I roam the slums of a jungle;
It is hot and I am always thirsty.
I drink from the
fountain marked
Colored;
It’s magic quenches
my thirst.
At 3 AM savage
sophisticates
jabber and howl.
“Who do you love most,” asks God.
“Jayne Mansfield,” says Max.
“And why is that?” God is so cleverly all-knowing.
“She’s dead.” Max replies.
***
(c) Rob Goldstein 2015-2017 All Rights Reserved
The snake yawns wide and shows its venom glands.
He is a large scaly ES on the queen sized bed in room 314.
“Ssunlight is an abomination.” sighs the snake.
“Oh fuck off!” snaps the dog with a twitch of his tail. “The whole
day is an abomination!”
“I know where the Garden iss.” says the snake.
“So you’ve said,’ replies the dog, “where is it, again?”
“In Manhattan, marked by the statue of the unknown bodybuilder.
Every Christmass true believerss ice skate to celebrate his musscles.”
“So, how come you don’t live there?”
“I got tossed by a blast of righteousness. God did a shimmy-shake and
I landed here with Frank. God was jealouss: I got a piece of the woman.”
The dog’s tail twitches again.
“Howss about you?” asks the snake. “How did you get here?”
“I was a happy Lab, bounding and slobbering and bouncing when suddenly a Toyota Celica flattens me. Frank peeled me up and nailed me to this here wall.
Frank’s a good sort really, taking us in like this.”
(c) Rob Goldstein 2015-2017 all rights reserved
For Isaac who me wonder and Jacob who made me wonder; together we went to Temple where I refused to learn Hebrew and the teacher called me retarded.
For Rabbi Padol, who smoked in the Tabernacle and made the girls giggle as dust settled on the Torah, which I kissed and sneezed, and kissed and sneezed, until my Bar Mitzvah, (that ceremony in English) and later received hats and a checking account.
That Passover Sunday the dogwood was in bloom and I found
a litter of dead puppies in the front yard.
I pitched a tee-pee over the corpses and said Adonoi three times.
I thought of the Lamb: how he bellows, “Look what I did for you!” extending his bloody palms.
(c) Rob Goldstein, poem July 1986, image June 2017
kneel into
self
as thick as
quicksand
or time
as short as
life
the mind goes
fritz!
and still soft
words
are the fashion
is the suck-off
are the
dreams
of
more me
of me
on the street
stretching
absorbed
into
niches
where the
envious
self
fails, extending
contempt
to the
“worthless”
to the
owner
of a sleeping
bag whose
mind has
snapped —
onto mine.
(c) Rob Goldstein 2014-2017
