Pieces of Liberty

By Tamara Tifareth

The uncommon lines of Tamara Tifareth’s poems reflect the contours of a young woman’s heart and mind as she expresses bizarre emotional truths in a language of astonishing rage, range, and resonance: soaring beauty alternates with sublime laughter, which in turn gives rise to skepticism, cynicism and sarcastic anger.

The novelty of these poems – the artistic and financial reason for their being published in the first place, and by no less a publisher than Party Crasher Press - lies in their ability to disrupt the reader’s sense of social convention, allowing her finally to see who she really is outside all forms of civilized violence and stupidity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Party Crasher Press
• Release date: Dec 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370047840

Book preview

Pieces of Liberty: Poems

Tamara Tifareth

Published by Party Crasher Press

Text Copyright ©2016 Tamara Tifareth, Party Crasher Press

Cover Image and Design Copyright ©2016 Party Crasher Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Emericus Durden and/or the publisher Party Crasher Press.

Please direct any enquiries to: [e-mail]

Dedicated to Emericus Durden – he may not be the world’s friendliest man, but he’s sure taught us a lot.

Contents

"I have worn gray flannel trousers

and walked upon the beach of hell."

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Autobiography

"Yeah, what we need isn’t right reasons, but just that grace."

- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

ONE: Hostage to War

Prelude to Liberty

Pieces of Liberty

Bluffs Overlooking Omaha Beach

Flies Walking Across Eyeballs

Feast of Circumcision

Bury the Dog Deeper

TWO: Days And Nights In Baltimore

Liberty for Milton, Bacon for Bacon

Throwing Sop to the Soap-Boilers

Me And Half of Chicago

Egg Tells Something to Chicken

Visual on Geronimo

THREE: A Reporter’s Job

Spring Break in Karachi

Eating Soup with a Knife

The Quintessence of an Excrement

ONE: Hostage to War

Divide, add, multiply, and understand.

- Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law

Prelude to Liberty

Turn your head

To look at me when I lie with you,

Reader,

To look at me through the eye-slits

In your hood.

When I make love to you,

Reader,

I see two faces there,

One compacted material,

Another hardly spiritual

Shimmering in the air.

I see two intentions there,

One emptied, hollowed out,

Another consummated

In the instant of a bomb blast.

Jumbled pieces of our two lives

Once flying apart

Now free and easy rolling pleasures,

Pieces of flesh

Rearranging themselves

Merging down there

In the crashing surf of the beach.

For now

Windswept remains pulled further out

By an unreeling tide

Become a swath of opalescent light

Circling on a surface,

Threading through a vortex.

Here

Make the quick

Downward rub

Of thumb and forefinger

Quicker still –

That’s enough!

The universal in a particular

Centimeter of space:

Glints of cliff-side sunlight

Suspended free and easy

In the swimming motions

Of deep ocean water.

Nor let me deceive you:

Take these goggles

To correct your watery sight.

Now what do you see? Yes

Every night as I fall asleep

I hear those drowning women’s voices,

Their enormous screaming

Failing to surpass

The gulps, the gurgles of misguided survival.

I see those women’s limbs down there

On the sea-beds, riverbeds, streambeds

Of the world.

I see a transformation occur

From human to crustacean