I’ve never laid a hand on a word
like banana slips
until the day I lined the streets of Berlin
like a bed of roses and hung
a piñata of a big nosed Jew,
you know the kind that rule the world
and take your money. It was like
the running of the bull, only the Jew
didn’t move. It was stuffed with Kinder
chocolate and Lindt imported
from the pocket of my grandfather’s
father who I met only through
the hearty laugh he buried
in the deep pockets of my grandfathers
tears that night, or was it day,
when they dragged him
to the corner of Bialystok
and bad luck, as if luck was
an iron dome, waiting to be born.
I left piñata clubs in
umbrella stands in the lobby
of every building on the
Ku’damm but it wasn’t
1943. It was today on
the Champs Elysee
and Piccadilly Gardens
and the Tree of life synagogue
named for its irony.
I pick up my megaphone and yell
across your college campuses decorated
with swastikas you can’t erase.
“Take your boycotts, your ovens,
your rivers and your seas,
take all the places
you want me to leave” before I
find a cure for the cancer
you breed.
November 6, 2019
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