Ideas and Poems Brewed with a Little Help from my Friend, Lysergic Acid
Poems and Ideas about Jews, Germans, Homosexuals, Mad Men and Other Nightmare Visages Streaking through Urban America at Midnight.
By
David Gottfried
For the Poor Old Irish Catholics I knew in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn
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Steak and Scotch and Cigarettes
Jesus and Mary and Little Joe McCarthy
Jack and Bobby and Drunken Teddy
Of such was my neighborhood made
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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
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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
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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
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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
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The homes were abodes for the shut-ins and fearful
By the time you were forty you knew you were old
You wore old man’s pants and diapers and catheters
And prayed for the day you would drop down and die
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The fundamental immorality of Christianity:
Christianity teaches us that in order for us to be saved someone who was utterly perfect, Jesus, has to suffer torture and death. The idea that a wonderful person must die for another person to prosper is grotesque. This inculcates the belief that we must always kill certain individuals in order to be redeemed. As such Christianity was a regression from Judaism. The Jews only sacrificed animals and after the Babylonian exile the Jews sacrificed neither humans nor animals. The Christians are a throwback to the ancient Carthaginians who killed four-year-old children to appease the gods.
Christians may counter this argument by contending that Jesus said many beautiful things in the Sermon on the Mount and on other occasions. But the Christian people, throughout the ages, don’t concentrate on the words of Jesus; they were fixated on the cross and blood and the gore – and the desire for vengeance toward the Jews.
But the most important problem is this: We don’t become good, and we shouldn’t be “saved,” because Jesus, reputedly a fantastic guy who should not have been crucified, suffered and died on the cross. Such an attitude is akin saying, “When A kills B and eats him for dinner, A is strengthened.” Christianity purports to preach goodwill and kindness but it is dog-eat-dog in its belief in the mechanism to get to heaven: We get to heaven by getting Jesus killed and then accepting Jesus as our savior. A good religion would preach that one is saved by doing good.
Tuesdays and Psychiatric Emergencies
Psychiatric emergencies and suicides spike on Tuesdays, presumably because after the high hopes and speed trips of the weekend have crashed, on Sunday and Monday, the despair deepens until the sorry, solitary man shoves a knife into his chest, often during the deepest gloom of a Tuesday afternoon.
The preceding thought is either something I read, in a scientific journal, or something I dreamed because it seemed so inexorably true.
If this thought came to me in a dream, maybe I had been listening to “Ruby Tuesday,” by the Stones, or “Tuesday Afternoon,” by the Moody Blues, before I had gone to sleep.
“Ruby Tuesday” was written by Brian Jones, who died, in his twenties, in his swimming pool, two years after writing Ruby Tuesday.
Some people have said Brian drowned in his pool because he had asthma. That assumption is preposterous. Although the hallmark of asthma is difficulty in breathing, this difficulty often only occurs on dry land. Ironically enough, asthmatics are often great swimmers and a couple of decades ago more than half of Australia’s Olympic swim team consisted of asthmatics. Similarly, my Mother reported that my Father’s asthma was so bad that on most nights he had to inject himself with adrenaline. Although his asthma was very bad, when he went to Coney Island, he swam out so far that the lifeguards used to yell at him to return to shore. Asthmatics, in this regard, are like artists or sages. They are mediocre at all quotidian and common pursuits, but they streak and shine like something stellar when they confront the arduous and beguiling. They are like Lillian Hellman, who said that she was terrible at doing “easy” things, and profoundly proficient at doing that which is difficult.
I think that Brian’s glamour and glory was so gorgeous that it had to be fatal. Listen to Ruby Tuesday. The heavenly sounds connote a mind that was too good for the muck of this world and the common, vulgar herdlike men we suffer to know.
Lose your Dreams or You Could Lose Your Mind, In Life unkind
Lose your dreams and you could lose
Your mind, in life unkind
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Ruby Tuesday, the Rolling Stones,
1967
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The rubies and Tuesday afternoons
Of the Moody Blues and the headiest Stones
The scarlet sunsets of blood shot eyes
The love that shined and its demise
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Weed and Cream and the jagged Jeans
Frayed and framing the butt and the crotch
The plaintive voice, the foolhardy choice
To plant your lips on the bravest boy
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To strive to seek to never yield
So Camelot, convincing, so Kennedy, so dead
And your fair and golden hair
Blushes with red, fleeting and fair
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That ass, that alabaster mast
That muscles your way into the port
Uncorking the wharf’s kegs of beer
All cops as impotent as a steer
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The sun also rises and falls
The horizon bleeds with softer reds
The oxygen was poached and preyed
Starved of love and the lustful shade
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Split Down the Middle
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I’m a poet to the lawyers
And a lawyer to the poets
Severed Serrated Soul
My Genius is too Whole
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A gay to the Straights
And a Straight to the Gays
Entertaining all Urges
I am subject to all Purges
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I add the lilt of art to Science
And the steal of reason to art
To make a Science that Sings
And an art of savage stings
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A Rock ‘n Roller to the staid
Starched and suited to the rowdy
My fickle emotive spring
Spans the spectrum to each wing
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I was named for Saul’s heir
My last name is Free of G-d
Imbued with Chosen Rays
I swear to singe the common haze
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Germans hated Jews, In Part, because they feared they might be like Jews.
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German animus towards Jews, for the most part, is not related to any feelings, on the part of Germans, that they are like Jews. However, a small but significant fraction of German antipathy toward Jews might derive from a fear of being like Jews.
By persecuting the Jews, the German says I am above the Jews, I am not like the Jews. For example, a straight man who fears he may be homosexual may violently lash-out at the homosexual. In his violence, he believes he underscores his difference from, and differentiates himself from, the homosexual.
Why Germans felt like Jews:
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a) Versailles made them feel persecuted – like Jews
b) Their fear of encirclement made them feel persecuted, like Jews
c) German minorities in Eastern European were, according to Germans, allegedly persecuted – like Jews
d) Many German minorities in Eastern Europe were entrepreneurs and successful capitalists, like Jews.
e) Germans and Jews both revered scholarship and hard work
f) Germany was not a unified state until 1870 when the Franco-Prussian War welded Germany together. Their failure to achieved statehood may have made the Germans feel like Jews, stateless since Rome slaughtered ancient Zion.
g) Yiddish is very much like German as so much of the vocabulary is straight out of German. But it sounds very, very different as the tones and the emotions infused in the voice seem so much more sensitive and emotional than German. This frightens the Germans because Yiddish makes them realize that a few changes in tone and timbre can make German sound like Yiddish, and the emotional richness of Yiddish is frightening to a man who represses his emotions.
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Playing Ball in 1967
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My bat hit the ball and it cracked
Like onions frying only amplified
And the kitchen smells wafted me over the rainbow
And I took first base
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I could do anything in 1967
When we won the Six Day War,
I ran into the Syrian Bakery screaming:
“We beat you
We beat you”
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I was nine and high as Moses on Mount Sinai
And when my Mother made a Kosher for Passover Cake
The spices and the ginger made me climb Jacob’s ladder to
heaven
Even though Kosher for Passover Food does not leaven
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Heavy Thoughts Inspired by The Godfather
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When I watch Godfather, Part 2
And see Michael’s car arrive at Hyman Roth’s house
I feel like we are visiting Aunt Ida in Long Beach
In the looonggest island, Long Island
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All the old people are the same
The men wear their pants up to their chins
The brunette women are born again blondes
The TV giggles like grandkids no more
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The basketball hoop’s a vaginal ring
lasagna dinners are lean cuisine
Old women go to the gym
And go home alone and learn to be grim
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The granny asses large and soft
Are pruned, attuned to never bloom
The happy rolls of rollicking fat
Now spindly, unkindly, pickled in brine
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The Passover seders of silver and flames
Are aluminum graced by cheesy bulbs
The slow and simmering chicken soup
Is saline solution with yellow dye
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The gefilte fish baked with love
Are dead fingers in grocery stores
The horseradish that lit up your tongue
Is the blood libel of the Protocols
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The brothers and sisters are dead, tied in tubes
The only children scream all night long
Your American children want to die
Coaxing the covid, our angel of death
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FOR A BEAUTIFUL, BRILLIANT, PSYCHOTIC GIRL WHO SCORED 780 ON THE VERBAL SECTION OF THE SAT WHILE ON THORAZINE
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All the girls in Villanova
Writing Villanelles
They dress in white and heather
And other nice pastels
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They sing the springtime weather
And dream of fainting spells
On divans, reclining splendors
Minds whirl like carousels
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On blonded, butter faces
Strawberried hair -- it swells
With mesmerizing graces
The lunar princess tells
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A story that she wrote
In a code that only dwells
Inside her maddened mind
Where language chimes like bells
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She makes new words for pleasure
The discontent it quells
She sucks them like pastilles
Her salves for special hells
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