Gershon Hepner
(1938 - )
(1938 - )
Poetry by Gershon Hepner - abe vs the KGB
"Mr. Rosenthal, we're really not
in any courtroom here, "
to Abe a K.G.B. hotshot
declared. Abe had no fear
to challenge him and to respond:
"I will ignore your grudges;
although of courtrooms you aren't fond,
all people are your judges."
Abe echoed Abraham who pleaded
for Sodomites with God;
his single voice was heard and heeded,
although it sounded odd.
When we are on our bended knees
God sometimes may agree
to our objections and our pleas,
unlike the K.G.B.
Abe (A. M.) Rosenthal, a distinguished editor of the NYT, died last week. James Barron writes in the NYT on May 15,2006, and describes Elie Wiesel's eulogy ("A. M. Rosenthal Is Remembered for 'Tender Ferocity'") :
Mr. Wiesel described how, during a conference in Moscow, Mr. Rosenthal gave 'a lesson of morality' to a K.G.B. official. Mr. Wiesel recalled that the general's reply was, 'Mr. Rosenthal, we are not in a courtroom here.' Mr. Wiesel said that Mr. Rosenthal countered, 'You are. Whenever a K.G.B. general appears before free people, they are.'
5/15/06
in any courtroom here, "
to Abe a K.G.B. hotshot
declared. Abe had no fear
to challenge him and to respond:
"I will ignore your grudges;
although of courtrooms you aren't fond,
all people are your judges."
Abe echoed Abraham who pleaded
for Sodomites with God;
his single voice was heard and heeded,
although it sounded odd.
When we are on our bended knees
God sometimes may agree
to our objections and our pleas,
unlike the K.G.B.
Abe (A. M.) Rosenthal, a distinguished editor of the NYT, died last week. James Barron writes in the NYT on May 15,2006, and describes Elie Wiesel's eulogy ("A. M. Rosenthal Is Remembered for 'Tender Ferocity'") :
Mr. Wiesel described how, during a conference in Moscow, Mr. Rosenthal gave 'a lesson of morality' to a K.G.B. official. Mr. Wiesel recalled that the general's reply was, 'Mr. Rosenthal, we are not in a courtroom here.' Mr. Wiesel said that Mr. Rosenthal countered, 'You are. Whenever a K.G.B. general appears before free people, they are.'
5/15/06
Poetry by Gershon Hepner - abraham
My language always is precise,
but I'm prepared to take advice
from people who can't follow what
I'm saying. When I'm being hot,
some people cannot understand
my arguments since they're not bland,
and even when they see I'm pensive,
they sometimes find my words offensive.
Although I try to be pellucid,
it is a nuisance that is deucèd
that I should be accused of being
obscure when I am disagreeing
with people who do not esteem
my words. It wasn't Ibrahim
who walked with Ishmael to Moriah,
but Abraham who lit the fire
beneath young Isaac. That is clear,
though many do not want to hear
such simple facts, like those I write,
pellucid, although impolite.
The man who told God: "Here I am! "
was very surely Abraham,
not Ibrahim, and that's a fact,
which, like my own, I won't retract.
3/9/07
but I'm prepared to take advice
from people who can't follow what
I'm saying. When I'm being hot,
some people cannot understand
my arguments since they're not bland,
and even when they see I'm pensive,
they sometimes find my words offensive.
Although I try to be pellucid,
it is a nuisance that is deucèd
that I should be accused of being
obscure when I am disagreeing
with people who do not esteem
my words. It wasn't Ibrahim
who walked with Ishmael to Moriah,
but Abraham who lit the fire
beneath young Isaac. That is clear,
though many do not want to hear
such simple facts, like those I write,
pellucid, although impolite.
The man who told God: "Here I am! "
was very surely Abraham,
not Ibrahim, and that's a fact,
which, like my own, I won't retract.
3/9/07
Poetry by Gershon Hepner - accentuate the positive
Accentuate the positive, I said,
and minimize
the negative, and then lift up your head.
Look in my eyes,
I'm positively waiting for a sign
you'll flash to me,
accented eyeball telling me you're mine,
to let me see
you want me and the heart I share with you,
and will not tire,
for I am more than minimally true,
like my desire.
7/14/98
and minimize
the negative, and then lift up your head.
Look in my eyes,
I'm positively waiting for a sign
you'll flash to me,
accented eyeball telling me you're mine,
to let me see
you want me and the heart I share with you,
and will not tire,
for I am more than minimally true,
like my desire.
7/14/98
Poetry by Gershon Hepner - accidental beauty
After Orhan Pamuk
The beauty of a ruin may be best
appreciated by a rank outsider,
observing it as uninvited guest,
without the context of a view that's wider.
Behind the fallen walls there often lie
sad stories of inhabitants who perished
in homes that once abandoned now supply
the ruins travelers long have cherished.
The pleasure coming from the accidental
beauty, burgeoning till it decays,
appeals to anyone who's sentimental
when seeing signs of others' judgment days.
Orhan Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature on October,12,2006, wrote, in "Istanbul: Memories from the City":
To savor Istanbul's back streets, to appreciate the vines and trees that endow its ruins with accidental grace, you must, first and foremost, be a stranger to them. A crumbling wall, a wooden tekke--condemned, condemned, abandoned, and now fallen into neglect--a fountain from whose faucets no water pours, a workshop in which nothing has been produced for eighty years, a collapsing building, a row of homes abandoned by Greeks, Armenians, and Jews as a nationalist state bore down on minorities, a house leaning to one side in a way that defies perspective, two houses leaning against each other in a way that cartoonists so love to depict, a cascade of domes and rooftops, a row of houses with crooked window casings--these things don't look beautiful to the people who live among them; they speak instead of squalor, helpless hopeless neglect. Those who take pleasure in the accidental beauty of poverty and historical decay, those of us who see the picturesque in ruins--invariably, we're people who come from the outside.
10/13/06
The beauty of a ruin may be best
appreciated by a rank outsider,
observing it as uninvited guest,
without the context of a view that's wider.
Behind the fallen walls there often lie
sad stories of inhabitants who perished
in homes that once abandoned now supply
the ruins travelers long have cherished.
The pleasure coming from the accidental
beauty, burgeoning till it decays,
appeals to anyone who's sentimental
when seeing signs of others' judgment days.
Orhan Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature on October,12,2006, wrote, in "Istanbul: Memories from the City":
To savor Istanbul's back streets, to appreciate the vines and trees that endow its ruins with accidental grace, you must, first and foremost, be a stranger to them. A crumbling wall, a wooden tekke--condemned, condemned, abandoned, and now fallen into neglect--a fountain from whose faucets no water pours, a workshop in which nothing has been produced for eighty years, a collapsing building, a row of homes abandoned by Greeks, Armenians, and Jews as a nationalist state bore down on minorities, a house leaning to one side in a way that defies perspective, two houses leaning against each other in a way that cartoonists so love to depict, a cascade of domes and rooftops, a row of houses with crooked window casings--these things don't look beautiful to the people who live among them; they speak instead of squalor, helpless hopeless neglect. Those who take pleasure in the accidental beauty of poverty and historical decay, those of us who see the picturesque in ruins--invariably, we're people who come from the outside.
10/13/06
Poetry by Gershon Hepner - acorn and cone
The acorn which doesn't fall far from the tree
and the cone that falls close to the pine
are like the ideas that you're sharing with me
till they grow into both yours and mine.
4/6/06
and the cone that falls close to the pine
are like the ideas that you're sharing with me
till they grow into both yours and mine.
4/6/06
Poetry by Gershon Hepner - acronyms
She taught me laughing, rolling on the floor,
acronyming it as rofl,
salad days with her I think are more
than merely mayonnaised kartoffel.
When she is laughing off her lovely arse
she chooses acronym lmbao,
but adds that if I ever make a pass
she'll scratch me painfully, meow.
She tells me that that she laughs her lemons off,
that's lmlo, causing lips to p-cker;
rejected by her, I'm inclined to scoff,
but know she'll call me motherf-cker.
Tai educated me regarding the Da Vinci code behind three of her acronyms:
rofl - rolling on the floor laughing
lmbao - laughing my beautiful arse off
lmlo - laughing my lemons off.
4/5/06
acronyming it as rofl,
salad days with her I think are more
than merely mayonnaised kartoffel.
When she is laughing off her lovely arse
she chooses acronym lmbao,
but adds that if I ever make a pass
she'll scratch me painfully, meow.
She tells me that that she laughs her lemons off,
that's lmlo, causing lips to p-cker;
rejected by her, I'm inclined to scoff,
but know she'll call me motherf-cker.
Tai educated me regarding the Da Vinci code behind three of her acronyms:
rofl - rolling on the floor laughing
lmbao - laughing my beautiful arse off
lmlo - laughing my lemons off.
4/5/06
Poetry by Gershon Hepner - adam and miranda
The stories of the bible that you know are
not true tales of what really once occurred.
According to the holy book of Zohar,
when God told Man he grievously had erred
and therefore should prepare to leave the garden,
He was astonished when He heard Man say:
"Now wait a minute, God, I beg your pardon:
it's You has to leave--I'm going to stay! "
He hoped that with a technicality
he might get off, as often happens now
to people of the highest quality
who do the sort of things laws don't allow.
Regardless of the crimes which is it is said
you have committed, if your lawyer sees
a loophole in the law through which to thread
your case no judge will bring you to your knees,
and if it turns out that your rights were viol-
ated, though you're guilty you will walk;
your case dismissed, you'll never go to trial,
for rights trump trashy prosecutor talk.
But God had read Man his Miranda rights
and followed all the details of the book
He gave to Moses after forty nights
and days, and proved that Adam was a crook.
There were no technicalities to save
his skin, once he had covered it with leaves
of fig trees. It is clear he was a knave,
no legal tricks were hidden up his sleeves,
and that is why the two of them were forced
to part and go off on their separate journeys;
just like unhappy couples who're divorced,
they went their separate ways without attorneys.
Inspired by an interview of Daniel C. Matt on NPR on March 3,2004. Dr. Matt is translating the Zohar into English having been commissioned by the Pritzker Foundation after Mrs. Pritzker became fascinated by the book following lessons she was receiving from her rabbi, Jacob Pupka. Matt sees the Zohar as a novel that deconstructs the bible, and cited as an example the way that it proposed that God did not expel Man and Woman from the Garden of Eden but that Man and Woman expelled God. As Matt pointed out, the end result is in many ways the same except that according to the Zoharic account we are still living in the Garden of Eden.
3/3/04,6/1/06,4/1/07
not true tales of what really once occurred.
According to the holy book of Zohar,
when God told Man he grievously had erred
and therefore should prepare to leave the garden,
He was astonished when He heard Man say:
"Now wait a minute, God, I beg your pardon:
it's You has to leave--I'm going to stay! "
He hoped that with a technicality
he might get off, as often happens now
to people of the highest quality
who do the sort of things laws don't allow.
Regardless of the crimes which is it is said
you have committed, if your lawyer sees
a loophole in the law through which to thread
your case no judge will bring you to your knees,
and if it turns out that your rights were viol-
ated, though you're guilty you will walk;
your case dismissed, you'll never go to trial,
for rights trump trashy prosecutor talk.
But God had read Man his Miranda rights
and followed all the details of the book
He gave to Moses after forty nights
and days, and proved that Adam was a crook.
There were no technicalities to save
his skin, once he had covered it with leaves
of fig trees. It is clear he was a knave,
no legal tricks were hidden up his sleeves,
and that is why the two of them were forced
to part and go off on their separate journeys;
just like unhappy couples who're divorced,
they went their separate ways without attorneys.
Inspired by an interview of Daniel C. Matt on NPR on March 3,2004. Dr. Matt is translating the Zohar into English having been commissioned by the Pritzker Foundation after Mrs. Pritzker became fascinated by the book following lessons she was receiving from her rabbi, Jacob Pupka. Matt sees the Zohar as a novel that deconstructs the bible, and cited as an example the way that it proposed that God did not expel Man and Woman from the Garden of Eden but that Man and Woman expelled God. As Matt pointed out, the end result is in many ways the same except that according to the Zoharic account we are still living in the Garden of Eden.
3/3/04,6/1/06,4/1/07
Poetry by Gershon Hepner - adventure and wild strawberries
Anomie and alienation,
angst and decadence,
melancholic desperation,
oblivion that feels intense
as boredom and depression and
attention deficit disorder;
they're in Antonioni-land,
within the Ingmar Bergman border.
Strawberries that are as wild
as memories of yearned-for youth,
within the old man's eyes the child
who knew the ancient, primal truth,
the seventh seal that they unsealed,
revealing what had been distorted,
these can't eclipse what's been revealed
on celluloid where they cavorted.
In the last two days Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni died. Stephen Holden writes about Antonioni ("Chronicler of Europeans in a Flimsy European World, " NYT, August 1,2007) :
Decades before it was given a name, Michelangelo Antonioni recognized the malady we now call attention deficit disorder. In his great 1960s films, "L'Avventura, " "La Notte, " "Eclipse" and "Red Desert, " but especially in "L'Avventura, " his masterpiece, it wasn't diagnosed as a chemical imbalance, but as a communicable social disease. Spawned in a psychological petri dish in which idleness, boredom and dissatisfaction with the material rewards of life combined to create and spread a chronic, generalized, mild depression, it was an ailment peculiar to the upper middle class. What made audiences susceptible was the glamour that attached to it. As I watched the attractive aristocrats and climbers in his films mope through their empty lives, a part of me wanted to be just like those people: self-absorbed and miserable, perhaps, but also fashionable and sexy. The ever-acute critic Pauline Kael recognized this contradiction in a famous essay, "Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties, " which aroused the ire of Antonioni devotees like me. More than four decades later, that contradiction remains unresolved in popular culture. Such is the power of film and television imagery that glamour and sex, no matter how tawdry or morally bankrupt, command our attention and whet our fantasies. Mr. Antonioni was the movies' first diagnostician of what back then was called alienation, anomie, angst and decadence. If his films had their silly side (the image of Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni, grappling fully clothed in a sand trap in "La Notte") , they were also prophetic. Their melancholy poetry transmuted an overriding mood of self-pity into something deeper and closer to tragedy. Mr. Antonioni's death on Monday, so close to Ingmar Bergman's, should give us pause. Their deaths bring down the final curtain on the high-modernist era of filmmaking, when a handful of directors were artistic gods accorded the respect and latitude of great painters or authors. Among the European masters of the 1960s, only Jean-Luc Godard, that most modern of modernists, remains. For all their differences of temperament, Mr. Bergman and Mr. Antonioni were staunch moralists. If Mr. Bergman, the Scandinavian, was stern and austere, Mr. Antonioni, the Italian, was a sensuous aesthete who, when it suited him, resorted to painting nature the way he wanted it to look on the screen. If both had bleak apprehensions of the decline and fall of Western civilization in an increasingly secularized age, Mr. Antonioni's vision was more urbane and cosmopolitan. The final bleak street-corner montage in "Eclipse" is downright apocalyptic. In that movie, the third part of the trilogy that included "L'Avventura" and "La Notte, " the world is consumed with stock-market fever. Greed trumps love. Sound familiar?
8/1/07
angst and decadence,
melancholic desperation,
oblivion that feels intense
as boredom and depression and
attention deficit disorder;
they're in Antonioni-land,
within the Ingmar Bergman border.
Strawberries that are as wild
as memories of yearned-for youth,
within the old man's eyes the child
who knew the ancient, primal truth,
the seventh seal that they unsealed,
revealing what had been distorted,
these can't eclipse what's been revealed
on celluloid where they cavorted.
In the last two days Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni died. Stephen Holden writes about Antonioni ("Chronicler of Europeans in a Flimsy European World, " NYT, August 1,2007) :
Decades before it was given a name, Michelangelo Antonioni recognized the malady we now call attention deficit disorder. In his great 1960s films, "L'Avventura, " "La Notte, " "Eclipse" and "Red Desert, " but especially in "L'Avventura, " his masterpiece, it wasn't diagnosed as a chemical imbalance, but as a communicable social disease. Spawned in a psychological petri dish in which idleness, boredom and dissatisfaction with the material rewards of life combined to create and spread a chronic, generalized, mild depression, it was an ailment peculiar to the upper middle class. What made audiences susceptible was the glamour that attached to it. As I watched the attractive aristocrats and climbers in his films mope through their empty lives, a part of me wanted to be just like those people: self-absorbed and miserable, perhaps, but also fashionable and sexy. The ever-acute critic Pauline Kael recognized this contradiction in a famous essay, "Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties, " which aroused the ire of Antonioni devotees like me. More than four decades later, that contradiction remains unresolved in popular culture. Such is the power of film and television imagery that glamour and sex, no matter how tawdry or morally bankrupt, command our attention and whet our fantasies. Mr. Antonioni was the movies' first diagnostician of what back then was called alienation, anomie, angst and decadence. If his films had their silly side (the image of Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni, grappling fully clothed in a sand trap in "La Notte") , they were also prophetic. Their melancholy poetry transmuted an overriding mood of self-pity into something deeper and closer to tragedy. Mr. Antonioni's death on Monday, so close to Ingmar Bergman's, should give us pause. Their deaths bring down the final curtain on the high-modernist era of filmmaking, when a handful of directors were artistic gods accorded the respect and latitude of great painters or authors. Among the European masters of the 1960s, only Jean-Luc Godard, that most modern of modernists, remains. For all their differences of temperament, Mr. Bergman and Mr. Antonioni were staunch moralists. If Mr. Bergman, the Scandinavian, was stern and austere, Mr. Antonioni, the Italian, was a sensuous aesthete who, when it suited him, resorted to painting nature the way he wanted it to look on the screen. If both had bleak apprehensions of the decline and fall of Western civilization in an increasingly secularized age, Mr. Antonioni's vision was more urbane and cosmopolitan. The final bleak street-corner montage in "Eclipse" is downright apocalyptic. In that movie, the third part of the trilogy that included "L'Avventura" and "La Notte, " the world is consumed with stock-market fever. Greed trumps love. Sound familiar?
8/1/07
Poetry by Gershon Hepner - after image
What's absent in the picture counts
as much as what is present and portrayed.
Like unvoiced words we can't pronounce,
its lasting after-image does not fade,
but lingers, echo of a murmur
whose source is so obscure you start to wonder,
"Does it belong to terra firma,
or heaven, like the lightning after thunder? "
What's missing may leave traces after
the fading image of the photograph
has disappeared, like sounds of laughter
recalled when we are sad though we can't laugh.
Bernard Weinraub reviews David Hockney's exhibition of photographs at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles ("A Painter's Photoworks: The Camera Expands Hockney's California Themes, " The Los Angeles Times, August 15,2001) :
Christopher Knight, art critic of The Los Angeles Times, in reviewing the current show, said that implicit in Mr. Hockney's photography and photocollages is a 'connection to indivisibility - to what's not in the picture.' Mr. Knight wrote that the eyes of viewers of Mr. Hockney's photographs are inevitably drawn to the photos' edges. 'Each edge, ' Mr. Knight wrote, 'makes you subconsciously mindful of what's not in the picture, of what was left out by the artist when he looked through the camera's viewfinder and chose to snap the shutter.'
8/15/01,5/2/07
as much as what is present and portrayed.
Like unvoiced words we can't pronounce,
its lasting after-image does not fade,
but lingers, echo of a murmur
whose source is so obscure you start to wonder,
"Does it belong to terra firma,
or heaven, like the lightning after thunder? "
What's missing may leave traces after
the fading image of the photograph
has disappeared, like sounds of laughter
recalled when we are sad though we can't laugh.
Bernard Weinraub reviews David Hockney's exhibition of photographs at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles ("A Painter's Photoworks: The Camera Expands Hockney's California Themes, " The Los Angeles Times, August 15,2001) :
Christopher Knight, art critic of The Los Angeles Times, in reviewing the current show, said that implicit in Mr. Hockney's photography and photocollages is a 'connection to indivisibility - to what's not in the picture.' Mr. Knight wrote that the eyes of viewers of Mr. Hockney's photographs are inevitably drawn to the photos' edges. 'Each edge, ' Mr. Knight wrote, 'makes you subconsciously mindful of what's not in the picture, of what was left out by the artist when he looked through the camera's viewfinder and chose to snap the shutter.'
8/15/01,5/2/07
Poetry by Gershon Hepner - after my dreamings
After my dreamings have all been dreamed out
and all of my thoughts have been thrashed out and thunk,
I'm sure that I'll wake up without any doubt,
and though you may ask me in jest: "Are you drunk,
and longing for four hundred wives like the king
of Saudi Arabia, and serious or sober
as that Supreme Justice to whom we all cling
while asking for mercy when it's close to October? "
I'll still be all over you if you don't hide
under sheets in a bedroom you mustn't keep locked,
and wait on my back for you, till you backslide
and tell me to shake you until you are shocked.
Inspired by "All Over You, " by Bob Dylan
Well, if I had to do it all over again,
Babe, I'd do it all over you.
And if I had to wait for ten thousand years,
Babe, I'd even do that too.
Well, a dog's got his bone in the alley,
A cat, she's got nine lives,
A millionaire's got a million dollars,
King Saud's got four hundred wives.
Well, ev'rybody's got somethin'
That they're lookin' forward to.
I'm lookin' forward to when I can do it all again
And babe, I'll do it all over you.
Well, if I had my way tomorrow or today,
Babe, I'd run circles all around.
I'd jump up in the wind, do a somersault and spin,
I'd even dance a jig on the ground.
Well, everybody gets their hour,
Everybody gets their time,
Little David when he picked up his pebbles,
Even Samson after he went blind.
Well, everybody gets the chance
To do what they want to do.
When my time arrives you better run for your life
'Cause babe, I'll do it all over you.
Well, I don't need no money, I just need a day that's sunny,
Baby, and my days are gonna come.
And I grab me a pint, you know that I'm a giant
When you hear me yellin', 'Fee-fi-fo-fum.'
Well, you cut me like a jigsaw puzzle,
You made me to a walkin' wreck,
Then you pushed my heart through my backbone,
Then you knocked off my head from my neck.
Well, if I'm ever standin' steady
A-doin' what I want to do,
Well, I tell you little lover that you better run for cover
'Cause babe, I'll do it all over you.
I'm just restin' at your gate so that I won't be late
And, momma, I'm a-just sittin' on the shelf.
Look out your window fair and you'll see me squattin' there
Just a-fumblin' and a-mumblin' to myself.
Well, after my cigarette's been smoked up,
After all my liquor's been drunk,
After my dreams are dreamed out,
After all my thoughts have been thunk,
Well, after I do some of these things,
I'm gonna do what I have to do.
And I tell you on the side, that you better run and hide
'Cause babe, I'll do it all over you.
9/11/07
and all of my thoughts have been thrashed out and thunk,
I'm sure that I'll wake up without any doubt,
and though you may ask me in jest: "Are you drunk,
and longing for four hundred wives like the king
of Saudi Arabia, and serious or sober
as that Supreme Justice to whom we all cling
while asking for mercy when it's close to October? "
I'll still be all over you if you don't hide
under sheets in a bedroom you mustn't keep locked,
and wait on my back for you, till you backslide
and tell me to shake you until you are shocked.
Inspired by "All Over You, " by Bob Dylan
Well, if I had to do it all over again,
Babe, I'd do it all over you.
And if I had to wait for ten thousand years,
Babe, I'd even do that too.
Well, a dog's got his bone in the alley,
A cat, she's got nine lives,
A millionaire's got a million dollars,
King Saud's got four hundred wives.
Well, ev'rybody's got somethin'
That they're lookin' forward to.
I'm lookin' forward to when I can do it all again
And babe, I'll do it all over you.
Well, if I had my way tomorrow or today,
Babe, I'd run circles all around.
I'd jump up in the wind, do a somersault and spin,
I'd even dance a jig on the ground.
Well, everybody gets their hour,
Everybody gets their time,
Little David when he picked up his pebbles,
Even Samson after he went blind.
Well, everybody gets the chance
To do what they want to do.
When my time arrives you better run for your life
'Cause babe, I'll do it all over you.
Well, I don't need no money, I just need a day that's sunny,
Baby, and my days are gonna come.
And I grab me a pint, you know that I'm a giant
When you hear me yellin', 'Fee-fi-fo-fum.'
Well, you cut me like a jigsaw puzzle,
You made me to a walkin' wreck,
Then you pushed my heart through my backbone,
Then you knocked off my head from my neck.
Well, if I'm ever standin' steady
A-doin' what I want to do,
Well, I tell you little lover that you better run for cover
'Cause babe, I'll do it all over you.
I'm just restin' at your gate so that I won't be late
And, momma, I'm a-just sittin' on the shelf.
Look out your window fair and you'll see me squattin' there
Just a-fumblin' and a-mumblin' to myself.
Well, after my cigarette's been smoked up,
After all my liquor's been drunk,
After my dreams are dreamed out,
After all my thoughts have been thunk,
Well, after I do some of these things,
I'm gonna do what I have to do.
And I tell you on the side, that you better run and hide
'Cause babe, I'll do it all over you.
9/11/07
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Reaching Towards His Unbounded Glory
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