gershon hepner Poems

“I got it bad, and that ain’t good, ”
sang Peggy Lee. She put it well,
for if you love me as you should
you wouldn’t always give me hell
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With bad girls badinage
can be a lot of fun,
unless, of course, they charge
before they let you run
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Across the country people fume,
repeating fervently this mantra
expressed against a mere legume:
“I do not want to eat cilantro! ”
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JAZZ VIOLIN


There’s Louis Armstrong and the Duke
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Abolishing a rabbi who’s the chief
is surely hutzpah that’s beyond belief,
unless the rabbi is so hutzpadik
that such views come not from a heretic,
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My favorite photo, for today
at least, is one in which the nose
of Zachary, my son, the groom, looks fey,
because his nose is luminose.
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Women tend to be more proud
than men, who are lot more lusty;
the things both sexes aren’t allowed
both do. My memory is rusty
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The future perfect equals ablative that’s absolute,
I don’t know what that means but it is surely aphoristic,
the sort of thing I say that many people think is cute
which I abhor as much as being thought of as a mystic.
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In China they’d call geishas “sing-song girls, ”
their value estimated above pearls;
Solomon praised women without pallor,
black the sign of beauty that’s not valor.
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Will the afterlife be any less
exasperating to us than the one
we have? Unless they give us an address,
how will we find a place to have some fun
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