6 Tangy, NYC Rants to Terminate Turkey-Day Torpor

If your pumpkin pie did not have enough nutmeg, savor the written analogue of that tasty hallucinogen in these lemmony, zesty diatribes

By

David Gottfried

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Sorry, I lied. The following are not essentially rants. I like to think of them as poems. (That’s the romantic in me.) However, I wouldn’t dare call them poems since poetry is highly unpopular.

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Of course, some people, once in a while, profess to like poetry, but that’s usually just part and parcel of putting on a façade of refinement, a love of art and all of that insufferable la di da shit. Hell, nowadays when people go to Italy, they zip through the finest museums in 45 minutes because they can’t wait to stuff themselves with a plate of lasagna which would be no better than the lasagna they can get in their grandmother’s kitchen in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

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These poems were written ages ago. I rarely write poetry anymore. It seems all too adolescent, almost like the literary equivalent of jerking off. You can write a poem in a few minutes, a spasm of feeling and passion that hasn’t had time to germinate and mature in the mind, like a long love affair or a gourmet meal of many textured, splendored favors. But, hell, it is Thanksgiving, and I am too tired to write an essay from scratch.

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THE GEOGRAPHICAL PROPERTIES OF MANHATTAN ISLAND

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Womanhattan

Sleek and Vertical

Physically fit

Chrome and Steal to smash you to bits

A graphic that gives you the finger

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Its womb is a rectangle called Central Park

That breeds infections in the dark

The crimes committed for a lark

Darling, sweetie, don't we look smart

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It narrows at the Southernmost tip

A Chinese empress's foot rather limp

But at the point of uttermost crimp

The jewels primp on proud promenade

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A polyglotted polygon

The earth decurved like a pentagon

We soldier for dollars until we are gone

For Bergdorf’s, Bloomies, emeralds of Oz

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The Lady of Liberty stands like a man

Exuding a matador's deathly elan

Her torch has the air of a battering ram

Of luminous lava of maddening span

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Its crown is a series of spikes in the sky

That knive through the night with a radiant shine

With electric pulsations to mock the divine

So Gaudy and gauche, and very porcine

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LIVING ON 34TH STREET

(I can’t wait to throw up)

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SEE:

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The big fat women

With the big fat asses

In the red pants suits

swarming vulgar garish shopping hordes

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SEE:

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Fast food screaming at your stomach

Fried Ulcerating bacteria laden

Cheap Chinese food laced with rat droppings

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EAT:

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Pizza made from petroleum-derived highly profitable pseudo cheese

Multicolored swirling twirling looney-tune doughnuts

Coca Cola from cans with rims encrusted with dirt, or dried dog shit

Sweet and Sour, mostly flour and fat, chicken, pork or maybe dog and cat

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HEAR:

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The shrieking voice of capital triumphant

A multicultural maelstrom of squawking selling voices

The Koreans, their staccato screams gunning your ears

For a Dollar, Dollar twenty-nine, Dollar thirty-nine

For a rock-like tasteless tumor of a roll

Hear Mick Jagger and his Jewish women yelp

"Shmata, Shmata, Shmata,

I can't give it away on Seventh Avenue"

While Lou Reed and his colored girls kick ball busting boots

To the beat of Bitch Amazons screeching from street boom box speakers

While turbaned men cower, clutching umbrellas, for five and ten dollars

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SMELL:

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The bus farting in your face

Its cheap petrol odor blending nicely with

the oil drenched ubiquitous egg rolls hawked on every grimed and guttered street

Graced with the sulfurous scent of dead rats

Of creeping crawling microbial Bombay-like

Infections oozing into open wounds

in lost poor lonely AIDS wards

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REASONABLY CONCLUDE:

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This ghastly fucking shithole of a city

This malevolent mosaic of multi-colored lesions

This tapestry of purple Kaposi’s sarcoma and bright red zoster

And menacing all-consuming bile-like green

Of rust-colored pneumococcus

And yellowish pseudomonas

And the vile viremic daymare of death-describing AIDS

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Oh, but it was such a gorgeous mosaic

Black, white and all the other ugly shades streaming through the streets

Angry emanations of colors darting with purpose, with politics

With the grim and steely certitude of lasers making war

colored lines clashing in brilliant manifold battles

Technicolor, gleaming and shining on the TV news

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Everyone will celebrate and kill for his color

red raged big pizza boy of Bensonhurst bleeding on

the pouting frown of clay brown Bed Stuy

erupting into blisters on bruised black boys' faces

infected and arrested in puss-engorged Chinatown

Peddling the opium of suburban Jews

(wantons, woven over pork worms, hallucinating Kreplachs,

Stuffed like pink orifices with every variety of clap)

And this is before the entre

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Vomit Hearty.

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NEW YORK WAS MADE FOR PHILISTINES

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Don't come to New York to become successful

It will only make you poorer and poorer

And Sicker and Sicker

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You will try to weave a sentence

But you will not find a single speck of quiet

The trucks will scream at your sonnets

Repair men will smash all your sentences

While the disco beat crowns the reign of the dumb

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Booming the illiterate constancy of an unchanging rhythm

Of hammers, compacters,

Clashing and banging and knocking down buildings

And building buildings

At every hour of the rat-infested night

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Driving you to valium, sleeping pills and whiskey

Making you dumber,

Your slum glummer

Your proud prose a tired dribble of grunts

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Awkward and ungainly

You drown

In a staccato sea of computer bits and bytes

Of rich young boys who never heard a word of

Shakespeare

Who never read a word of anything

Except financial news and personal ads

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And they will scream at you

Are screaming to you

To buy, to sell, to invest

And when you can't

When you can't put up the money for the rent, the computer, the doctor’s bills,

They will laugh the hysterical laugh of

so many rich spoiled, closeted faggots

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Il Duce Guiliani will laugh

And Ed Koch will laugh

Bill Mahr will laugh

And Howard Stern will laugh

"He's a wimpy poet sixties holdover let him starve in the gutter"

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And you will starve in the gutter

While fashionable liberals giggle and guffaw:

"See the strange artist in tatters on the street"

And poor blacks are happy to see a white boy suffer

And all the policeman -- black and white and all of them fascist to the core --

Are happy to break your burdened head

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And if you are young and gay

An old queen will give you a virus

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And if you are Jewish, you will stop being a Jew

Because the Jews are all so wealthy and you're a smelly toad

And in the rustle of silks and satins

Of ladies’ dresses and torah scrolls

Of plastic surgeons and securities traders

Of sheisters large and small

Of people whose only true bible is the tax code and the human genome project

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You'll hear the damning whisper:

"The trick is to first get successful, and then move to

New York

And then make miserable everyone who hasn't become successful"

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THE SAGA OF NEW YORK JEWISH LIBERALISM

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And they are talking

Talking in the Biltmore, talking in the boardroom

Talking to the clip of the time bomb tick

Talking of the time when there's time to talk some more

Talking and weighing all the many risks of war

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Talking to their wives and making alibis

Talking like the print of the stodgy New York Times

Dressed up in Ivy foliage so cunning in the colleges

The choir of castratos never gets the least bit shrill

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And they talk in New York where they've talked for

sixty years

About the Holocaust, the Exodus and Eretz Yisrael

About Selma, Spain and Sobibor and later still El Salvador

They talk, they deplore, and they always want some more:

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News and food, food and news, while they plan to save the World

They order Chinese take out while they watch some children die

When this lecture is over there's a nice buffet waiting

Lets munch, share our hunch, as to where Hitler strikes next

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Eat chopped liver, chop my heart, be convincing and get tenure

Frost your hair like Susan Sontag -- you may look rather sublime

See the Seine, write some verse, rather free and getting worse

And dribble clunky tears about Leon Blum et al.

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Ten thousand in the Hagannah; two million in this City snide

Convinced that some petitions really gave birth to a State

The Hubris of the Humanists, the West Side polemicists

Learn to fight with a gun or please shut the fuck up

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THE PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF THE SUNDAY NEW YORK TIMES

(In the pre-digital era, the Sunday Times consisted of about 9 sections and was 8 inches thick)

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My life is caught within the sprawling shingles of the Sunday New York Times,

Like little notes lost in the Western Wall of Jerusalem.

I cannot find anything anymore

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A scrap of a poem I wrote

is ensnared in the smirks of the Book Review

The number of a broker

is gobbled-up in the splashy

spreads of the Real Estate Section

A plan for peace

is trounced and denounced with style and sarcasm

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The scalloped potatoes of pages

Is plaster of Paris on your palate,

Building a big, bald head of thoughtful woe.

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The inky itchy planes of compressed lust rust are

inedible without strong coffee

Bearable with bagels and lox

Maybe even comfortable in the Hamptons

Are nothing but an insult when you're roasting in a tenement

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And the back pages of the paper

Yellowed and yawning and choking your studio apartment

Are the Publisher's manna for the cockroaches

Crawling and balling and chasing you out of New York

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THE SOUND OF YIDDISH SPEECH

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When the sixties were over

New York Jews forgot about Hebrew

And returned to Yiddish

A German tongue

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Decrepit and Indirect

The syllables mush in the street

Like rotten apples from a pushcart

Sliding down to the sewer below

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The women all sound like such shrews

And the men seem so feeble and frenzied

They chatter a business of trinkets

Stored-up like the fillings of gold

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The skull caps the life of the body

Deciphering old, withered code

The limbs become limp and distorted

A gnarled tree that smirks at the grass

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And the green never comes near the shops

Airless, Brooklyn, basement affairs

Where the dust chokes an asthmatic child

Who cringes in fear of bad grades

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And the sun never shines

Jerusalem never arrives

It's the damp and the cold of sad Warsaw

A night that stalks all our lives

Copyright, David Gottfried, 1995 to 2005