Zeke Greenwald: Left Intact

Photo: Joanna C. Valente

1

There aren’t many flower beds,

But the park has flowers ample;

The flowers grow among the grass,

And, like the grass, get trampled.

So in Amsterdam almost wild grow

Violets, daffodils, and tulips;

They languish in the violence 

Of the frequent, treading tourists.

Take comfort, you unguarded stems,

Though abused your colors may be,

What such a rush of real life things

Has left intact of all your beauty.

2

I didn’t sleep so well last night

And when the night was over,

Sleepless I walked in the park

Among the drooping flowers.

I could have said perhaps that I

Didn’t feel, in a normal sense,

lively, but I know nothing more alive

Than watching in abundance.

The violets are overturned;

The tulip petals no more on flowers;

It is cold; the daffodils are bent;

They won’t measure sleep in hours.

All I did was not sleep too well.

When the light was growing stronger,

All too alive, I took a walk

Just tired of living longer. 

1

My blanket is all coffee stains;

I spill my coffee on it.

I often wear my blanket with

The coffee stains upon it.

I wake; I sit; I drink coffee

In the unheated apartment;

I drip the hot caffeine’s dark cheer

On the sleep-deprived garment.

Are you awake? Are you warmer,

You drooping insulator?

Or is the coffee lost on you

In your second shift of labor?

I sit days in pyjamas like

Life were the sleep of being;

And the coffee keeping me awake

Prolongs the painful dreaming.

I dream that I am maladroit

And hated for who I am;

I am cold; and I am celibate;

I am kept from having friends

2

Sitting on David’s porch, I said that

Poets compare our lives to dreams.

He asked, “why, because life is odd,

And we forget we have agency?”

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Zeke Greenwald‘s work has been featured by the Opiate, Prelude, Join the Dots, Künstler Künstlerin, and others. Check out more of his work at zekegreenwald.com