Different Slants

July 16, 2013

1985

I’m unemployed

Uncertain about my chances

My son and I

In an ancient Chevy van

Take off to see America’s West

Driving by day

Sleeping in the van at night

(Read on …)

Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story: http://www.differentslants.com/?p=355

By Robert M. Katzman © July 7, 2013 

When the passion is enough

I’m compelled to pick up a pen

Recreate incidents now forgotten

Resurrect the long buried

Populate rooms with them

Put words in their mouths

Editing the dead

***  (Read on …)

By Robert M. Katzman © Mother’s Day 2012 (37 years later)

Oh Dear God, it became her eulogy exactly five years later

on Mother’s Day, 2017-

Please let her find peace, somewhere

If Jacob the Carpenter

Hadn’t left

Mogilev, Byelorussia in 1901

Traveling from

New York to Kentucky To Chicago

and there met

Rose from Lithuania

We never would have met

If the Polish Border Guards

Hadn’t just missed Jacob

When they thrust their

Killing bayonets

Into the haywagon

He hid under and escaped in

We never would have met

(Read on …)

November 4, 2011

I have been many places

Traveling alone

Traveling together

Sometimes both

Together’s better

Alone you choose

You come

You go

You pause

You contemplate

You share nothing

You have

Freedom’s

Isolation

(Read on …)

August 20, 2011

Sunrise

Rays dancing on my Soldered Lids

My fragile spine a Gordian Knot

Takes an hour of contortions

To give my body back to me

To beat unstoppable Time

That Posse that pursues me

Through the Night

Into the Dawn

God,

Give me

One-more-day

***

Falling out of bed

I escape the Darkness

And for one more day

That choice is mine

****

Awake and Naked

Icy water on my face

I wince into the Mirror

Who the Hell is that?

***

Worn jeans hang lifeless

On a peg on a wall

Waiting for me

Like a patient Hound

Awaiting my touch

I slide into them

Shape matching Shape

The Uniform of the Unregimented

***  (Read on …)

First, some background: My family came to America between 1902 and 1916 from Eastern Europe, where some of my immediate ancestors were murdered during the World War One years. They were non-combatants. I grew up with grim tales of unending, irrational persecution and in sync with my left-of-center politics beginning in the later Sixties, I wouldn’t wish that kind of terror and life on anyone.

I grew up on the South Side of Chicago and never met any Middle-Eastern people. The neighborhood was Polish-Jewish-Irish. In 1968, at seventeen, I was severely beaten by two plain-clothes Chicago cops, hand-cuffed, thrown in a paddy-wagon and booked for resisting arrest. What soon became apparent was that I had been assaulted by mistake because to the two cops who captured me, I evidently looked like a local Arab youth they were unsuccessfully pursuing who was suspected of numerous breaking and entering incidents. I was eventually released and went immediately to a hospital, but none of my subsequent antagonism was aimed at the unknown Arab teen I supposedly resembled.

Over the course of my varied career, I never had any conflict with any person with roots in the areas around Israel. I have no prejudice and never had any difficulties with someone being a Muslim, or any other religion. Even when terrorist-inspired fears to the airlines caused me to be endlessly pulled out of line at airports to be scanned by metal detectors, and/or have my luggage searched, I never blamed Arabs whom I must closely resemble or why would so many people agree about that? (Read on …)