AIDS, NEW YORK, 1991
By
David Gottfried
My holy hating heart
Beating out a tune of Hendrix's cherry red
In all of Jagger's Chelsea Drug stores
It's Hot, it's real hot, it’s about 105 degrees.
Come on America and suck it.
Suck that virus America.
Come on and suck the virus you gave New York and San
Francisco
Come on and suck the virus you thought was so funny
Suck that virus or I'll fucking stab you with my blood
Stab you with my blood in Bob Dole's corny Kansas
Stab you with my blood in Gross Point and Great Neck
Stab you in Stone Mountain Georgia and in every molehill in
Mississippi
Stab you with the red fulminations of a thousand fevered
dreams in a thousand filthy hospitals
Stab you with the sweet and pungent excrement of sick,
distended bellies churning a gruel of drugs and rage
Stab you with the evil emanations of Jagger's saintly Devils, cursed by Moher Mary, nursed by Sister Morphine.
Stab you with the liquified remains of the biggest rats on
the Lower East Side
Stab you with New York's subwayed, smelly air
(A gaseous witch's brew of tuberculosis and tenements and
urine soaked alleyways)
I'll stab you for Angie and I'll stab you for David Bowie
I'll Stab you for Ruby Tuesday and I'll stab you for Freddie
Mercury
I'll stab you with the fevered night of the summered city
I'll stab you with my sweat and all my seething secretions
I'll stab you. I'll stab you.
Come on Amerika and Die like a fag.
Copyright David Gottfried 1991
When I heard the music play
By
David Gottfried
When Jimi Hendrix went down on his guitar
Ecstatic squeals leapt like leopards fighting for love
My brain was so inflamed
And this lamb became a lion
When the Stones sang Street Fighting Man
I thought I would burn my neighborhood down
I screamed. I singed. I severed all connection with right and wrong and Law.
My hair swirled like potions boiling in a flask
I became a Communist comet
When the Beatles played Helter Skelter
I shot up in a rocket straight to the moon.
I learned war from Mars and Kingship from Jupiter
I danced on Saturn’s saucers and sauntered through sin
I drank celestial wine in goblets made of diamonds
I glittered like Bowie floating between the sexes
Like a spirit springing between life and death
Screwing the world and screwing myself
I declaimed my dominance and danced to defeat
And when I heard John Lennon Sing
I heard David pleasing G-d
I saw Abraham sparing Isaac
I saw Ishmael given his due
But this bird has flown
Copyright, David Gottfried, 2020
Inspired by A.E. Housman
And round that early-laureled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.
. A.E. Housman,
“To an athlete dying young”
It’s best to be an athlete dying young
With a garland briefer than a girl’s
The baby blue eyes will always seduce
A vodka martini with velvet vermouth
It’s best to die when you’re twenty-two
Blazing and beautiful, terribly true
Like Bobby riding a ‘68 wave
Burnished for eons, immaculate, brave
It’s best to be a poet clubbed by police
Harangued and Hanged for vistas of visions
But we shall roll away the stone
The lying law will atone
Its best to be John Lennon, slain by Reagan
When he won the 1980 election
His voice veritably kissed my ear
The death of his youth we needn’t bear
Its best to be Hendrix or Sacco and Vanzetti
Eternal marble you’ll never malign
Dying at the height of life
Eliding debasement and dogged decline
I wish I had died when I was twenty-two
With muscles and moxie and golden hair
A Vainglorious rolling stone of a queer
My eyes the saucers of a seer
Copyright, David Gottfried, 2017
LIVING ON 34TH STREET
By
David Gottfried
SEE:
The big fat women
With the big fat asses
In the red pants suits
swarming vulgar garish shopping hordes
SEE:
Fast food screaming at your stomach
Fried Ulcerating bacteria laden
Cheap Chinese food laced with rat droppings
EAT:
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
HEAR:
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
And 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 sale speakers
While turbanned men cower, clutching umbrellas, for five and ten dollars
SMELL:
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 bombaylike
Infections oozing into open wounds
in lost poor lonely AIDS wards
REASONABLY CONCLUDE:
This ghastly fucking shithole of a City
This malevolent mosaic of multi-colored lesions
This tapestry of purple karposis and bright red zorster
And menacing all-consuming bile-like green
Of rust-colored pneumococcus
And yellowish pseudomonas
And the vile viremic daymare of death-describing AIDS
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
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
(wanton woven over pork worms, hallucinating Kreplachs,
Stuffed like pink orifices with every variety of clap)
And this is before the entre
Vomit Hearty.
Copyright David Gottfried 1991
Ruby Tuesday, 1967 to 1990
Warm Purple Ebullience
A withering British chill
A cocktail of cocktails
A queen for a king
Sceptered Silvered Saintliness
Purple Lesioned Lifelessness
Swastikas Stars Sickles
Show me the valiant way to die
Copyright David Gottfried 2017
FOR ABNER LUIMA, BRUTALIZED BY THE NEW YORK CITY POLICE
By David Gottfried
The priests screw alter boys
The police shove toilet plungers into
Black men’s rectums
And David Bowie had it right:
"A cop knelt down and kissed the feet of a priest
And a queer threw-up at the sight of that"
And it was a Priest
Who ran the Nazi regime in Slovakia
And said "Bratislava needs no matzoh
All the Jews are dead"
And it was always a Priest and a pig
A dress and a night stick
A phallus always flaccid
That makes a hand a fist
And they're denouncing all the faggots
At Saint Patrick's day parades
They hoist flags on kilted crotches
Applaud archbishops' tirades
And they're swilling lots of whiskey
While they're busting guys for pot
And their bellies, they are heaving
With toxic livers spewing rot
They loved it when Hanoi was bombed
When panzers razed half of Russia
Commies, kikes and gooks they knew
Deserved the wrath of Prussia
Your sweet Jesus in his undies
With his legs crossed on a stick
The juiciest Jew for goyim like you
Inflames your little prick
Copyright, David Gottfried, 1998
VULGARITY AND ITS SANCTIFICATIONS
By
David Gottfried
Hiking the mountain
Spiking the breast
A Viking beholding the crucified crest
The nipple is knived
The blood it is let
The water and wine of a virginal chest
Cavernous coffin
Mildewed Recess
The darkness and musk of an aching abscess
Holy Sepulcher
Catholic Caricature
The Most Mothered Mary of Divine ingress
Chloroform Crown
Odor of Hope
Fistful of vistas of marvelous scope
The pain is assuaged
The salve gently soothes
Life is enchanting while rolling on dope
Copyright, David Gottfried, 1993