International Surrealist B.Z. Niditch

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

EXILED FOR JAZZ

The military
exile the thirst
for freedom and jazz
remembering
your twenty first  birthday
in a fervor
of fevered expression
yet you suffer
working on islands
from life's painful images
amid political repression
your language amazes
as you write in silence
from the notes you play
on a a historical scale
survive on riffs.


ONE OF MY ACTORS

One of my actors
in my Original Theater
roller bladed
to his audition
he had tunnel vision
of his lines
with an eidetic memory
so I kept my eye on Adam
he left us
for the Big Apple
since I had no funds
to pay him for his worth
then went to Hollywood
and became a star
but when I needed him
he always came back
to us in roller blades
until he fell off
listening to Coltrane.


IN MANHATTAN 1966

Anti-romantic
Andy Warhol
a passion to the lost,
I'm on a sleeper car
the ex-camera rolls
for we underground Beats
are giving our readings
on street corners,
with a lost Anna Karina photo
when married to Godard
we find at the Chelsea,
I buy a lunch poem
from Frank O'Hara
at the Cedar Bar,
here is
cheap vodka in draws
as time lapses
in my synapses
of taboo tripping,
after Andy demanded
to be electrically shaved
for the boy next door
carrying an imbibed state
for an extra in "Flesh"
needing a prescription
for a drug free America
losing a nude display
of Gordon Parks' sequences
after getting the "Shaft"
on the way meeting Lana
a transvestite
who asked me for a light
and turned herself into
a bulbous yet
nosey chaperon
asking me to do
her laundry
of lace aprons,slips,dresses
of silk, Egyptian cotton,
and chancy things
drifting in the wash
in bathed bleach
of celestial swimsuits
from Esther Williams'
Technicolor sets
swirling shirts and blouses
lifted things from Macy's
from a drawn basket
in shiny scents of lystoil.


NEW YORK CITY 1989

With the romantic
gone
here in the French
underground
once again
playing jazz
to a melody of Mahler
and Rameau
before a French mirror
doubled up
for Mallarme,
the wind
has Paris icicles
for us
in the restaurant
we murder croissants
by the portmanteau movies
of Spanish refugees
seeing bridal angels
of Chagall and Picasso
of our passing.