A Literary Gin and Tonic for the Dog Days of Summer

If you are hot and bothered, you can identify with fancy British colonials, in Graham Greene novels, drinking gin and tonics for malaria-combatting quinine

Aug 15, 2024

David Gottfried

For the most part, these are poems I wrote at the end of the last century. They may be a tad immature, but they have punchiness and sock the bad guys in the jaw.

My love letter to Emily Dickenson

This is my death threat to the world

That gave weak tea sans sympathy

My angry banners are unfurled

I shout my mordant majesty

My lines of love will lacerate

Succumb, submit to my tirade

The hot and holy fevered hate

In martial quatrains on parade

A Stern and harsh Yankee march

Syllables clipped, cutting stark

Dressed up fine with lots of starch

The colors subdued, rather dark

A Cotton Mathered mouth of curses

On spinning wheel of lady love

The fabric's softened 'till the verses

Become a perfumed, poisoned dove

AT TIMES I THINK I’M A MEAN SON OF A BITCH

The eddy draws me in

The quicksand covers me up

Entombed, marooned, the jig is up

The fire has burned its last

But I hover in the winds

A wafting witch of doom

Bequeathing certain gloom

My member becomes a broom

I am a cancer and a curse

Ejaculating lava love

I seed eternal disbelief

I desiccate every dove

I am evil, evil, to the core

My laser eyes glare and bore

Like a magnifying lens

I summon fires to the fore

That burn and singe your petty heart

And take every organ apart

Into your balls I throw my darts

And clot your vessels with infarcts

Dissected, Resected and never respected

Your half dead body writhes in pain

Your mind is stupid or insane

Your buggered belly’s pierced, distended

And when I look upon my deed

The debasement of a fine young man

I realize why my ancient creed

Was so irate at his elan

We cannot love and so we hate

We cannot create, so we destroy

The pride, the Phallus, we’ll ablate

While we declaim we’re god’s envoy

Under Oath

Do you swear to tell the truth

To curb the tenderness of Ruth

Cut it down like Charles Wilkes Booth

Extract it like a rotten tooth

And tell the truth that's sort of whole

Exclude the parts that like a mole

Disrupt a prosecutor's role

Expunge the messy heart and soul

To tell the truth and nothing but

Like a golf ball being putt

Quite rehearsed, of course corrupt

The corporate state's good little mutt

Will you say so help me God

With Bible closed, a blunted rod

The prophets peas all in a pod

Stamped-out, crushed by trial's trod

All Feelings Amplified to Infinity

I want everything to be extreme

I want hot coffee to jolt me like a crack pipe

I want the color red to scream blood bath

I want a law condemning subtlety and gentleness

I want the summer to burn like the Sahara

I want Cleopatra’s asps to bite a Diva a day

I want the winters to Freeze like a Russian Icon

(Its lunar glare Mortifying you like Siberian Snow)

I want the East to rise like Alexander Nevsky

I am a communist to the day I die

Fear

In the darkest dark room of my mad mind

Where delusions come into their own

And stalk my cerebrum from ear to ear

And eye to eye

And teach me there’s a world to fear

In the center of the world’s true gloom

Where 6 foot vampire bats belt me in privy

And then you feel like you’ve become a steer

Not queer but dead

And frozen, cold, old every rotten year

When the poems have become moons in June

Palsied, polite no bigger than a dust mite

You know the dementia gallops on its way

To take you away

And your enemies will praise the day

On a slide in a microscope

In the richest city of the richest empire

This prey is prepped so people can stare

Eyes I despise

The Glaring lights singe the clothes I wear

And the pain never comes to a climax

The poem finds no resolution

My basketball dribbles in fear

The net’s not mine

I hear them all laugh and jeer

The End. This is the End. (Dig the Doors)

When the wind and the water and whirling all died

And no one was left to be your bride

And your only thought was homicide

And god was a gutless guide

When Aaron couldn’t speak and Moses couldn’t raise his staff

And no prophet could pass a polygraph

And the witch in triumph was heard to laugh

And the temple was borne of death and graft

When Jerusalem is an arid beast

And Holidays are heathen feasts

And Christmas Trees are Burning Crosses

And all the world joins Hitler’s forces

Then Death has vanquished life

And the Ghouls and witches are blithe

The rats are bigger than cats

And the night has eaten the day

The Sound of the Letter S

S is such a secessionist letter

It swerves rather snidely

It eludes and evades

The torrent of the swirl will always break away

Its big sexy hips sashay through the bar

Promiscuous and blithe it sends you a curve

Its buttocks and its bosom roll in the hay

Well-rounded and rebellious it sings a siren song

It can curse, and do worse, like Scarlet in a rage

Such a harlot, such a sinner, such an idiom of self

It is savage, it is sex, it is scintillating smacks

On the rack, on the back, with a cataclysmic whack

It's a jump rump, it's a sissy, it's a coiled chord of vim

Quite vivacious, and salacious, it nudges left and right

Salivating, fornicating, it employs phallic "L" s

Yes it slides and it rides and there's nothing it abides

It's the South, it's magnolias, it's mint julips on the lawn

Loud ladies with big hair shouting Sermons on the Mount

It's South Carolina drinking dandelion wine

The rebel yell, the tolling bell, and then Fort Sumpter fell

It's sweet and its sour, it’s got heaps an' heaps of batter

Fried up fierce, in a fire, by a woman fat and brash

It's a smoke, that's unfiltered, that will make a voice rasp

You'll become a haggard braggart but the song will never die

A Meditation on the Scientific Definition of the Word Sublime

“Sublime [Latin, sublimis, to the limit]

To evaporate a substance directly from the solid into a vapor state and condense it again. For example, metallic iodine on heating does not liquefy but forms directly a violet gas.”

Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary, Eighteenth Edition, 1997, Page 1854

I want to light fires and see violet gasses

A jubilant inferno that ravages, harasses

I want to have a fever of a hundred and five

I want to be convulsive, committed, alive

I want to see the zenith that excels, surpasses

Every fevered fury that smashes the masses

The fired exaltation that fails to survive

That resounds in memory as a blessed archive

I want the hurricane that enraptures, crashes

The flaming cold water alabaster, amasses

After the floods I dare not revive

Arch, grand chaos is what I will contrive

I want to feel the fright of status asthmaticus

A strangulating clutch of inelastic hiatuses

Of air that the fates will smugly deprive

End banality; let me soar or nosedive

A Poetic Essay on the Etiology of Schizophrenia

When I was six my Father died of Asthma

And when I was seven my Doctor Uncle showed me x rays of lung cancer

And when I was eight I tried to imagine Tuberculosis germs flying in the room

And the TB is in the holy Jewish tabernacle, sniggering like a white fish on a

rye bread

Like a toothless evil relative pinching my cheeks as if she wants to draw

blood

Like the leeches lurking in the back of my Grandfather’s drug store

Almost as sharp as the scalding chicken soup made by my Nanny

The Matzoh Ball Tumors bigger than my Mother’s boobs.

Because my Mother was anxious, anxious, anxious

About goyim and infections, goyim and infections

And so we kneel before huge penicillin shots

And get fucked up the ass.

And the Freudian child psychiatrist tells me that my penicillin shots are

penises

And I know I am a sodomite at the age of nine

And now they tell me that my genes made me schizophrenic

DEATH DRIVE

There was vermin in his verse

It will take you to your hearse

Like a castrato with a curse

You know you’ll curtsey and far worse

Your very being’s now subverted

Male and female inverse

A boy with pomades in a purse

A pantomime to rehearse

So cruelly you’re traduced

To a midget you’re reduced

Regression is induced

And the penis is recused

And your expanding girth

Will subsume your manly worth

You won’t find a speck of mirth

On the sordid, wicked earth

AN ODE TO “BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN”

Is my mind shuttered

Hopelessly corrupted

Religiously cluttered

With lies, alibis

Am I asinine

(Do I dare to eat that peach)

But do I derive

Something alive

Manna to thrive

From a beautiful song and the man singing the words

Herds of sheep on Brokeback Mountain

I hear the lines, “Oh captain, My captain”

I hail, I hallow, that brotherly bastion

That tent in the woods, my Mecca, my mansion

I love that man, I love his eyes

No drug will anesthetize

Nor sublimation ever disguise

My stabbing aches and pleading cries

Storm the dungeon of my heart

The relentless melody of the tart

The irony, like a rampart

Against what love can impart

Put down the quill, enjoy the thrill

Don’t espy it from a windowsill

A warm chest for winter’s chill

And burn taboos on a grill

The fire’s down, the embers gleam

Cold air blows in a steady stream

The warmest arms embrace, redeem

The manly force of love supreme

Although his steps were soft and slaked

The boots on his feet were muddy and caked

It seemed as though the earth had quaked

Our hard embrace could not be braked

Touch those jeans and feel the heat

The weight, the heft, the sinuous fit

Stand erect and beam conceit

Relish strength and true grit

Touch striations of muscled love

The rump pale like the white of a dove

Manners be damned the cock will shove

The aperture fitting as sweet as a glove

The howling night, the dusty shrub

The mean and common monotonous grub

Those grunting gasps you’ll never dub

The seed, the stain, you’ll never scrub

Whisker to whisker, hear him whisper

Savor the breath with the force of a twister

To be each other’s sovereign brother

A bulwark, a brace, against disaster

The seasons stark, the natural reign

The real intention spoken plain

Shouting at the world’s disdain

Growling softly in my brain

His voice so soft to me resounds

The strength, the sweet, so fused, astounds

On all the playing fields and grounds

His memory overtakes, surrounds

But coyotes and jackals intervene

Braying, heaving, reeking spleen

Cleaving to their means obscene

Their Jesus real as plasticene

The prohibition that always detains

The prosecution that always arraigns

That never, ever, ascertains

The loneliness lodged in our brains

Now soil’s moist, the dew like tears

They once rejoiced, so many years

Their flag was hoist, but disappears

Their love was voiced, but doused by fears

So do not dare to stifle and bridle

And make me lonely and so suicidal

Bereft of the force virile and vital

Silence and Bury that bible recital

That cowboy, that manboy, that man of no means

Exposes Pharisees as Philistines

His beauty and balls, staunch evergreens

Surpassing the straight, perverted and mean

I want to laugh, I want to smash

Barriers and bullshit and doctors’ cant

I must, I will, I shall do it now

Redeeming acts my steely vow.

JEWISH COOKING

The women are cooking tsimmis and borscht and chicken soup

Everything simmers over burners

Of gas

The fluids are reduced

The Yiddish is refined

To a pure German core

And the grease at the bottom of the pan

The organic essence of the chicken fat

(Carbon rings, lording it over oxygen and hydrogen atoms, just a couple of reactions away from the hydrogen cyanide of the camps)

Is Indistinguishable from

Lard
.

THE LIBERAL CLUB WILL MEET AT EIGHT -- QUICHE WILL BE SERVED, AND POVERTY WILL BE DISCUSSED

..

Have you seen the wealthy liberals eating quiche lorraine

They're so dainty and urbane

Yes they Summer in the plain

And they dance in Spanish rain

They adore the poor they do

And the famine that's their due

They fight bosses by the slew

And shop on finest avenue

With degrees, grace and aplomb

They pounce on a dire slum

Tell the poor that they're too glum

While clutching Mommy's tidy sum

Their Theatre's Masterpiece

And the last century's cease

Gilded gowns and Christmas geese

Gives them everlasting peace

For when they contemplate the old

Wretched London dark and cold

Portentous poverty and gold

They have a cause, my dear, to hold

THE ANGLO-AMERICAN TASTE FOR BOOKISH JEWS

They're Republican and Protestant

And Looking for a supplicant

A little Jewish pedant

A relic of the dead Levant

A frail and smarmy well-read man

Who lacks the element of elan

Hews to a well-trodden plan

And never dares to say I can

He may be such a lovely tutor

Declaims on kings Stuart and Tudor

His Shylock is a rude intruder

With sentiments reeking of the sewer

A Disraeli tends to suit his taste

A convert, unlike Gladstone chaste

The eunuch of the Queen erased

Himself and India was defaced

COCAINE

Valium was the good witch of the North

Its gently falling snow soothing the sores

Of my fevered, mad mind...

Wound tight with the blight

Of a crystal, cocaine night

Starless, Mars-lit bright

My veins are quite contrite

My face is like the moon

All eerie, bloodless gloom

The son is in its tomb

A yellowed, tattered plume

My lips are rather blue

A deadly, ghoulish hue

But the sky's sardonic view

Says more abuse -- it must ensue

So these asteroidal things

Garbed in leather, metal rings

Collide and crater me with stings

Such are free love's sweet flings

And the neon New York night

Smiles cruelly at my plight

Office buildings twinkle spite

Like tombs dancing on life trite

The Cocktail Party

They grin and glide around the room

They never tell you what they mean

I cannot begin to presume

What animates the face serene

A smile or a smirk that taunts

An invitation or a dare

Eyes scrutinizing all your faults

With rays that singe and flare and glare

And they'll have another glass

Something dry, sedate and chic

Don't count on vino veritas

Lip pursed passions never leak

All commendations qualified

All criticisms compromised

Discernment is always defied

With mincing speech, perfected, prized

And hands that beckon, then wave away

Capricious as a weather vane

My back that longed to dance and sway

Is Stiffened like an old man's cane

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

Discussion about this post