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    years we still try to observe it’s
    funny, our habits don’t
    die like we do
    On Rosh Hashanah,
    which means the head of
    the year in that language in
    Heaven you can ask for
    God for one thing
    On Rosh Hashanah,
    which means the Head
    of the Year in that language
    in Heaven you can ask
    God for one favor,
    one lack,
won’t insult Him by asking for that assuredly One thing only that might be missing,
    that you might be missing,
    even in a heaven that’s yours—

    P eople ask for
    E verything on that Day of Days,
    A sk for bad knees again, bad teeth, ask for
    C ar problems, erectile dysfunction, ask for
    E verything except what they
    need.

Maturing To Infinity
     

 
     
     
    A boy grows. It’s inevitable as is any Aba’s pride, by which I mean heartache—the two of them panned, weighed in honest enough scales slung across the gray dead of his eyes. A boy grows because he must. To know the earth from further. Height marked short above the threshold, at seven, eight years a full two hinges tall. A screw stripped to posture. Turn the knob. A boy matures. Even in heaven. Even in the wrong heaven, which, in the endless end, is more a question of Who. Behold the Who becoming another Who who by the time he’s become yet another Who is by then wholly unknowable. Me. Open the door. An eternal boy matures eternally. What do you want to be when you grow up? the Queen always asked though she had all the answers, as if breasts to suck to satisfaction, hers as much as mine. A nipple doctor? A slip ‘n’ fall lawyer? Wait. Maybe a government minister? An Israeli perhaps? A Semite? I know—a Jew?
    No not a doctor and no not a lawyer and no not a government minister—not even with nor without a portfolio. And Yes who wants to be a Jew when they’re grown?
    Maturing to infinity is not the worst of all means. Neither is it the worst of all ends. It is a becoming unnoticed and unnoticing. Nonetheless a becoming. A becoming still. To mature is not to grow up but to grow In, is another dimension of growth I was never to have realized had I survived, had I lived. No one ever does in life, I mean realize, recognize, Actualize is what the Americans say except of course for the Cabbalists and the—good—Slavic poets and that ancient I think she was a woman in that tablecloth stained then knotted around her head into a kerchief the Queen she gave a shekel to outside the Kotel because her as Aba said Birdosaurus pecker of a face seemed to prick her and hard. But no not even them I say, that the realization of true growth occurs only in heaven, that only in heaven can this growth begin only to never end ever. That in heaven one grows eternally and infinitely In. Through yourself. Into your skin.
    In heaven maturation is unending. Maturation is ripening not to rot but to riper. To grow unendingly is the ideal, with an aspiration to tempered by a recognizance of the impossibly ripest: a sheen of skin under which our lives are packed deep, densely, juice straining the thin peel of neck, exploding the seeds of our Adam’s apples to sow a wind for the gleaning of our inconsolable widows. Upon the Messiah, we will become arisen as if worms to our fruit, to live within and without the world simultaneously, surfacing for air, then again burrowing down to the core. Bite us in half and we will grow back ever bigger. Call us a snake and our tongues will no longer be bitten. Understand. This is what we once believed. I am sorry. This was once the belief that was us. We beat our breasts at which we have suckled our gods and our murderers. Forgive us. Forget nothing.
    Yea though I walk around this heaven unshod a boy, in appearance to all those who would not know me to be me a snotfaced pitfisted bratchild of ten fat years of lean age, the mind within—or lo the soul, if that you prefer—has or was gifted all knowledge at death (along the way losing any sense of personal, or let’s even say tribal, achievement), and, further, was given the