DETENTE
I’m done with this fiction
Formatting
The quest for
Heartbeat
Success
From the keyboard
Through the screen
Words pressed – compressed
Into hope – legitimacy?
Until then – I won’t run
I’ll push ‘send’ instead
I’ll swim
Slapping the water
Ending battles with the alphabet
Each lap increasing détente
Approval
Rejection
MAYBE
It has occurred to me
That
I may not live long enough
To love my neighbor
Indeed
We may all perish if we don’t learn (quickly)
To love one another
And maybe this is the deficiency – like the dinosaurs
That will bring about our extinction
ADULTING
Aristotle says;
Education is the best survival tool for old age
What Ari doesn’t know is that the
Truth found in education at night
Is now the lie used against you
Circling the continent twice by the
Time you awake
But you carry on as if it hasn’t
•
There’s frustration in being adult
When grown men fight in high-rise sandboxes
In suits bullet-proofed with dollar signs
But you carry on as if they don’t
•
There’s frustration in behaving grown up
When the agony of the human condition
Can be rationalized
And we carry on as if it isn’t
•
There’s frustration in being grown up
When the door to respond-in-kind
Remains locked by decency
Yet you pull on it anyway – as if it isn’t
•
There’s frustration in being grown-up
Knowing that civilizations have been lost to dreams of retribution
Ungovernable desires
For the “blood-dimmed tide”
To drown the babble
AND the rabble
But you desire it anyway
•
There’s frustration in being grown-up
Knowing the constancy of war
Feeling the subliminal connections between
Truth and chaos.
And we carry on anyway
Holding our truth in hands folded in supplication
As we kneel, unreasonable, at the edge of age
Amid the *signs that tell us to behave like adults
*Invisible ink
•
We drag our middle-class, care-worn hearts
Across years of capitalist tyranny
Through periods of relative decorum
Retreating waves allowing enemies
Time to deep-fake truth
And we must behave as if they aren’t?
QUARANTINE: Week Two
Like our electronic toys
The world has a reset button
When we ignore her overheating
She admonishes with flames
When we foul our nests
She sends the oceans in retort
And when we ignore the world’s health,
Its inhabitants’ well-being,
Choosing to chase vicious luxuries
Because – we can
She sends the enemy invisible
The virus incurable,
Barely namable
Scoffing dreams and schemes
Our world has reset
An algorithm for stimulus
Six-degrees of separation
Leaves room for empathy
We leave food for the hungry
We drive the immobile
We care for the sick
We handsomely tip the daring
Souls who venture into the
Empty streets of commerce
Bringing food to those of us with money – to eat
But, the natural world wants us
To open our eyes
She wants us apart enough
To see those lives
That will never change – even with
A conquered virus
She wants us to see the fallacy of
Putting profit before people
She wants us to see those
Who have always been
Quarantined by poverty
In spirit and in purse
Yes, the world has reset.
Sadly, the culling
Won’t be equitable
Reset people
Reset!
DEAR WHITE PEOPLE
I don’t want your liberal guilt
Your shocked alarm at blood long spilt
I truly don’t want your dismay
To matter more than a racist display
What I want when you’re alone
Standing among those blood and bone
Not a defense of my right to BE
But a defense of my right to take a knee
Scour your own heart of stereotype
It sieves through all the “tolerant” hype
I know when you think I’m not enough
When my vocabulary tends to call your bluff
I will know when the racist BS ends
When in absence I am just your “friend”
You’ll understand my anger at a human race
Those who won’t rise above limited base
And you’ll feel easy in the skin you own
Knowing we are ALL simply blood and bone
All working toward a peace un-shattered
Where there is no offense that our lives matter
G. Davis-Feldman ©2019
OPEN CARRY
I’LL BE A WOMAN MODIFIED
CARRYING MY WOMB
STRAPPED OUTSIDE
•
THAT FAMOUS CANAL
MY MOIST BANDOLIER
EXOSKELETON WEAPON
YEAH – YOU FEAR
•
I’LL TAKE IT INTO DONUT SHOPS
ICE CREAM & PIZZA MOM & POPS
I’LL MARCH WITH WOMEN
IN MODIFIED LIGHT
AND FIGHT MEN VOTING
TO RECANT MY RIGHTS
•
ALL WOMEN WANT
IN LIFE SO MEAN
TO SIMPLY HAVE
MORE RIGHTS
THAN AN AR-15
G.D. FELDMAN 6/2022

DETENTE
I’m done with this fiction
Formatting
The quest for
Heartbeat
Success
From the keyboard
Through the screen
Words pressed – compressed
Into hope – legitimacy?
Until then – I won’t run
I’ll push ‘send’ then
I’ll swim
Slapping the water
Ending battles with the alphabet
Each lap increasing détente
Approval
Rejection
REINCARNATION

I’LL BE A WOMAN MODIFIED
CARRYING MY WOMB
STRAPPED OUTSIDE
OPEN CARRY
MY MOIST BENDOLIER
EXOSKELETON WEAPON
STRIKING FEAR
I’LL TAKE IT INTO
DONUT SHOPS
ICE CREAM
and PIZZA MOM & POPS
LET LITTLE MEN KNOW
THE FEAR HAS STOPPED
I’LL FLICK THEIR HEADS
OFF MY SHOULDER WITH EASE
COMFORT-SEEKING VERMIN
I’LL NOT APPEASE
THEY’LL PROFESS TO ME
THEIR LOVE AND LIGHT
BEFORE VOTING AND
RECANTING MY RIGHTS
WHEN I RETURN
NO REGRESSION
TO THE MEAN
I’LL HAVE A LIFE WITH MORE RIGHTS
THAN AN AR-15
G.D. FELDMAN 6/2022
THINKING PAST AND PRESENT
The concept of the drive-thru is beautiful in its simplicity. First for burgers, then donuts, carwash, and now in our clean cars, we sit for precious (monetized) minutes waiting for a macchiato – extra sweet.
~~~
I was a mad-hungry freshman, rubbing last night’s party from my irritated eyes. The fall of 1969: Saturday morning, leaving McDonald’s with my breakfast, I stood on the paper-strewn corner kicking aside shredded protestations for peace. I waited for the light to change, barely noticing the air until I opened my mouth and stuck out my greedy tongue for a salty-sweet hit of those fries. I didn’t get it. Just a bitter sampling of leftover mace, telling me that this was the intersection that ended a peace march the day before. Mace had been successful in dispersing the peace-mongers.
It would be years before I would connect our drive-thru lives to the forces behind the mace – that clung to the air that angered me for not tasting like fries.
Converting my guilt to shame.
~~~
Six months into Covid – it is a Saturday morning and I’m driving mad and unmasked to the store. According to county health officials, this epidemic was going to be a long haul. I live in a blue state but in a red county where obedient people listen to a president (who likely failed chemistry) wax poetic and pathetic about science. I turn into the shopping center parking lot, halted by the line of cars patiently waiting for a turn at the Dunkin-Donuts window. Not me! I pull out of line, opting to circumnavigate the deserted K-Mart building, creating a lateral line of attack on my destination. I wait for a few shoppers to withdraw, increasing my chances of surviving what I’m sure will be a pandemic—four people exit. The coast is clear – I don my mask and make a beeline to the front door, where I grab a cart. I breathe shallow dizzying breaths – as I study the store’s arrangement. I am cautious as I approach the domestics on the left, where, after a brief reconnaissance, I make my way out of the Finger Lakes, grabbing a few bottles of good whites. I stand for a moment in the archway leading to the reds. I know the need for urgency but linger anyway at the mercy of ratings. I am deaf to the sounds of my bacchanalian brain stuttering at the sight of French, Italian, Portugal, South African, Spain, and Venezuelan reds– mesmerizing blood-shot pinwheels in a firefight – hand-to-hand combat for space in my cart.
In my obedience to Doctor Fauci’s biblical warning that this plague will be a long haul, I fill my cart – my private Arc – two bottles of each.
~~~
My Spectrum service is broken – I mean down, not working, caput, fin, nothing. For almost ten days, I’ve watched a platoon of Spectrum trucks trace and retrace the road in front of my house to no effect. My hope for a temporary outage had sprung eternal. But now I see the drive-bys as a ploy –like a Russian May-Day parade – a show of strength offering hope where, only a few know, there is none. The outage has been long enough for me to finish Johnathan Foer’s beautiful five-hundred-page tome on love and Judaism. And long enough for me to fear my unread emails growing to legion; so many requests for my dollars to save dogs, cats, goats, donkeys, and sometimes people. Should I worry?
Spectrum seems not to worry. The billing department is sanguine, telling me I will be reimbursed ten dollars for every four hours I’ve been without service. For the first week, Spectrum outage was never, like it is now, continuous. It was more like three-hours of outage interrupted by twenty minutes of service. Even if I had the internet’s stupefying privilege of a misinformed populace right now, I could see the hand of capitalism slapping me in the face with “free enterprise.” I am free, I’ve surmised, to go without or pay dearly. I know where I, the consumer, stand. I even know where I’ll fall if I tumble down my stairs. I may or may not survive Spectrum or my fall – who knows? My cellphone won’t – having been rendered useless in an emergency because of this Spectrum outage.
HAPPY NEW YEAR – 2022
January 3rd and the Sharp Shinned Hawk has returned to the feeder
Dropping into the cedar bush waiting for an old, slow dove
But it’s the red squirrel who drives my husband crazy
Rick and his wife Judy have taken a winter
Residence in our walls. Their bedroom quarrels
Legendary in the ceiling above my husband’s office.
I know the nights have been rough when I lay abed
Long into the morning stirred from slumber at the loud mutterings
Of my beloved below
“Fuck you, Rick!”
Yes, from the man who marched under his
banner of long hair
Fighting for a hopeful harvest for the world
Fighting against ugly forces intrinsic in warring hearts
My peace man
The silhouette against all those night fires
Set to capitalism
Arms always raised in righteous revolutionary anger
Never in surrender
Now sits at his desk perusing
The hopelessness in today’s headlines
Wishing the Sharp Shinned Hawk
Took prey larger than the dove.
G.D.F. 1/3/22