Two Poems By Small Press Veteran B.Z. Niditch

Here are two poems by B.Z. Niditch, a veteran of the small press era who has published more poems than most poets will ever write. Good poems. He's someone I appeared with many, many times back in the old days before the interwebs killed the small press star. He has just become the first poet besides myself to be published in Zombie Logic Review. I will be publishing more poems from poets I respect soon. Please feel free to send your poems for consideration.

HOW EASY, BUKOWSKI

There are no ultimatums in poetry

unlike love or political affairs.

Maxim by BZ Niditch 

Even living

in a roulette world

when traffic lights

go outside

your tinted rooms, 

the neon sky opens

sprinkling rain

on the window sill

where you sink

to rest your arms,

and a poet's life

has little sun

but dust

by shafts of night

with the scent

of ply wood,

overwhelmed

with words, bills,

in a sea of underground 

abandonment set

for another round

of small talk

and Finnish vodka,

amid unaccounted dead

peeping in a tavern

above a storefront

at Frisco's edge

of the train line,

we cannot lose sight

of being railroaded

by a hermit's fate

when a decade 

is older

than the Redwoods

on empty days

of sleeplessness

as your smashed car

now a body machine

is beaten up by time

in this quickie part

blinding the city's proper

look-outs for the lost,

knowing Mr. Devil

is no gentleman caller

who visits the friendless

with hands full 

of promises

with thorns of roses 

and fortune cookies 

in a numbing secret

hand shake.

You Uncle Walt

Here I am in Whitman

Massachusetts,

really nowhere,

with my bare head

covered in snow kisses

you always humoring me

with your pulsating 

half photo in my mind

on fragrant fields

at cranberry harvest

playing around with words

full of unsettled life,

rounding out

an eye lashed history

under a chimera

and beggar sky

no one can explain

that I your adopted nephew

from a lost city

without a green card

from the underground, 

washed in fires

of the limestone Beats

at fervid awakenings,

we do hear you sing

here Uncle Walt,

in Whitman

all the way to the cities

of down and out angels

where one stops

to read you

blinded in love

on bus stops

and cable cars

covering scarlet letters

from graffiti walls

amid every sex and sect

no longer hidden

from burning bushes

your kind words, Walt

swatting our brows

even in the middle

of nowhere.

B.Z. NIDITCH is a poet, playwright, fiction writer and teacher. 

His work is widely published in journals and magazines throughout the world, including:  Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Art; The Literary Review; Denver Quarterly; Hawaii Review; Le Guepard (France); Kadmos (France); Prism International; Jejune (Czech Republic); Leopold Bloom (Budapest);  Antioch Review; and Prairie Schooner, among others.

He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.