Poems 1959-2009

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Authors: Frederick Seidel
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officer,
    Cross-dressing across Deathland in the final months of the war,
    Urbane inside his skull-and-crossbones attire—
    The first John Weitz fashion show, my dear!
    When Weitz wanted to obliterate his SS tattoo,
    He burned it off with a cigarette just like the real SS.
    The underground network he would infiltrate had removed theirs.
    A mysterious beautiful woman was involved. It gets better.
    There is the story of how he needed publicity
    For his fashion line and couldn’t spend much money.
    No one had thought of putting advertisements on the back
    Of New York City buses back then.
    Weitz wrote koans for the age of Warhol.
    I DON’T UNDERSTAND JOHN WEITZ ADVERTISING
    Went rolling down Fifth Avenue behind a bus.
    He looked like a distinguished diplomat when he ate a wurst.
    Weitz had the lofty friendliness of a duke.
    He was full of goy.
    He was not discreet.
    He admired the great.
    He could operate on automatic pilot
    With his beautiful manners.
    He had unreal good looks.
    He used his mellifluous voice.
    John Weitz belonged to clubs, loved boats,
    Told lovely anecdotes, bad jokes, wrote cordial biographies
    Of colorless Third Reich personalities.
    He loved honors and he loved glory.
    He kept the Iron Cross
    Of his father from the First World War framed on the wall.
    He denied that he was dying.
    He never sighed until the moment after he died.
    Â 
TO DIE FOR
    The ants on the kitchen counter stampede toward ecstasy.
    The finger chases them down while the herd runs this way and that way.
    They are alive while they are alive in their little way.
    They burst through their little ant outfits, which tear apart rather easily.
    The little black specks were shipped to Brazil in ships.
    The Portuguese whipped the little black specks to bits.
    The sugar plantations on the horrible tropical coast where the soil was rich
    Were a most productive ant Auschwitz.
    The sugar bowl on the counter is a D-cup, containing one large white breast.
    The breast in the bowl is covered by excited specks
    That are so beyond, and running around, they are wrecks.
    They like things that are sweet. That’s what they like to eat.
    The day outside is blue and good.
    God is in the neighborhood.
    The nearby ocean puts liquid lure in each trap in the set of six,
    Paving the way to the new world with salt and sweet.
    They sell them at the hardware store on Main Street.
    Inside each trap is a tray that gives them a little to eat
    And sends them back.
    There is light in Africa, and it is black.
    I was looking for something to try for.
    I was looking for someone to cry for.
    I was looking for something to die for.
    There isn’t.
    Â 
BARBADOS
    Literally the most expensive hotel in the world
    Is the smell of rain about to fall.
    It does the opposite, a grove of lemon trees.
    I
isn’t anything.
    It is the hooks of rain
    Hovering with their sweets inches off the ground.
    I
is the spiders marching through the air.
    The lines dangle the bait
    The ground will bite.
    Your wife is as white as vinegar, pure aristo privilege.
    The excellent smell of rain before it falls overpowers
    The last aristocrats on earth before the asteroid.
    I sense your disdain, darling.
    I share it.
    The most expensive hotel in the world
    Is the slave ship unloading Africans on the moon.
    They wear the opposite of space suits floating off the dock
    To a sugar mill on a hilltop.
    They float into the machinery.
    The machine inside the windmill isn’t vegetarian.
    A “lopper” lops off a limb caught
    In the rollers and the machine never has to stop.
    A black arm turns into brown sugar,
    And the screaming rest of the slave keeps the other.
    His African screams can’t be heard above the roar.
    A spaceship near the end of a voyage was becalmed.
    Two astronauts floated weightlessly off the deck
    Overboard into the equator in their chains and
splash
and drowned.
    A cane toad came up to them.
    They’d never seen anything so remarkable.
    Now they could see the

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