Keeping Kosher

 

I remember red meat.

 

In red meat’s time,

our lives were marbled with victory. 

Our fingers’ flesh folded over our sacred rings,

burying our eyes and doubling our smiles.

 

In red meat’s time,

we slapped it down to fry pans,

to roasters, through grinders. 

Skip the lying, seeping surface.

That’s life, that’s death,

that’s the way it is,

if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it and

I’ll give ya something to cry about.

 

The men then were men and

the women were bubbly,

impossibly cinched, chiffon giggling bubbly;

thigh-high, long-line, fly-me-to-Rio bubbly,

excuse us while we skip out and powder our nose.

 

And the men shifted in their over-stuffed chairs,

fearing and loving their birthrights,

chasing them down with hard gold liquor,

unnatural laughter, nervous prayer, and

the tight, bright fiber of rare, red meat.

 

It was science,

blasted bodies of knowledge,

that ended it.  Showing us how

our hearts stopped too soon,

our colons packed rock solid

with the remnants of grand tours,

our veins viscous with bad fats.

 And so our search for alternative stuffs

to tear in our teeth

brought us to the fruits of the sea.

 

In seafood’s time, we tread lightly. 

You could almost hear

the wind chimes when we walked. 

The world was beige,

the wood was blonde, and

California had its airy tentacles in everything. 

We melted down to skeletal angles,

laid artificial blends on our backs and

stalked the mandatory party.

 

The men then were men and

the women were sullen. 

Straight-haired and barefaced,

they pulled back into books,

behind low-level desks,

waiting for the moment

when they would emerge equal,

like the butterfly folding back to cocoon

in search of greater wing.

 

Some men, shaken by the loss of their girls,

grew sideburns and

frantically ran to make room. 

Others rumbled away disgruntled,

slamming their spiked tails

against a volatile ground

in the hope that something would come

from the backlash.

 

Soon, we discovered that seafood

stuck more to its shells than our ribs, and

its bones were always a problem. 

And so we looked to poultry.

 

Light and filling, miraculously versatile, 

after all didn’t everything else aspire to taste like it? 

In life, these beaks were mean, jutting little monsters,

but in death, poultry gave itself up selflessly,

blending into our dishes, considerate enough to see

that our blood pumped unobstructed.

 

In poultry’s time,

we filled out to livable weights and

ran hard at what we wanted. 

The men then were men and

the women were men.

Check the musculature!

See  the stamina! 

We watched as women tore up stomach lining

with the best of them! 

Weren’t their heads for fourth-quarter figures and

baby-making afterthoughts?

Wasn’t their laughter the most false silk,

much like the scarves they wore

as their last shred of sex?

 

And the men, feeling rushed and outrun,

slipped into hard, sleek, Italian numbers,

legions of bloodless Pat Rileys. 

They looked downward for their models,

not bothering to play by the rules

they kept changing, 

I’ll bet you a Boesky, 

I’ll raise you two Trumps.

 

In poultry’s time,

pork made a stab at such acclaim,

stamping its feet,

I’m white meat, dammit coach, put me in. 

But we would not be swayed. 

In the name of an ovine utopia,

it was poultry that we loved.

 

Until we found out how it was

or was not cleaned. 

Jim Fixx dropped in mid-jog. 

Nothing is ever what it seems and

all promises shatter at the pedestal’s base. 

Now, we wander listlessly from food to food.

Pasta is a sometime friend that

bores us with its quantity. 

We can never seem to bring the vegetable

over from the side dish. 

Our world’s options melt like spring ice

as we slip to old-world poverties.

 

And men and women

come down slowly from their separate peaks,

sorry really sorry for everything,

I mean it. 

They remember the goodness in each other’s faces,

benevolent binding and bone. 

There’s so much less static and distraction. 

We have time now, can’t we try again?

 

But if you listen closely,

you can hear the reticent, reformed tapping of

red meat at our survival’s door. 

Hi, I was in the neighborhood . . .

Don’t the words “lean” and “free range”

mean anything to anyone? 

Give me another chance, can’t ya?