Archive 03/05/10 - (3)

   

Speaking from Experience

                                                                  

Hey, face it, call it like it is or isn't —

I don't really give a good flaming shit —

But don't gloss over death;

It's no laughing matter, that's for goddamn sure.

You so much as breathe "Oswiecim" into the conversation,

You're talking the beginning and the end,

The start and the finish, the aleph and the tav...of existence.

 

Before you know it, more sudden than a knock on your door,

By God's enlightened Gestapo,

Your breath owes its allegiance to death's brethren,

Must be prepared to confess its faith in the Millennial Reich

Or recite the Shema and Kaddish, like crazy,

In the time it takes to let a few Giftgas-crystal pellets

Come clanking down a flue, into your heart's chambers.

 

Tonight, seven decades after mein ghost's Kampf,

A jubilee-and-a-score of years after its ignition,

I tread, scared shitless, for the life of my memory,

In the airy ocean over Poland, hoping to descend below the ozone,

Reclaim my faith as a German Jew laid low,

Before Auschwitz, like Atlantis, sinks into history's myth,

Slips beneath Earth's surface, speaks, nevermore, of death.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                          

                                               

 

03/05/10 - (3)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
       

 

 
   
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