Artistic Interlude: Don’t Fret, My Pugilistic Polemics Will Return

May 17, 2024

By David Gottfried

Introductory Note:

People, I am sorry, but I have no essays for you today. Just poetry. If you pooh pooh poetry as too felicitous to constitute good solid food, don’t worry. I have hundreds of essays with the seriousness of a scholar’s study shaded in the dark brown of meatloaf and the dour white of mashed potatoes.

For My Poor Old Irish Catholic Friends of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn

..
Steak and Scotch and Cigarettes

Jesus and Mary and Little Joe Mc Carthy

Jack and Bobby and Drunken Teddy

Of such was my neighborhood made

It was the unJewish, unItalian part of Brooklyn

Stout and Sad and Sniggering in their Rum

Chaste and Wasted and Pasty skin that aged fast

The fags became priests and the lesbians nuns

Football and John Wayne and B-52s

The boys go to war in two by twos

The muscles so huge, the penis so timid

Sweet Jesus wears nice underpants

Stained with Mary’s bleeding heart

They’re primed and pumped for Vietnam

Beaten and buggered by Daddy’s dogma

They sport forlorn hot-crossed buns

All sweetened and sugared and sexless and stunning

They’ve been smacked and whacked right down to the root

Pruned and broomed by witchery bitches

And high-voiced men who limp and smell.

Their homes were abodes for the shut-ins and fearful

By the time you were forty you knew you were old

You wore old men pants and diapers and catheters

And prayed for the day you would drop down and die

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

Stiffened like an old man's cane

My love letter to Emily Dickinson

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

To 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

Sweet Songs Fade Out

The saddest sweetest most lonely song

The magical myth that we all belong

The tresses of blonde and reddish hair

The romance as fleeting as a hare

The lips that taste like strawberry wine

The corny lyrics seduce every time

The melody steeps in your spine

An orifice winks in perfect time

It winked but now it wound down

Like a clunky clock or a cowed clown

Bury it deep in the silent ground

Spare it the sweet and soaring sound

Dreaming Back to the Glory of Dawn

Beautiful faces

Connote beautiful hearts

While crows’ feet sinks the sun into the horizon

An unblemished eye

Beams with bliss and bespeaks sweet noon

The rivulets of wrinkles

Dissipate the Niagara of Life

But a smooth and glowing face

Beckons like a plum you long to eat

When bared limbs lay longingly in the grass

When sweat was a snack like salt water taffy

When your clothing was an appetizer

When magazine centerfolds

Gave me irrepressible hard-ons

When your farts were but a funkier form of chocolate

When the refuse becomes the reward

When exhausts are virginal oxygen

When the perverted is pristine

When the clock draws back

To the innocence of dawn

Writing like Baudelaire

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 so subverted

Male and female inverse

A boy in pomades with a purse

A pantomime will be rehearsed

So cruelly you’re traduced

To a midget your 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

Just My Imagination

It’s getting worse and worse

I’m nosediving into the past

Going headlong into a hearse

Dying for love that will last

A charmed and gentle purse

Put the pills into my grasp

And I didn’t have to rehearse

I was Jagger very fast

We wrote the viral verse

That swept the ship’s mast

We blessed you with the curse

Of seeing the mad intact

We tainted all your mirth

And made you so aghast

At perversions and their worth

And lepers leaving their caste

We bequeathed the beckoned birth

Of a world without a past

Where the stars are here on earth

When the first are finally last

But the pills are wearing off

And all the burghers scoff

At the incandescence lost

At this rebel so distraught

OLD AGE IS DISGUSTING

Old age is disgusting

Because Death is disgusting

Each new wrinkle

Is like the crevice from a nail dragged across your face

Branding you decayed

Old age is gray

Black and white married to make a creed of death

Bloodless, colorless as an x ray

Exposing your cancerous lungs

Two legs naked and ashamed

Ashamed as Adam before G-d

Fallen from the perch

Of Glistening, golden youth

Of Bar Mitzvas when we did no wrong

To Dreyfus in the dock who was always wrong

The wrong hair, the wrong face, the wrong muscles

Mother Nature swallows her children

And your penis is concealed by her aggressive belly

Tree trunk thighs became spindly, tentacled and sick

The hands that held the liberty torch too weak to come together

In begging, pathetic prayer.

Old age is disgusting

Because being incapacitated is disgusting

Because it is disgusting to depend on medical attendants who

Harass you as happily as

A ten year old

Burning matches On a kitten’s ass

My last act of self-love

Will be setting myself on fire

Extrication from organic mire

My smoke a heavenward spire

I shall die like a geyser

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

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