THE MEANING OF
MIS-IDENTIFICATION
I did not come from
someplace else--
I came from here
the son of parents who
also came from here.
What of it?
Somehow stones on Yom
Kippur were enough--
swallowing people whole,
a garden of sin and a
garden of darkness,
a drunk and a
prostitute.
Everything degrades:
thoughts of honest
mitzvah,
ideologies beyond the
compact of one to another,
Reform becomes stuffing.
Last year for the first
time
I thought about Yom
Kippur in November,
did not even recall Rosh
Hashanah,
and needed real
forgiveness--
not a simplicity of
stone skipping across water
or the first line of the
Shema,
or how David was not
punished for allowing another to die
for the sake of
intimacy.
Twice in my life I did
not fast,
I talk aloud to God,
I do not know who I am
anymore,
I am not misaligned.
A PAUSE ON ANGER
I wake with another
Walter Mitty moment,
outside the sky on
fire--Merlin's powers
not strong enough to
save the clouds--
Excalibur bent, and
nearby,
one tell tale heart
away, her body
splashes into angry
disappointment lighting
the final chords of the
old growth forest.
Where is Robin Hood?
William Tell?
She ignites the tail of
the two cities,
rushes into the foray of
the lost child,
and discovers too late
Black Beauty
can save the little
women during the war.
Still there is the
abandoned man.
the thrown away
hysteria, the grip of metal,
the degradation of sword
and myth,
Venus arriving in a
shell full of carcasses,
Thor misjudging his
returning hammer
and the blood forms a
spider web of deceit
across the embers in the
burnt black sky.
No, nothing was a dream.
The tornado,
the large ugly gusts of
wind, the huge hail
swept Dorothy from me
into the anger
and void of disruption
ruptured even more.
Someone has to put out
the fires,
but since you are no
longer here beside me,
who can it possibly be?
I cannot tell.
Michael H. Brownstein’s latest volume of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else was recently published by Cholla Needles Press (2018).
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