What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping?
Excursions to the dark side of the moon
By
David Gottfried
Incidentally, shock treatment was first used in Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy. After it wowed the European tyrants, Bellevue Hospital in New York City promptly began using it to tame the deviates in its psych wards.
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Just a few oldies but goodies:
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Split Down the Middle
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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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A poet to the lawyers
And a lawyer to the poets
Severed serrated soul
My genius is too whole
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I add the lilt of art to logic
And the steel of reason to art
To make a science that sings
And an art of savage stings
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A rock and 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 son
My last name means free of G-d
Imbued with chosen rays
I swear to singe the common haze
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A Poetic Essay on the Etiology of Mental Illness
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When I was six my Father died of Asthma
And when I was seven my Doctor Uncle showed me x rays of lung cancer
And when I was eight, if I tried very hard, I saw Tuberculosis germs flying in the room
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And the TB is in the holy Jewish tabernacle, sniggering like a white fish on a rye bread
Like a toothless, evil relative pinching my cheeks as if she wants to draw blood
Like the leeches lurking in the back of my Grandfather’s drug store
Almost as sharp as the scalding chicken soup made by my Nanny
The Matzoh Ball Tumors bigger than my Mother’s boobs
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Because my Mother was anxious, anxious, anxious
About goyim and infections, goyim and infections
And so we kneel before huge penicillin shots
And get fucked up the ass.
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And the Freudian child psychiatrist tells me that my penicillin shots are penises
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And I know I am a sodomite at the age of nine
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And now they tell me that my genes made me schizophrenic
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ON MY MADNESS
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I stand aloof, august, austere
I silence suns with bluest sphere
These eyes that singe and flare and glare
And never, ever, shed a tear
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My blood is royal, cold and blue
The world at large I do eschew
The "friends" I've known have not a clue
Why I stew a witch's brew
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I hate you, hate you, yes I do
The way my mind is so askew
The world's a gawking, catty crew
Listen to the lies they spew
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They whisper in the dark of night
Guffaw and giggle in broad daylight
"He's crazy, he suffers, see his plight"
Lot's wife’s progenic blight
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In cafes, talk shows -- everywhere
But especially in the sophist's lair
The moral mice, amused, they care
For good copy, cash to spare
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And so they say some wayward gene
Made me mad, distraught with spleen
My ideas they need not glean
Neuronal quirks of blood unclean
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With lots of psychiatric spite
And technocratic talk quite trite
They claim their drugs will set things right
In tactless tracts of thinking light
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But I can tell you such a tale
Of horror and an infant's wail
Of how the World made me assail
And rave and rant and hit like hail
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So come survey this paper trail
Of poems, polemics, that pierce the veil
Let your mind set-out and sail
And you'll be capsized in a gale
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Wondering if I Have Become a Son of a Bitch
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The eddy draws me in
The quicksand covers me up
Entombed, marooned, the jig is up
The fire has burned its last
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But I hover in the winds
A wafting witch of doom
Bequeathing certain gloom
My member becomes a broom
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I am a cancer and a curse
Ejaculating lava love
I seed eternal disbelief
I desiccate every dove
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I am evil, evil, to the core
My laser eyes glare and bore
Like a magnifying lens
I summon fires to the fore
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That burn and singe your petty heart
And take every organ apart
Into your balls I throw my darts
And clot your vessels with infarcts
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Dissected, Resected and never respected
Your half dead body writhes in pain
Your mind is stupid or insane
Your buggered belly’s pierced, distended
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And when I look upon my deed
The debasement of a fine young man
I realize why my ancient creed
Was so irate at his elan
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We cannot love and so we hate
We cannot create, so we destroy
The pride, the Phallus, we’ll ablate
While we declaim we’re god’s envoy
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The Vortex of Masochism
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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
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Your very being’s now subverted
Male and female inverse
A boy in pomades with a purse
Pantomimes will be rehearsed
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So cruelly you’re traduced
To a midget you’re reduced
Regression is induced
And the penis is recused
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And your expanding girth
Will subsume your manly worth
You won’t find a speck of mirth
On the sordid, wicked earth
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Inspired by Housmann
“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”
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. A.E. Housmann,
“To an athlete dying young”
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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
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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
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It’s best to be a poet clubbed by police
Harangued and Hanged for vistas of visions
We shall roll away the stone
The lying law will atone
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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
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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
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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
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Copyright, David Gottfried, 1997 to 2017