08.15.12
Poetry: Cliff Fyman
Loosening Home Ties
Fill canteen. Mother's faucet. Butter bagels. I place them and Stetson in Shor's Glatt Kosher Catering shopping bag. Last hug goodbye to sister Sherry, I leave Barney my young brother a short note Ciao with my gift to him, a corner's amount of one bag and 3 joints tucked neatly in his pencil drawer. Walk to subway with Mom. She's never been past Cleveland and speaks of Delaware Water Gap as the most beautiful rolling hills she's ever seen. Holds me when I break down in her lap writing that note. “You're just going away on vacation,” she says and the “memories at home are too painful for you,” and “smart kids are hard to raise.” Go through separate turnstiles together: her tokens. Kiss goodbye. “Now have fun,” she says firmly. I wait for Manhattan train. She sits on Jamaica steps. I look at her to wave. She looks straight ahead. I step right to the right wave again. She waves reluctantly. “E” comes I can't see her. Corner seat silent car. “F” train bearing down the track. Her train slowly pulls out. Before the “F” splits our line of vision last time together we glance once and wave. --- 11 June 76 * Continental Avenue, Forest Hills |
Lee Drops Out in Cedar Falls
Lee and I had a long talk tonight on religion. He's Catholic. When he questions Christianity it is whether or not Jesus was the son of God. He could've been a self-proclaimed number. Lee believes in a lot of what Jesus said thought he was a cool guy and gave us a lot of beautiful things to learn from but he doubts whether JC was The Man. “He could've come from fucking,” Lee shrugged. So poignant. My questions of religion came from a totally different place. I tried to think whether there actually was a Supreme being or not and did He really give Moses the Ten Big Ones. God was a feeling that was in my body, blood, my breath, buzzing in my head and in the air against my skin. This was His total presence. He was down here in the abstract. It dawned on me how I completely avoided the topic of God in heavy detail in the past three years. It's come up once in a while in getting in touch with the feeling of spirituality and nature how we are all the same thing beginning with the spirit that is drawn through our nostrils but I haven't...I guess it's cool I've been thinking positively of what God is and not trying to argue against what God isn't. I'm leaving the yeshiva world it seems. Why try to figure out their problems? I would like to express my own spirituality and acknowledge it. I think when anyone is creative that feeling is stimulated by a love of “God” or Beauty or the Holy. It's an absolute feeling. You feel its solitude and are all alone with it. Material falls away, all that surrounds you falls to the side and you float. Tough News Reaching the City
This is all blowing me out. Waverly & 6th.
Coffee shop. 2:07 a.m. Ellen across the table drinking black coffee just told me Phil Ochs committed suicide last week! I'm really depressed. Phil Ochs really meant a lot to me! He sung sincerely, it all meant a lot to him: the war, civil rights, materialism, machinery. When the Yom Kippur war broke out Abe Nathan played all anti-war peace songs and one of the people he played a lot was Phil Ochs: clear, sensitive, committed, he really meant all he said and felt it, bitterly. “I ain't marchin' anymore.” You didn't hear much of him after '68, '69, say, in the 70s. I never heard him making any new music, he just sort of dropped out of sight. Ellen tells me he was drinking. --- 13 April 76 * Greenwich Village |
About the Author:
Cliff Fyman lives in New York, in the East Village. His poetry and prose appear on-line at Napalm Health Spa and Not Enough Night.
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