Worms: And Other Poems

By Jay Tanenbaum

This book of poetry is centered around psychological themes. It is primarily designed for anyone who has wondered how they pertain to the events which occur in everyday life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984545169

Jay Tanenbaum

The author is a retired psychiatrist who wrote most of his poetry in the nineteen seventies and eighties. He resides in Lafayette, California with his wife Kathleen

Book preview

A Life

Why doesn’t somebody hate me?

Is this also too much to ask?

             Twenty years

             Of living

             Unseen face

             Observing

             No one for

             Nor against

             Meaningless

             No matter—

This is what I chose for myself.

Did I? Something in my too Freudian mind

Did it. I saw too much.

Maybe I saw what wasn’t there.

Yosemite

Standing in hot September snow,

Dressed in sunlight and the bluest sky,

The whole world spread out below,

Light-years away from words like why.

Thinking only when spoken to,

Letting what I see be me,

Feeling like I’ve broken through,

I’m less like a man, more like a tree.

A Matter of Taste

My pockets are empty;

My memory, gone.

The night is still spinning

Its web around dawn.

I look at the traffic:

Swift arrows of steel;

The experts are baffled

Which motions are real.

The songs we have cherished

Are always played twice—

Once for the audience,

Once for the dice.

I follow your footsteps

But you are not there;

I hear the loudspeaker

But the cupboard is bare.

Wrinkle, Wrinkle, Little Star

He didn’t ever stop to say

What kept him at the edge

But seemed to be afraid to play,

Listening behind some hedge

Or other, sure that life is