Steve Hirsch

Mommy Mafia

The ones with nicer clothes set the tone
When they hate Cuomo and love Trump
you’d better too or face the angry mob
be the ghost mom, cold shoulder faucet drip-drip

Idiot chromosome
for cavewoman dominance
Toxic coffee clatch code of silence
vilifies the odd mom out.

Hold your tongue in mixed company
you never know who is listening and
may judge you or keep your daughter
from the next birthday party.

This catty omertà side-glance bitch wall
builds brick by delusional brick
I load my slingshot with a space laser
and keep my distance so as not to get sick.

Anti-vax; anti-lib, anti-gay, anti-antifa
Pro-life, pro-Trump, Pro-white, Pro-wall
They got mean kids, just like them, sponges of toxic bias
Anyone you don’t see at church on Sunday is made of glass.

Sorry-ass obese prance at poolside
cheering the fastest swimmer by chanting snide comments
at the slowpoke, mommy outside smoking
spit dripping down her locker door.

So odd a town filled with cops and firefighters
would be the epitome of intolerance.
Wait…that’s not so odd after all
After all, the white family sits down to have a bite

and reinforce the fantasy of an American dream
without any jews, hispanics or people of color.
We are rubbed out, fit with cement boots, we gotta go, it’s curtains.
We swim with the fishes, retrieve our pot luck dishes.


That Person I Was

Innocent believer
in magic, prophecy, eternal self.
Now under late fall sun I wonder
Can I see the seasons past
and undo beliefs that
pave no paths?

Young and excited
about the unknown future
about clutching a notebook
wearing a woolen poncho walking
down silent Broadway pre-dawn
over Boulder creek bridge - water voices murmur —

Clock ticks, clock reads, clock says
the essential rhythm of my days
are swipes sharpening my razor’s edge
on the strop of the new new-age

The magic was looking deeply
Count Castaneda’s crows and the true belief
Seth really spoke through Jane.
I channelled wise spirits like Shirley MacLaine
played the alpha fool at Omega Institute
played bamboo flute at Naropa Institute.
Thoroughly institutionalized, quartz crystallized
and none the wiser, point is moot.
Magic was the chain that tied my eyes behind me.

That person I was died at daybreak on the last day of the Mayan calendar wheel
a little bit at a time, to seal the deal and document the crime
of having my will frozen in limbo faced with false forks on dead-end roads
of wasting my own time, flooded with conflicting emotions.
My harmonic convergence was not harmonious.
Jose Arguelles was not to blame.

Maybe a balanced view is the best I can do.
Who I was and will be is like thawing ice in February
revealed to be exactly what I was before
walking slowly down a silent Broadway
collar turned up against a ripping wind
coat pockets cupping hands that crepe and ache in the cold.


Curriculum

The trees teach you all you need to learn.
That being said, clay whispers like crisp silk
as you slip the spin side into a flare
smooth the edge with a sponge
and fire the kiln.
Contact distant narcolepts with black opal flashes and burning feathers.
Stir the suspension with a touch of acid and moon glass
phased to melt at Mercury’s passing.
Time is the blues and it passes too.
Trees whisper and we are hard of hearing.

Impermanence lecture via spray jet to clear deck-railing wasp nest.
Flow chart of spigot to lawn valve to hose coil to hot tub to drainage ditch.
Register for Medicare A and book tickets for the Keys.
100 ways to burst an egg yolk, melt cheese against meat.
Review top ten paw support protocols, throw pasta at the wall.
Clean out 2 decades of old t-shirts and size 42s I’ll never get into.

Paint the closet, paint the parging, paint the spindles and railing.
Paint the lake and the spillway, paint a week or two away in October.
Paint the last crickets chewing Indian summer sprouts.
Like grandma said, you’ll be a painter and then so what.
Sing a Jon Anderson song at top volume for grandma.

Refuse to be ripped off by Empire Today in a last minute bait and switch on vinyl flooring.
Learn how to build a JSON data structure for a metadata import to Adobe Experience Manager.
Refuse to be ripped off by National Floors Direct in a last minute no credit cards shocker.
Learn that the path to taxonomical glory is named Anastasia, Anastasia Metadata.

Sit and rap your own knuckles with a ruler for fun; pluck an eyelash for your box of cat whiskers.
Stick them all on a canvas with a glue gun; paint a cat, paint a dozen cats running
pouches swinging in the hot summer sun.
Paint an old man pushing a grocery cart with a yellowtail tuna saku block
and a hundred pounds of cat litter.
Say goodbye to my sweet friend Neko, put to sleep way too young.

Cats teach you all you need to learn.
That being said, rain sours like warm milk
as you make avocado toast naked off the grid
wrap up a long, painful career as a technologist in a plaid suit.

Fine tune your meat processing units with lysine treats.
Class is seated with cardboard notebooks open to boot
to categorize eyebat messaging that gives you an A.
Raise a hand extended in sleep to send a root down deeper
bring the rain back up to catalyze these lessons of age
from chapters revealed in the glaze of sun that remains.


About the Author

Steven L. Hirsch was born in New York City in 1960. Raised in the NY area, he graduated high school from the Storm King School in Cornwall-on-Hudson, NY, in 1977 and earned his B.A. from Bard College in Drama/Dance in 1985. Steve also earned an A.A. certificate degree in Theatre from Naropa University in 1982 where he was a student of both poetry as well as performance arts inspired by Buddhist monastic practices. He was an apprentice to Allen Ginsberg in 1979-1980 at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and he studied Vajrayana Buddhism with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche as well as many other visiting lamas and spiritual teachers.

In 1983, after his junior year at Bard, Steve’s father Louis died. He left school to manage his family business of manufacturing bridal veils and accessories in New York’s garment center. Concurrently, Steve founded the literary magazine Heaven Bone in 1985 to showcase surreal, experimental, and spiritual poetry as well as art, photography, fiction and essays. Along with five poetry chapbooks, an anthology of anti-Iraq War poetry and a collection of fiction, he published twelve issues of the magazine, with the final issue having been released in 2000. Steve finished his B.A. degree credits at the New School for Social Research in NYC while running the family business. Leaving the business to his mom in 1990, Steve entered the computer consulting world and mastered the technologies for digital publishing and marketing workflow management. He is a certified expert in Adobe Workfront and other Adobe technologies, and has provided his creative and technical expertise to dozens of Fortune 500 companies for more than four decades.

In recent years he has been riding his Harley all over the Northeast, studying Buddhism and writing, and playing Latin and African hand drums as a founding member of the drum circle “Spirithawk.” Steve is the author of Ramapo 500 Affirmations (Flower Thief, 1998); Demon Commuter (Giant Steps Press, 2023), and he has had poems appear in various journals including Hunger, Napalm Health Spa Report, Pudding, Big Scream, Hazmat Review, Muse Apprentice Guild, and Etcetera among others.

Steve has performed his poetry at numerous venues including the Core Gallery, New Paltz, NY; the Catskill Mt. Foundation, Hunter, NY; Monkey Joe’s Café, Kingston, NY; Colony in Woodstock, NY; Noble Coffee Roasters, Campbell Hall, NY; the Dactyl Foundation Gallery, NYC; The Bowery Poetry Club, NYC; A Gathering of the Tribes, NYC; The Howland Cultural Center, Beacon, NY., and Penny Lane, Boulder, CO.

Steve resides on Woodcock Mountain in the Hudson Valley region of NY State with his wife Karen, daughter Jesse Mai Lotus, and two cats.

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