Two Poems by Michael H. Brownstein

 

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).