The Butterfly by Pavel Friedmann

THE BUTTERFLY by Pavel Friedmann 4/6/42 ============================= The last, the very last, So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow. Perhaps if the sun's tears would sing against a white stone.... Such, such a yellow Is carried lightly 'way up high. It went away I'm sure because it wished to kiss the world goodbye. For seven weeks I've lived in here, Penned up inside this ghetto But i have found my people here. The dandelions call to me And the white chestnut candles in the court. Only I never saw another butterfly. that butterfly was the last one. Butterflies don't live in here, In the ghetto.

About this poem
-------------------

This piece greatly influenced me in choosing the butterfly, and particularly the crumbling ashes of the butterfly in the symbolism of my work. As a Jewish poet, I found the work of this Jewish poet to be very moving and haunting. I intend to record this as a spoken word piece with accompanying photographic visuals.

The Sorrowful Midwest

"...with a head thats full of winters and the chill that bites and bleeds, with skin as thin as whispers as confusion stalks my sleep... im headed towards depression, bitter lonely me, in the sorrowful midwest where we all pretend so prettily to know where we are going.... just to know where we are going"

PSALMS 103:15-16 "Man, his days are like those of grass;he blooms like a flower of the field; a wind passes by and it is no more; its own place no longer knows it."

I Left My Home And Joined the Army

I left my home for the Army
I left my home for the Army
the day I left, my momma cried
said 'son, don't go, you're gonna die'
I left my girl
the baby still inside
said I'll be back soon
we'll have a better life
I left my girl
the baby still inside
tears on her face
she begged me not to die
These lonely days
in the Army,
i wanna run away
from this Army,

I left my home
for the Army,
packed my dreams away
for the Army
The day I left
my momma cried
begged me 'son, dont go you know your're gonna die
I quit my job
for this Army
life was hard in the Army
But I came back home
from the Army
Heard the guns report somewhere above me
and mommas breaking heart damning the god damn Army
In a cemetery two blocks down from
where I left my home and joined the Army

Dinner with Hyenas

What grows inside of these bones? The frail, frightened youth molts into a soldier running off to war. Paranoia gives in to purpose, fear into forged steel. He that once was lost at every turn, burns with a focus that consumes every hour. Running running running. faster further harder.

War is an angry siren, driving all that hear her screams to madness. My ears are on fire. Like a cat after its pray, my tongue thirsts for the blood of the oppressors.

I am a citizen of the great republic. I am a child of earth. I was wombed in the blood water mixture, brought into this world baptized in pain and suffering that I might lust for comfort only as the ancestor of slaves can.

Africa's dead haunt my waking hours. Children's bones beat like drums in my skull. To sit is to be silent. To wait is to be complicit. Iraq is my new home. War is my mother. I suck on the tit of chaos, nurse on the fattened breast of a mutilated corpse.

Every day the fire burns closer, and closer. I can smell the acrid stench of flesh. I shake against the monotony of my existence, knowing yet another orphan has died. Each death marks the passing of days.

Monday's bombs ripple crescendos in my Mogadishu blues. Tuesday brings wicked screams from Tutsi graves. Wednesday is the whirl of helicopter blades ghosting over the Western Sahara. Thursday the ghosts of Tikrit stand outside my window with bloody howls crying for help. Friday, Saturday, somedays every day is like an appointment in Samarra.

Death stalks my sleep.

The hyena dines with my dreams, his sickening laugh maddening as he thrusts spoonful upon spoonful of intestines into my soup. "STRENGTH! COURAGE!POWER! THE EYES OF YOUR ENEMY! EAT! EAT! EAT!"

I have tasted my fill of this madness. Still there is no escape.
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NOTES:
This piece continues to go under the knife. Each time I come back to it I find something that needs to be tweaked; another line that needs to be expanded upon, or a word that needs to be deleted. I am struggling to decipher the code of this poem, as there seems to be several pieces living inside of its skeleton.

Can we not pretend?

Is this the part where I am supposed to cry?
Is this the part where i should start to realize,
those aint shooting stars, those is fucking airplanes
taking lovers forever out of each others lives?

 

Dear Avraham Itzhak,

They tell me you speak to ghosts. Tell me a story. Make me believe. Show me what you see. Make me afraid.

This fading light

When you have not written for years, there is a silence that eats through your pen like a cancer works its evil through flesh. Willfully totally destroying beautiful thoughts before their birth.

How can this silence be so violent? the blood red turns to pale bleak grey and the rushing sounds of thoughts collide against the dull ache of NOTHING. There is a war inside of me. Everything is dead.

I am empty. void. a poet without words. a writer without ink. Gridlocked in a fucking impasse. Staring at the world through my rearview.

What happened? All of the promise that yesterday held, now...

Some people are afraid of spiders. rats. dogs. clowns. I am fucking terrified, petrified of failures. I dont look in the mirror anymore.

"You guys were sooooo cute! Like little cabbage patch dolls with afros!"

Flashback: August 1983

The yellow dinge of lacqured paint. The bareness of the room. Five brown skinned boys huddled in corners. Shivering with terror. The stench of feces and desperation.

Nikita said

"If you live among wolves you have to eat like a wolf."
- Nikita Khruschev