Artwork © Ira Joel Haber

 

Larry David Goes Out For Good

Forgoing my cape
I put on my sports jacket
and corduroy slacks
my Gucci t-shirt
and black Converse
content to walk not drive to the café
until I learn to decipher
the No Parking signs.
I am not looking for trouble
but am ready for trouble
since so many things
aren’t as they should be
and need a champion in this world.
You have to admit
certain things like obscure jaywalking laws
inscrutable parking meters
overflowing trash cans
disappearing curbs but never a wheelchair
merchants who continually
hose down their sidewalks
to name a few on my prospective route
should make more sense than they do.
If you allow people to do as they please
they will greatly disappoint you
and if you do as you please
you will disappoint them.
If you refuse what pleases someone Look out!
but I can’t help myself.
Sometimes I feel like Don Quixote
other times like a skinny version of Batman.
Loose-kneed and loping on my way
I appear to be walking
and sitting in a chair at the same time
which is not as easy as it looks.
I feign self-possession
smiling because nothing has gone wrong yet
camouflaging my hyper-alertness
with a sunny vibe
but the sunnier the vibe
the bigger the disappointment
when a crusader meets up
with the general lawlessness around.
Down the sidewalk I go
like a lazy boat on a canal
on a Sunday during more civilized times.
I hardly have to steer myself
because no one else is out there
to get in my way for some strange reason
only two wall-sitters you know the type
with their cardboard signs
one guy in a stupor advertising his stupor
one guy advertising he won’t steal your car for food
whatever that means.
The café has taken its outside tables inside
which is odd on a sunny day
and inconsiderate since their sign announces Open
Well Open must mean open to interpretation.
What will they think of next?
I see the coffee and tea drinkers inside
no one sitting together
as singular as fish in a bowl
looking out from their shadowy element
pleading for escape
because where the door has always been
there is just more window and no way out.
What’s a café without a door? A French drama?
Do these people know something I don’t?
No action at street level I look up
and see a large Signora in a second story window
her great steaming breasts exposed and swinging
so that I can feel their weight with my eyes
and smell the intimate richness of cannolis
all the way from the ground.
Am I in Rome?
I signal for the Signora to cover up
but what does she care
at this point in life
you have to use the assets you have
and not wish for others you don’t
like I do all the time
always striving for perfection
like my father demanded
leaving me with a super-charged id
an even more super-charged super-ego
and no ego to speak of except shmuck.
I wish I could be as satisfied in my life
as the Signora is in her window.
I think she is waving me up
to tell my fortune or something
and I am tempted but
the building has no door just like the café.
This sudden lack of doors is a trend
or a pattern I don’t know which.
Signora complains in Italian
which I didn’t know I spoke until then
that her geraniums are dying
and they really are dying at her elbows
in a windowsill planter box
a pathetic display of neglect.
I signal with a pouring motion
that she should water them.
Well apparently, how darest I?
She has other things on her mind.
She screams down that the authorities
have confiscated her… her…what?…what?
It seems I no longer speak Italian.
Door, you idiot, she says in English
they have locked everyone inside
because they knew you were coming out.
Is she saying what I think she’s saying?
Am I so powerful?
I check the headlines on the newspapers
in the vending machine
but they are very old
and announce the bombing of Pearl Harbor
which makes no sense
because I am not even born yet.
Giving up I arrive at the corner
and though there is no traffic
respectfully wait to cross.
At the corner across the street stands a wise man
just when I need one.
Well we shall see how wise he really is.
I am skeptical but he looks the part
just like Moses they all do
with a flowing beard and flowing robes
and a terrible aspect in his eye
a forbidding judgmental desert light
the harshest of servants of the harshest of gods
not only harsh but with exceptional attention to detail
so you can never get it right.
I decide to ask him my question
Great Rabbi, I say,
No one is pleased with anything
or anyone anymore.
What pleases me doesn’t please my neighbor.
What pleases my neighbor doesn’t please me.
We are constantly at odds with each other.
How are we ever to get along in this world?
That’s why we have the law,
boomed Moses like thunder
and you are its chosen instrument.
I? But what law is that, Revered Moshe?
The law The law
What law, Great Teacher?
The one and only law
It’s hard to follow the rules
when you don’t know what they are, crack I.
Moses fixes me in his gaze
pulls my ear and pinches my cheek and that’s it.
He’s gone, not in a rumbling cloud
but like he was never there in the first place.
I am leaving this world I’m afraid
just as confused as I came into it.
For all my efforts none the wiser.

 

Steven Schutzman: “I have published a lot, been rejected a hell of a lot more yet I continue to send stuff out to prove a life of the imagination is still possible in this barbarian backwater of a country.”

Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, writer, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in the USA and Europe and he has had nine one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum,The Albright-Knox Art Gallery & The Allen Memorial Art Museum. Since 2006 His paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 300 online and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Creative Artists Public Service Grant (CAPS) two Pollock-Krasner grants, two Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grants and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc. in 2017 & 2018 he received the Brooklyn Arts Council SU-CASA artist-in-residence grant.