Paper Snowflakes

There was a certain film, 
And every year, Simona said, 
They had the students elegise in fluent
Exponential gelbbraun greatcoats
Scarlet forearm bleeding patches
Once I shrieked at the projector
Turned my German into Latin
A brevity of solace 
Sprouted from your candy plums

Let us watch these old enchantments 
Pictures I’ve reserved for you
Let us gnaw on Swedish fishes
Dance around my hamantaschen
Choir at the odd cartoons
These nightstained pastel golden figures
Were the shadows distanced from reality 

We sat in dollhouse wooden tables 
Spooning through a soaked up 
Matzoh-ball in atmospheric 
Applesauce infested fumes
Forking though a Brooklyn deli 
Four and forty candle wicks 
Consumed this time of me and you

Soon I shall be an anti-Semite
Selfish brazen charity 
Prostitutes run off in pools
Moulding panzers into luftballoons 
Exploding through your kippa 
But have you ever tied desire in a bowtie
Scarf around your sinister December neck
Proclaimed yourself a fickle slave 
Parading through this avenue of blue jean scents
Have you ever loved a Jewish boy 

My patience burned down monuments 
Fraternised with all the ashes 
From the rubble resurrected
Painted beers and one eyed statues
Just for these demented 
Foolhardy endeavours 
I oversaw a lecture hall 
With fourteen hundred smashed up clocks 
Where we used to play in German 
Dancing closely I’m your groom
These are loathsome tender buttons 
They do not mean anything

There is a grotesque humming
Empty treadmill running 
Gallop of invisible elation
The fountain plays a bellow 
Pipelines groan a clair de lune 
Lust is an upheaval of desire
Palsy that attacks a crevice
Drinking up the acetone 
Gone away on furloughed wishes
There was no war until
You made one now

You won’t show up in the papers 
Pastiche mumbling 
Scrolling through these thorny visions 
Sometimes with a vestige of a smile 
These cutout paper animal creations 
My childhood in wilting seizures
Shattered window candy stores 
Running up the marble steps 
My scarf was tucked into your bed 
You cried at all the whiskey shots 

Well if you had said 
That this would be the last 
I’d get to hold you 
I would have bolted up the doors 
Basking in my self-invented prisoner
Yet you preferred to play the warden
These are no longer your decisions 
Freedom’s overrated, sir

And if you must fly away 
With hubris weave Arachne stories
Painting me a devil and a fool 
Then I shall paint a watercoloured sky 
Look upward for these photographs 
From which I’ve cut out my visage
With a pair of plastic scissors 
We’ll grow up too someday
Sordid painfully alone 
Admiring the birds