"I Am Salvation"

Here are two poems I wrote last summer, 2014, along with a study for a extremely large painting I'm working on THIS summer of 2015 titled, "I Am Salvation"....Seems like these two offerings compliment each other.

In the Waiting Room at JFSA in Beachwood Ohio I want to touch all the surfaces soft and grainy like new cloth. I see bustling life in butterflies constructed from steel painted rust. A still life of Jerusalem--- crumbly walls gracefully accommodating sparrow and rock dove nests. A dollhouse occupied with tools for living and void of human beings. A pine rocking chair sits idle, yellow cars rest on its lap. Silk gerber daisies long-stemmed in a vase. Airplane full of toy people waits to be lifted off its magazine launchpad. Autistic songs trill and tremble rhythmically through the drywall barriers gift-wrapped in institution-grey wall paper. I hear a nigun, a lawnmower, a sneeze. Outside, the unseasonably July sky tricks everyone into thinking its Rosh Hashanah, and you would 't even know there were tunnels painstakingly dug throughout Israel for that day of our destruction. Its 68 degrees and glorious yet ominous clouds usher in a very confusing 9 day count down. So on Tisha B'Av we can feel what remorse is supposed to feel like so we can mourn our propensity towards baseless hatred like Humans with the countenance of ash-smeared Angels whose eyes never broke gaze with the contents of G-d's right palm.

Poem I wrote today at JFSA waiting room::::: Ishmael Is My Brother Too I forgot the words to his lullabies our mothers would sing while kneading dough we did not know rejection would become an arrow ejecting oneself into self-determination and the profound distance from need to being needed. We did not know the power of silence--- that quiver containing a multitude of arrows. So to deal with the awkwardness of ignorance we fumbled for words to express our otherness in haste we chose signifiers such as "occupier" and "terrorist". But all terrors are occupied with crying and bleeding people all who yearn to hold hands in embrace and soothe the shell - shock. I do not know how to reach out to Ishmael right now. We both forgot the songs of our names. We forgot the smell of our mothers' cooking. We wandered out and got lost in the field where all spilled blood is indistinguishable, where all suffering is one.