personal faith known

That if I were to abandon their beliefs, they would not hesitate to disown

 My grandfather, Bill, had especially strong feelings about my Jewish connection

So much so that my views about God flitted in perfect symbiosis with his affection

He would exuberantly express his pride and joy for my religious education

Elated that Jewish practices were being passed on, in spite of the once popular “Aryan Nation”

I believed that understanding values like the Ten Commandments were important to my grandfather’s tomorrow

Especially after he divulged such personal sorrow

When I was eleven years old, my grandfather and I sat at his fancy Upper West Side table

And with tears in his eyes he told me what he was able,

“I was thirty at the time and at school in Prague

I returned to my home, horrified to find it cloaked in smog

The story painfully transpired from there

With my head glued to the ground, my heart encaged with despair

My whole family was taken in nineteen-forty-two

My father, amongst them, was a leader, a Jew

They were corralled off like cattle for being who they were

And what happened in between, I imagine, was a blur

They arrived at the camps and got into lines

Panicked by the towering electric fences that were now their confines

My mother was separated, never to be heard from again

She was murdered in a gas chamber; a lifeless female fen

The soldiers put my father to work as an old man

And after too many brushes with death he devised a plan

He decided to escape from the treacherous place

But he was caught before he had even left base

The soldiers took him and the others who had been “bad” on a “walk”

Each man went naked in the snow, without so much as a frock

By the time they reached the end of the trail

The men were exhausted -- far too weak to inhale

And when they finally stopped vomiting enough to see what was in sight

A gun was cocked to their temple, the bullet mid-flight

Blood dribbled like tears down my father’s frost bitten cheek

Down to the iced lips that could no longer speak

Alongside him was a frosted sea of skeletons; naked, mangled and cold

The million lives surrounding him, ended “unimportant” and untold

The breath my father drew that was once powerful and booming and strong

Was all lost at Auschwitz, a place that very few considered wrong…”

My grandfather’s voice trailed off after that

We sat in silence, my face wet from the chat

Eventually, his voice quivered uncontrollably but his thoughts carried on,

“I believe this is why you must be a Jew Shaina Matel. Remember what I lost and captivate your spawn”

As I grew older I recalled my family’s story with gravity

But my thoughts were graciously manipulated by what my grandfather considered depravity

My mind was set free from its cell and danced with the powers of time

And I finally discovered the beat of my rhyme

I fell upward from my prism, and religion stopped being important at all

God, Judaism, and prayers simply became cracks in The Wall

I began to celebrate freedom and speech

I began actualizing possibilities that had previously been out of reach

My identity stared at me in a kaleidoscope-like fashion

As an individual I became a multitude of ineffable vitality culminated by experience and passion

Each aspect of my inside colorfully reflected off another

In order to create an infinite spectrum of dimension, traced back to The Great Mother

I believe that “religion is a system of wishful illusions”

This has become my pragmatic conclusion

I believe in “a life devoted to one’s own improvement and the service of all mankind”

This is a product of my progressive mind

I believe that “freedom should ring from every mountainside”

This too was supported by thousands, who marched together in Utopic stride

My community is mankind because I am a fraction of the human race

My culture has been integrated into infinite space

I developed and finally came into my own

Proud of new ideas that I had put in my mind, now sown

However, I still wish that our family believed just one thing:

“Blessed is thou who let the caged bird sing.”