The Perfect Kibbutz (poem)

The Perfect Kibbutz

The perfect world's a kibbutz

No cult leaders though, no kool-aid

I don't know how we divvy up the women

Or how they divvy up the men

Or how the non-binary divvy up at all

Although I'm listening if you want to go with orgy

But not Caligula though

And not virgins in heaven waiting for their pimp to arrive before the party begins and the angels arrive with their mastercards, act up, and have to be defenestrated through the stained glass windows

The perfect kibbutz would feature suffering

Existential dread, ontological conundrums

Arbeit macht frei smartass remarks made by fascist alt-angels

And we'd swim together, kibbutzim, in naked steaming hot pools of empathy tears

No more unrequited love, es ist verboten, I love roses too much, sieg heil

No more Hank Williams throwing himself off bridges blindly into dry bed rivers like some nincompoop only to see the song he writes in sorrow's honor go to number one. WTF? Why encourage them?

Everybody will be as funny as the stand up shtick of Jews and Africanus Americanus driven to stark raving sanity, o lawd the tears, by the Landlord, absentee. O lawd, we'll laugh, tears streaming down, teleology is so fuckin funny. O lawd.

.....

The last kibbutz I was at

Was a letterpress poetry thang in western Mass.

sometime in the 70s

Named after a Blake poem.

Stu, The kool-aid man lawded it over

Thought he was the real deal. (He wasn't bad.)

He fondled his woman all day. (The kind of thing that drove Moses to the wilderness)

Or was strumming Dylan songs from New Morning,

which we much appreciated, and the stir frys, lots of fuckin stir frys, featuring rice and beans

And she would feral moan from the bathtub with caterwauls and laughter so I knew some animals were more equal than others, and you could tell Stu was soaping her, and you could smell the lavender, and you knew the bathroom was candlelit, and you bit a knuckle thinking about it

And he had the means of production at his beck and call, a real bourgeois reactionary, who looked like late-days Abbie with shortened hair, about the time he won with a necessity defense against the CIA in Northampton. Probably they had him killed.

It wasn't a real kibbutz or she would have passed herself around like a bong. And we'd all get high. I can't even remember her name. Thought of her naked every time I heard I Will Never Love You on the radio. Sometimes I got naked. And felt like the Snake in Eden on the prowl. But if she thought me handsome, she didn't show it to this vet. Some of them are like that. And they go off to war either hoping to die or not because of love.

They made fun of my poetry from the bathtub sometimes, splashing at my soap bubbles, made fun of my veteran status, like I was a card-carrying draftee didn't have the sense to run to Canada. They called me Jack, but I was John. They built my myth, but they was wrong.

Even one time in there yahooing to a poem I wrote about my father riding in a rodeo, but mother said I was derived from Cherokees, which would have explained some things, but turned out to be false, and Dad rode off into the sunset, and I became a foster care clown, boo fuckin hoo, but it could have been worse, could have been born with black skin with people f*cking with me every day of my life for something I could not change -- if I wanted to, and I didn't.

.....

I ended up back at the VA (natch), listening to all the worriers (sic) carp diem after diem, Korea sniding to WW2 and them laughing at Nam, spending hours in the library listening to Tchaikovsy's symphonies, 6th mostly, the one that ends with a fading cello groan, f*ck it, he seemed to say. Wouldn't you?

The VA is the worst kind of kibbutz, you ask me, wrongest kind of equal. You had empathy for the guy on closed ward 12 who they were always filling up with Thorazine -- all who smoke Camels are humps, he'd say -- and that was all the orderlies needed to hear. Boom. But when he returned a few hours later, sedate and drooling (oh they had some droolers there), everyone was ensconced in dayroom TV and we were grateful. He didn't deserve it. But we were grateful. Damn, though, you can drool. Second shift featured a nurse. Sure did. Her static electricity nylons sanging like a siren when she strode in beauty. The stuff of war. Helen. The VA was no place for Achilles heels. Or love.

Like Johnny Lennon kind of said: You gotta kibbutz your mind instead.

VA line your ass up for meds, even if you there cause you fragged your non-com in the sh*t and can't live with it, make a peaceable kingdom of your head.

Feel no pain. That's the ideal kibbutz.