MINOR HITS AND FAZED COOKIES
MINOR HITS AND FAZED COOKIES
By
David Gottfried
I am providing another respite from the pedantry of my polemics (But, come on, those essays are often very funny). I wasn’t sure what to term this, but then I remembered how the Rolling Stones labeled a bunch of songs that were not as famous as songs such as “Satisfaction” and “Brown Sugar.” They called the collection “Big Hits and Fazed Cookies.” In a nod to his imperial majesty the English Mick, I will call this Minor Hits and Fazed Cookies. (If anyone can tell me what a fazed cookie is I will mail him a grand prize in the form of a check for 68 cents.)
THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME
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 then 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
IN THE DARK ROOM OF MY MIND
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 my enemies will praise that 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
Their 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
You gather ‘round and laugh and jeer
TO BE
Oh, to be a mad dog and an Englishman
To fight with the panache of Bernardo in West Side Story
Assuming a stance, like a knight with a lance
Reveling in the gorgeousness of Renaissance garb
To wear shorts so short they stun like a retort
To wear T shirts so tight they incite a Latin night
To wear socks so high they tower with preening pride
To don the sneaker as fortuitous as Cinderella’s Slipper
To be as tough as the mightiest straight guy
To be as pretty as the loveliest homo dancer
To revel in cosmetics with florid French names
To scream like Elizabeth Taylor, to kill like a Marine
.
To be the heroic hybrid of countervailing dreams
To be a corpus collusum that welds my selves together
That unites the antipodes without cancelling them out
Like a ten inch dick and a ballet ass.
TO WALK AS TALL AS G-D
To go higher and higher and leap over bastions and barricades
Like divas storming the octives, like Stalin storming the occident
To see the antipodes of my sexualities come together and make
Holy Nuclear Fission
To be that singular, inhuman white light
Of imperial disdain
To focus my eyes like a magnifying glass and make people burn
To singe and make you cringe and to pierce like a syringe
To breathe fire and Ice, splice vile and nice, at the throw of the dice
To walk as tall as God
To have jewels for eyes
The orbs, the center of gravity in every bewitched room
My lashes, black as polished onyx
My whites, pearls
My pupils, Lucy’s kaleidoscope eyes
And the stare and glare as kingly as Lawrence Olivier
To wear capes and scarfs of linen, silk and satin
To eat off the china of Manchu emperors
To don the glowering crucifixes of Popes who ordained War
To howl like the dungeons of German castles
To scream like guillotines,
To convulse like electric chairs
To erupt like Mount Vesuvius and lay waste to the world
THE SENIOR BOYS IN HIGH SCHOOL
My idols were the senior boys in Stuyvesant high school
Who threw sulfuric acid at NYC police
When Nixon invaded Cambodia.
I felt so spunky and cool
Shouting through the Streets
“Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh
The NLF is gonna win”
I broke into Republican rallies and cursed Der Fuhrer
Richard Nixon
And barely came out alive
When I was 14 and told that I was a faggot because I opposed the War
I threw bricks on my antagonists
(I was on a roof adjacent to the schoolyard in Mc Kinley Junior High)
and was duly arrested (This is True)
And five pigs said, ”up against the wall.”
Pilloried and bludgeoned
I knew I had become a man
MY ENGLISH FIXATION
The insouciant stance of an Englishman
Dazzling manners, haberdashery never bland
Elite and discreet and with sneering conceit
Proud kingly power and queenly deceit
The voices ironic, iconic sarcasm
The syllables sling like Lancelot’s swords
To joust like a knight beaming and bright
To ride mighty steeds with the ease of a breeze
The manor houses are grand but staid
The Gray walls as tall as a fjord
The rococo roof is a preening Tiara
A chandelier cackles, a dungeon door slams
So take me on a mystery tour
Down trap doors and caverns to ancient abodes
To the misty, melancholic onset of England
To Castles and classes and stark, silver swords
TO THE INNOCENCE 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
While the rivulets of wrinkles
Dissipate the Niagara of Life
A smooth and glowing face
Beckons like a peach 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
COME ON BABY LIGHT MY FIRE
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
Copyright David Gottfried 2018 to 2020