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Sometimes the way to know a person's heart and soul best is through their poetry.  In addition to serving as a window into my internal landscape, I hope my poems may serve to open or illuminate something within you.

MIDLIVES

Let’s move
Somewhere
Where no one dies
or feels lonely
or wakes up and feels a rock in her breast
where it used to be warm and soft

Let’s get away
where it never rains
and gray is only a color
that looks great with black
and brings out my eyes

Let’s go
where passion stays
and juice lives
and dry only applies
to the weather

Let’s live
where color and love and light live

Let’s take a permanent
Death vacation

Because if we don’t get out of here soon
I won’t be able to bear it
Truly.

7/24/07

FLUB DUB

It was so much easier
when you didn’t beat so hard
and red
When life was something to observe
from a distance
a pool for toe dipping

When did you stretch so wide and deep
and when did each moment
grow so painful, and so dear?

When did the perfect soft curve of his ear
the langorous yawn and stretch of the cat
and the fearfully dense red of summer tomatoes
become so precious,
and so sharp?

7/24/07

LOOK

Look at that
Monarch butterfly on a Black-Eyed Susan
in the morning summer sun.
Is it happy?
Blissful?
Does it know?

Does the mourning dove
bring forth its plaintive elegy
to remind itself that day
is fleeting?

I don’t think Nature’s beings know
anything but the glory of Now.

I don’t want to think anymore
Stop me
Please.

7/24/07

WRITER’S CRAMP

I am a block of frozen feeling.

I need something more abstract than black and white words that
leave so much out.

Thoughts and feelings suspended in the limbo in between the words,

Insects frozen in ice on a nightsilent winter lake.

I am those insects, tiny, inconsequential, frozen by my own fear and the carelessness of people.

One quick swipe of icy steel blades, a cruel word, a glance, a sneer, and I am dead in my tracks, immobile, open.

In this openness I may seem meek and unable to defend myself, afraid to inherit the earth, more afraid to inhabit it.

I refuse to harden to stone.  I’ll stay in ice, for ice melts, and there is courage in openness.


RSVP

What if I gave an affair, and nobody came?
I could put in my party hat, dab every zone with lovescents, silken myself to slithers and you could
With your cold and vague-away eyes
See past me to a speck on the wall.
Woman hater.

I love you dammit.


HER

What’s she like, this wife of yours?
This midget thing who has such a grip on your love.
Is she breathtaking?
Is she your mother?
Who is she?
Does she beat you when you’re bad?
Let’s find out.
Be bad with me.


TWO ISN’T ALWAYS BETTER

I wrote love poems once before.
Copiously.
To a man away in a cell, my lover,
scarred arms and harsh reality staring back at him.
We made and broke a child within me
and he retreated into dreams.
I still write love poems.
Twice a year, dutifully.
To my sweet, loving and realistic husband.
Happy Birthday and anniversary and harsh reality staring back at me.
Reality that I am tied to him as my lifeline to what is
And the pain of knowing it’s you I really want
But its both of you I love.


DISCOVERY

Let me through your moat
Past the hurts and fears of years past
Let me touch your love-scars with sweet hands
Let me comfort you.
Let me love you.
I’ve waited too long to give up now.
Is your controlled passion a storefront
To a shallow, empty man
Or are you a rich garden of surprises
Surrounded by a forbidden gray gate.

Tell me.


VISITING DAY

The ride was tedious
Winding through the Catskills in your mother’s big blue boat
Of a Cadillac.

We moved our lips at each other
Words bounced off the closed windows and froze in the rarefied, conditioned air.

I ate a banana, the air smelled sweet.

The brick building ahead was dark, surrounded by electric fences.
Muffled radios behind bars
An occasional chocolate hand flickered through
Going down for the last time.

A whiskery guard let us through the gate
Sun bounced off his shades
Guns glinted
Teeth yellowed and stained.

We walked through the gauntlet of outstretched arms
Catcalls, obscene promises
Down the narrow cement walk to the visitors line
Checked bags, gave names, watched feet.

“We’re here to see Harry Davis” she said
Her loud voice brayed past the long line
Like she told the headwaiter “Table for Two”
Such a faded, drunken socialite.

We waited on a long wooden bench
You appeared through a door
Guards on either side.
You asked for a cigarette
She gave you a carton.

We stared at each other.

EVENING U.N.

The small park seems at first to be a last remnant of green on this crazy city patchwork.
Faded benches sat upon by frazzled gray ladies and reaching lovers hands.
I almost fear the benches, I see years of tired vagabonds, encrusted bodies resting like chicken bones on these green painted wooden beds.
Maybe even vomit, or disease.
My flowered skirt perches uncertainly.
U.N. Policemen saunter and stare, talk and adjust their gun belts, boys with toys, guarding the towering glass play pen.
If we cannot make peace with all this massive guarded vastness,
How can I expect to make peace with the man at home
Emerging from his shower
Wondering where I’ve gone?


OBJECT OF MY AFFECTION

Every curve and sway of Nature
Swooping swallow
Bending willow in the storm
upturned petal
Has an unconscious perfection
An arc no human hand can duplicate
A clumsy mechanical aping
Of an unreachable ideal

So it is my Love for You
follows that painful and perfect curve
But your Human nature cannot help but
Make you a misshapen obelisk
Twisted by the push and pull
the turn of the screw
of Life’s torture Rack.

But my Love for You sees the dance of the swallow
In the curve of your neck
And a rose’s gentle opening
In your Smile.

SON

I remember you
before your eyes got hurt
and hard.
When your smile went through and through you,
instead of the one
you practice in front of the mirror
until you get just the right
Esquire-esque insouciance.

I remember you
when I was your Alpha and Omega
the Sun to your Moon
instead of this loser
who never finished college
or made a killing anywhere.

All those years of tenderness
have faded into a pale sachet
tucked in your drawer of memories
almost devoid of scent.

I’m the curator of those days,
the lone caretaker of our forgotten garden.
Waiting for you to see the blossoms
Among the weeds of disillusionment.

Cover me with flowers when I die
And sing me a song you wrote for me

Play your guitar as I burn
And I’ll live again.

7/24/07

THE BOY IN THE MAN

Look you said
at my Bar Mitzvah pictures.
Unearthed during one of the
many purges of our
“detritus of a lifetime”
as you put it.

The Bar Mitzvah album survived the coup,
saved from Frank the junk man
and his longbed truck.

Thick burgundy leather trim
and gold lettering
Picture after picture
Of Aunt Sophie, Uncle Milt
And crazy Cousin Lenny who
lost that gleam
and became a dentist.

Look at you, my husband,
Clowning next to your worried, stooped father
How did your high spirits survive
Life’s constant hammer?

I can’t see you now
without seeing the gleeful boy
in the man.

7/24/07

Tenderness

To well with tenderness

is to laugh and cry at once.

To feel the drop of each moment roll down

your face along the curves of your flesh and return

to earth where it began

is to swim in the sea of now.

Cover, defend, swath in unconscious gauze

or let time and enlivened senses do their work

in softening you and opening you to the pith of your life

where bud is new and leaves unfurl

and love suffuses every cell.

Let jaded glance and hardened eye pass over

and wish for your softness as it chides, derides,

subsides.

Lord forgive them for they know not what they do.

In fighting over crumbs they miss the sky

And love falls on deaf and ravening ears.

It will return if only on death’s door to remind them

What they missed, and what is waiting for them

in the light.

They yearn and it shall answer, they pray and shall receive

the love that has always loved, those who could hear

no more than those who could not.

I pour my tenderness over you, my love for you

is boundless as it comes from the spark of desire

that formed all things seen and unseen.

Believe or not, it does not matter, for it IS just the same.

From tiny floating seed to unseen Titanic angels,

my love is unchanging, it is the same.

e.k. deutsch

4/26/09

SCAPEGOAT

She said it so casually

In her swivel chair

That’s what you are you know

The Scapegoat

Keeper of sins, bearer of blame

Heaped on the open hearted sensitive

Who cried in her crib and yearned for

Mother’s absent arms and whisper of love

That got lost in the mail

The sweet little pretty one

Quiet in her corner

Eclipsed by louder, more strident inmates

In our suburban chaos.

Cinderella.

Isn’t this normal?

Isn’t this what I deserve?

But I loved them so

As they whipped and scorned

Father drank, ranted and fumed

His father visited us in the night

With probing fingers

And still, I loved them so

Until something broke inside me

And I said Enough

My goat fangs protruded

Coat thickened

Hooves hardened and yellowed

And they hated me even more

Because I spoke their secret

Bleated loud and strong with hidden tears

And boundless hurt and rage

I am alone in the wind

Penniless orphan face pressed against the glass

Of the Bloody Bakery

Divorce them, she said

As she swiveled and regarded me

With hooded eyes

I did.

I am.

I will.

And I am alone.

As always.

But now I know.

A small seedling grows in me

That believes in healing

Please root quickly

Before I lose my nerve

Sink back to entropy

And become nothing again.