Anniversary

Αυτή είναι μία από τις λίγες φορές που φιλοξενώ στο μπλογκ το κείμενο κάποιου άλλου. Ευχαριστώ τον OAF για την εμπιστοσύνη του. 

 There’s not an audience for this text, except my chosen few: the other women, these fags fucking those other respectable discreet fags denouncing their faggothood with wedding bands and my G-d whom I love like none other and who’d probably fashion a Hell entirely for me or trebuchet me over to the Christians so I can be their problem. My G-d, the G-d of David the Other and Shlomo the magus poet Melech of yearnings galore -as of now. Maybe all my fathers would be ashamed of me, for I hold a mirror to their own shamefulness, their lacking of, their shortcomings ― ah look, I’m reflecting Giants; Avraham, Yakov, and later Baruch, Karl, and Allen and Larry. I am a little man, following a tradition of little men, trying to make sense of it all, with loaded words, chutzpah,  a bagful of songs, and woven cloths to cover our shoulders lifting our vellum scrolls of telling and retelling and making sense of, of trying to make sense of, of not making any, a perpetual puncturing of holes, some calligraphy, some embroidery, some borders.

Father Avraham, father Moshe, I’m sorry to overstep as such. I’m sorry I wear your declaration on the inside of my palm, but please, understand, my insolence falls into the great tradition of Jewish failure; I know I took the word you spoke to our Adonai and poked it with ink into my skin to declare myself before a man in conjunction with myself. I was made of that kind of irreverence. I’d say I repent for it, say I know how to and what that entails. But I don’t. I want that para-phrase covering my eyes when the Shema drips down my lips thrice daily and on Shabbat, I want the false word hooding my lid. Hineni, Hineni, Hineni, I’m ready my lord, Hinenu, Hinenu, behold us, my fathers. I’m a little man, claiming his vanity. Claiming my first, my last, my always, my steadfast failure. My sentence, spelled out steadily, my bliss, then; such an abyss. My month of Iyar, in my room.

I will never be more myself than in this split second reflection of me I caught in your eyes last time I saw you, three years ago 
That snotty Oxford alumnus wrote that April is the cruelest month; he was correct 
And I hate to prove poets right 
For it only adds to their audacity 

Behold me, my Jerusalem 
Banging my head against the Wailing Wall.