I Wish I Had Had a Beautiful Voice
By
David Gottfried
I WISH I HAD HAD A BEAUTIFUL VOICE
…
I want to write the longing lines
The lovely lyric longing lines
The lines that linger in your mind
The lines like arms that hold your chest
The lines like arms that protect the nest
The lines that coo and woo the heart
The lines that always do impart
The chocolate kisses from the start
That breathes the light into the dark
That shields your sap like bawdy bark
…
I wish I had a beautiful voice
A silken voice
A slithering voice
A sugar cubed acid voice
A sinuous Eden Gardened voice
A voice that doesn’t leave a choice
A voice absconding with your poise
A voice that vanquishes all your Troys
A voice that says I love you
,,,
I wish I had a rapturous gaze
A smiling lively fire gaze
A sneaky snaky pupil gaze
An eye-lashed lascivious gaze
The gaze that flays but warms your flesh
My gaze emblazoned on your face
That makes you blush and takes you away
…
I wish I had a musician’s ear
A perfect pitched shaman’s ear
An ear whose notes will make you dear
And ear whose love is so severe
Who makes the sounds so crystal clear
Who takes you to the strangest sphere
…
I wish I had the feeling hands
The strumming, loving, forceful hands
The holding, enfolding, eloping hands
The tuning, crooning, moving hands
The hands that whirled the water in the pool
The hands that wed the sonic tools
The hands that raised the moon at noon
The hands that smote the garish sun
That hands that made the children sing
The hands bequeathing endless spring
The hands that pressed your lips to mine
That made the music and made you mine
…
Copyright, David Gottfried, 2022
,,,,,,,,,,
LIVING ON 34TH STREET
--------
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
Absolutely love your new poem. And the photo too! Memories.