gershon hepner Poems

Losing themselves as in slow movements
great performers must be lost
attempting to define the moment,
composers must become compost,
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His subject was fame;
he courted the famous
whose fame is their name,
proclaiming: Do name us.
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Refinement of a pot appears effete
if you don’t like irregularities.
Once baked inside a kiln the searing heat
preserves forever angularities
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In Yoshiwara courtesans
were influenced by Zen,
whose masters were their greatest fans,
and proved that they were men
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They wondered why the fruit had been forbidden,
and ate it though they clearly had been warned;
the danger surely never had been hidden,
but early warnings they had blithely scorned.
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Shedding girdles and their padded bras
the early feminists all sought equality,
but women have returned to pick-up bars
to prove their serious interest in frivolity.
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Try to find the people whom
you knew when you grew up and dared,
before you lost the youthful bloom
that you and all those people shared.
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In the dreamspace lies a source
that flows to keep the dreamers moist,
till the dry words of remorse
wake us, crying to be voiced,
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“If we walk far enough we will come to some place, ”
said Dorothy, taking the yellow brick road
in slippers of silver—not red––to outpace
the standard of gold the bricks hinted in code.
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We live in an unlikelihood,
dehubrissed by humility,
beyond the middle-aging wood,
defying probability.
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