Josh Mitteldorf Poems

Portrait of the Artist as a Graying Adolescent
with Apologies to Ogden Nash

It was my father who first told me, when I was a boy as yet unschooled in biology, but curious about why the bee buzzes and the bird sings
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Awareness flashes forth from waking dreams -
Amid the clouds, a peek-a-boo of sun,
Mere thought of self can be the death of fun -
My consciousness, more fractured than it seems.
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Shed fear. Sprout wings. Float out from arbitrary time.
Transmute the ordinary; prospect the sublime.
Twirl till you collapse, exhausted;
Taste ambrosia; scale the frosted
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I might knock off writing now
And join friends in pursuit of holiday cheer,
But I choose to stay the course I find more comfortable.
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Will there be no end
(to these sonnets on immortality) ?

Now and then it flashes through:
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Beneath our tattered cloaks, the sun's own creche,
Obscure within the only form we know
Yields hints of what our eyes will never show:
Time, space and matter form a knotted mesh.
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If all life is a dream, is it your dream or mine?
And why should our two worlds agree?
An answer avails if we're both The Divine,
At our source, I am you and you're me.
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In perfect rhyme and strictest meeta,
I sing in praise of Annelida.
(If high school Latin made you squirm,
You may not know that s/he's a worm.)
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I might have been embodied animal.
Instead, I wear my brain outside my skin
And touch the world through thought, unlike my kin
Who know th'immediacy of Gaia's pull.
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A horde of lovers you've invited in
Accosts me as I enter at your door.
Though liberality be far from sin,
This strikes me as a venal bidding war.
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