Stupid Shirts / Roy Chicky Arad

shirts are so stupid

DJs in coffee shops are so stupid

jellyfish are so stupid

a mobile phone lost in a taxi

is so stupid

jeeps parked on the curb of Bograshov Street

are so stupid

the newspaper I write for

is so stupid

the newspaper I don’t write for

is so stupid

the lemon is so stupid

sitting on the straw

in the heart of the empty glass

Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres

are so stupid, so stupid are Peres and Sharon

the plants are so stupid

salad dressings are so stupid

talking about the Holocaust is stupid

both always get attention

always stupid

bearded men with earrings are so stupid

especially if they wear a pouch

my heart is so stupid

my heart is so stupid

a ring is so stupid

the same dog is so stupid

the dog so stupid

the beautiful waitress from Hungary – she’s smart

bus stations are so stupid on Saturday morning

jellyfish are so stupid on Saturday morning

shirts are so stupid

on people’s chests, on beautiful women’s chests

on the chests of 37-year-old women, tourists from France,

sales ladies in clothing stores, women who smoke and women who don’t,

shirts are so stupid

Translated from the Hebrew by Lisa Katz

The Owl

Out of the golden sand,
it slaughters falcons,
turns cobras pale,
the rock owl.
I’ve seen it all,
I haven’t seen anything yet--
the rock owl.

Everywhere

ads for R.C Cola.
Around my earlobes
Israeli rap on loud speakers

--the rock owl.

Igniting the desert wind,
pure on a dark sand dune,
the owl,

and on the dune a man in a colorful American shirt.
Here!
Right here!

(ten years earlier)
Skies blue as a tee shirt.
It’s the middle of the desert.
On this spot the Negev Mall will be raised,
bones looted.
A Swiss-made surveying instrument,
whose rage is crystal and
arrows metal,
clangs toward
the owl born of panic.

And the Beer Sheva city coalition.
The owl and I!
The owl and I!

Wielding the sword
in his wounded arm,
the owl
son of Anat
of earth, of the crescent.
the owl.
Beer Sheva of the early Nineties,
and the former desert,
slowly spreading its wings,
bronzed and mortared,
and quietly revealing his sword.
What sense for me now
owl and love?

And then the mall,
three stories, octagonal with fluted skin, and a floor of restaurants
yellowed with dust,
standing five and a hundred cubits
clad in chill marble.

And the folks with their swords,
next to picantic-china
across from i.M.P.
The Fox-Man store is next to a pile of orange clothing,
and the Fox-Man salesgirl,
a pretty gumchewer aged one score less two
her face pitted, chewed, blue-green, gleaming with
fire,
her heart chewed
with lust and passion.
(On her chest a freckled shirt that will never by stylish, whatever may come
to pass)
And in the volume of the mall
shouts the owl with zeal
with a torch-cry
I am immortal
I am King Kong of the desert,
I am Godzilla of the Negev
The Golem of the Negev Mall.

His grandfather?
Baal.
His grandmother?
A Canadian real estate developer of Jewish origin,
massing and buying,
racing with their dumb shopping bags
down the neon corridors,
in the formike passage.
And the local paper’s photog flashes,
And then the guard, brave and proud
(He already fought in Afganistan, a Lau missile powdered his
nose),
he draws his gun,
Looks at the Fox-Man Girl, the foxie human’s girl.
And the owl, there’s the cool and quiet flint,
weary, his eyes today are dry,
the beat of his wings is aureate,
his feathers are pure Kerolite,
he smiles.

Raise the fire and consume the mall and its daughters,
conflagrate the merchandise of Fox-Man,
the wild bull of Burger Ranch.

I’ve seen it all,
I haven’t seen anything yet--
the rock owl.

Who will re-inter the rock owl, the fire owl?
What transgression made I on this dread world?

-
-

Mall nation by the owl accursed.
A human being by the owl accursed.
An owl by his smile accursed. 

Translated from the Hebrew by Pesach Slabosky. "The Owl" participated in Michal Helfman's work in  the Venice Art Biennale 2003.

The Owl  - Text
The Owl - mp3 (Hebrew)

The Corpse

The eagle approaches the corpse.

The falcon squints at the corpse.

It’s a rainy day. Nevertheless, a serpent crawls on its belly towards the mound

of the carcass. Out of his tongue rise venom and a yellow vapor.

The eagle and the falcon fall onto the corpse.

Their heads entwine like lace. The eagle pokes the falcon's belly.

A brave ladybird rolls in the desert sand.

As slippery as the future, as elegant as an opinion,

the serpent comes closer. It can already smell the corpse.

The faded centipede plots from the rock,

as pale as paper! Its legs like an upside down "Y"!

I am the first to reach the corpse:

I am the corpse.

Translated from the Hebrew by Jan Greenberg and Eran Hadas

Some recommendations  

I recommend to my readers not to fall in love

and to eat herring

eat herring with onions

don’t fall in love

women are trouble

men are mud and heartache

pickled herring

won’t do anything bad to you

I recommend Tolstoy’s biography by Henri Troyat in two volumes

to my readers

read the part in section two where the elderly Tolstoy gets a bike

and get back to me

I recommend to my readers

to sleep in socks

despite the recession

because of the recession

nothing will happen if you sleep in jeans

I recommend eating sweetsops

Tsachi, a party animal friend of mine told me they’re very healthy

even though the last one I bought

wasn’t ripe

and turned gray in the freezer.
I guess I did something wrong

if you are musicians or poets

I recommend that your next work be

emotional or danceable

don’t try to be too smart

or too stupid

it’s better not to try too hard

it’s better not to do anything if you’re musicians or poets

you can learn to do nothing slowly. my advice for success and luck –

invest in your toilet paper!

that’s the only superstition worth believing in

listen good my readers! it’s better not to do anything. invest your money there!

Get some great, expensive, high quality toilet paper, even if you’re poor

triple layered, quadruple-layered and even quintuple-layered

politicians will disappoint you and won’t move a finger when you’re fired

they’ll send you to your death for a photo in the free tabloid “Israel Today”

but nice toilet paper will console you

So

I also recommend a trip to Cairo

and drinking cold Karkade juice there

in the cheapest café

I recommend to my readers

never to buy more than one book and never to agree to take more than one book

I advise all my readers not

to sleep with the same person

day after day

don’t sleep day after day

with the same partner

So no one will get used to the idea

I recommend to my readers

to join at least two labor unions

I recommend to my readers

to sit near the window

and to avoid war any way possible

nothing good will come of it

not even a motel. the bother is a real waste.

I advise my readers

to make use of construction in the city

to watch the cranes at least

ten minutes a day

to look at the holes in the ground at the building sites

to bang your head into the metal fence, even if there is a warning sign

and to look deep into the stormy shafts at the building sites

and to love anyway

Translated from the Hebrew by Lisa Katz

Cast-Steel Cadaver: The Poem of the Dead Escalator

On the urban pavestones it is dying now, bent on its side –

The massive escalator

Of the 58 Allenby Street underpass.

A crane approaches the mechanical staircase’s corpse, and hooks around its hook.

While all around, like red ants in their shirts,

The laborers and their helmets.

The red crane –

Its telescopic arm lengthening and dangling

Such as that of the tank of destruction, at its end the crooked hook.

By the posters of shows that took place within another corpse, that of the lascivious Club 58

Allenby Street,

The hook slowly descends

And that laborer there in short

Shorts and white socks

Lights a cigarette,

While the mechanical stair case’s motor screech-scratches the urban pavestones and moans

Sending horrid, horrid noise every which way

And finally ceases.

A failure.

The crane’s belly, the crane men prepare for round

Two.

Blond girls go fumbley-mumbley by, under the crane, next to the cast-steel cadaver, then penetrate via

The bar door, and already someone’s hitting on a ponytailed lad.

Some lights flicklicker, other lights are blocked, others dance-a-dance

And gently (it’s a woman) the crane turns back

And folds up, as if failed in courtship.

And the case – a dome of aluminum, steel and plastic (bureaucratic turban of the transportation department)

Lies

Horizontal, waiting on the muddy sidewalk.

Failure!

Nor did it ever help a pedestrian,

For years it hasn’t worked,

I don’t know if it ever worked

Certainly since I have come to the city,

It hasn’t worked,

Only moaned,

In grim weather and heat-sting

Only screech-scratched,

In grim weather and heat-sting,

This good for nothing stair case,

This here metallic menace.

A sad case!

And I consider seducing some drunk in a pink and gray striped shirt

And decide against an awful girl in a striped skirt

And then three others enter at the clap of a hand, walking briskly, one of them exposes a portion of

Her back

Featuring a tiny tattoo in bad taste.

And behind, the fortress, 58 Allenby Street, Tel Aviv

Rife with homosexual lust and straight lust, and the lust of my own letters,

Tired, a tree grows over the newsstand, and over the attempt

To build a twenty four hour bar-barbershop, a tree as fresh

As a hasty toilet encounter’s cum.

And zipped kisses - the spit of despair – later.

And the apparently Yemenite laborer places chains over the dead escalator

And two men like fast-drying glue cling to the body of the striped girl

And that of the ponytailed guy sitting beside her,

And seems to me the best of the two, despite the ponytail

And here’s the approaching and crackling sodapopgas noise of the escalator

And in the other eye, two dark girls stepping out of single toilet stall. 

And the direction is stable and the crane looks new and bright

And the idiot guys look like idiots and the idiot girls look pretty.

And the girls gather now about a donkeylike motorcycle with a sticker that says “Our POW Ron Arad, born free.”

It is a huge, leviathan-like case, a Moby Dick steel van, several brainless tons.

For a brief spell it stands in the mild and joyous nocturnal Tel Aviv air – just as

It did within its useless shaft,

That always caused me to cross the street, better to die by the Humvee of some cheering whitebread

Youths from celestial garden developments, and not breathe in those sharp urinal odors.

The toothed wheels are exposed – stairs within stairs within stairs

And a nice religious girl approaches the case,

And the girl is pale, slender and pretty, perhaps Romanian.

And behind me the striped one, scattering away the lechers, straightens, looking as interesting as flat

beer

and the case rises into the air and stands there.

And is now being loaded onto the “H.A. Cranes” truck.

Looted and tethered in “H.A. Cranes” chains as a luckless foe, defeated already

at the onset of the plot.

It is Samson whose plot abruptly discontinues.

And where is my Delilah?  (the twenty four hour barbershop is bankrupt).

Soon this Samson will be led in triumph, his body all beat and bruised while “H.A. Cranes” employees

Spit on him.

And now an employee rises to the middle of the stair case,

Placing chains on the case, to stabilize it on the truck

Causing it to go erect in the air and shift for a second as a ballerina.

And the passersby touch the parts of the staircase that stick out of the “H.A. Cranes” truck

Nonchalantly

And the pretty dark girls leave the bar,

Strings at their backs

And the laborers took the cadaver from the bar’s front to the asphalt.

And the bar’s employees begin to rearrange the chairs

And tell those who only just arrived how they missed out

And the bar’s crew shakes hands with the crane laborers

I never understood who runs this bar.

And the plants return to their proper place.

Translated from the Hebrew by Yuval Ben Ami

The poem was written about the sealing of the pedestrian underpass which used to exist beneath Allenby Street, between King George Street and the Carmel market in Tel Aviv. Due to the discontinuation of the underpass, the old, inactive escalator on the 58 Allenby side was pulled out and sold to metal traders.

The Chief Executives’ Fishing Workshop

Three executive CEOs

in a leadership-through-sport workshop

accidentally caught the same fish.

Its body lies on the Tiberias promenade,

attached to three hooks.

Three helpless executives

near the big fish, its gills broken.

They won’t learn a thing!

Won’t learn a thing!

A fourteen-year-old passes by a couple of centimeters

from them

his clothes shimmering scales

they’re afraid he may ask questions

but he runs off, makes out with

the girlfriend, his dick stiff in the Benetton.

The fishing rods of the three CEOs

tangle up in a coil.

The three are still with the rods

besiege the poor fish.

They won’t learn a thing!

Won’t learn a thing!

A group of Breslov ultra-Orthodox Jews, roaring something, echoing in the distance

one of them in shoes made in Israel.

The insurance company CEO

approaches the fish and forcefully pulls the strings

to pull out the hooks, but they are stuck.

He sparks a flame and the light thin strings ignite and detach

easily.

For a second the torn fish is gilded with fire.

That CEO takes the dead fish

and throws it beyond the stone wall, into the darkness of the sea of Galilee.

“It is dead anyway, why throw it in the water?”

says one of them

when that CEO washes his hands with the remains of a freebie magazine sweeping   across the promenade.

Translated from the Hebrew by Orit Gat

The Crack 

Sometimes I’m an elderly woman

remaining outside the door

because she lost her key

in a crack in the sewer.

And sometimes I’m the key

and usually the sewer crack.

Translated from the Hebrew by Lisa Katz

End of the battle

The battle is over

and someone I don’t know will shake my limp hand 

it’s the junk m

an

and a Peugeot speeds along

a pickup truck with a banana on top

and many loves I knew and will know

the battle is over

Nimrod takes off his uniform, argues about the price

with the elderly innkeeper

and her daughter

enters: the battle is over

the Maariv newspaper has shut down

the battle is over

we know the fight is bitter

and hammocks swing,

the wind free

to ruffle the hair on my head

and storms are allowed too

the battle is over

and there are happy orphans

waves a yard high

when the battle ends

a nine-inch prick    

and the cripples rest.

the battle is over

I’m not a singer

I’m a wooden porch

cover me with a carpet

and on Allenby Street in Tel Aviv

there is a new pizzeria

with olives a new color,

the color of love

The battle is over,

the olives are a new color,

the color of love

Translated from the Hebrew by Lisa Katz

Tel Aviv

The city is faint and mysterious,

the lights and the fines 

women returning alone from waitressing shifts.

He directs his finger backwards,

hairless. 

Translated from the Hebrew by Yuval Ben Ami

Mustard

I'm going to sleep with the phone still on, going to sleep with the phone still on

and when she calls,

I'm not picking up,

and when she calls,

I'm not picking up,

because I ate a salami sandwich

Translated from the Hebrew by Yuval Ben Ami

Flip-flops: four haiku from Sinai, Egypt

The last evening in

Sinai the shadow of a

cat upon a roof

returning to Joe

with my punctured water raft                          

I say inflate it                               

worker from Sudan

brings me black coffee we have

similar flip-flops

I drank and I peed

ready for my arrival

at border control

Translated from the Hebrew by Lisa Katz

The Neighborhood

I was first in this neighborhood.

I was the most handsome man in the neighborhood.

I had the most leopardlike hair in this neighborhood,

the best situated ass in this neighborhood.

I had many ants, the most red ones of anyone in this neighborhood

I filled up in all the gas stations in this neighborhood

I filled up on both diesel and the best gas in this neighborhood

I ate from all the compote bowls in this neighborhood

I chewed out of the mouths of the daughters of every leader of this neighborhood.

I am the one who planted all the trees in this neighborhood.

I am the one who chopped down all the trees in this neighborhood.

I am the one who tore up, with my bare hands, each and every shrub in this neighborhood,

for reasons that proved essential.

I wept into each and every gutter in this neighborhood.

I painted all the crosswalks in this neighborhood and then crossed on red.

I loved all the loves in this neighborhood,

no one had more loves than me

I watched films made by Koreans, ate Tartare and pesto in all the restaurants of this neighborhood.

Then I chewed m plate, my waiter, my table and my footstool.

There's not a footstool left in this neighborhood.

I chewed the last footstool in this neighborhood.

This is the neighborhood without any footstools.

People run, people sleep, people stand on a slant in this neighborhood.

It's It's been impossible to stand on a footstool for years now,

To see what's in the pantry, if anything's left. 

Translated from the Hebrew by Yuval Ben Ami

The Nectarine.

I love people so much

that I love even hatred itself

as though it were a nectarine.

I love life so much

love it so much

that I love even death itself

as though it were a nectarine,

but I don’t like nectarines.

I don't have to be enamored of everything

I'm a  simple man, with a slight limp, this past week

and a bruise on my nose due to an incident with a mailbox.

I like soft fruits: pomelos, lychees, canned pineapples.

Grandma's mulberry tree

the one Moti Kerner and I used to climb

before he served in the Army

and went to study computers.

Translated from the Hebrew by Yuval Ben Ami

GazaMe

I face the sea on a sunny day

watch the leaping girls Gaza 

I wake to the ring

of a telephone Gaza

I order a half-portion of fried chicken from Tsion

so I won’t get tired, and then another half Gaza

I toss her down on the bed

and we fondle each other through jeans Gaza

I look at the sails

that say Tenuva Dairy in blue Gaza

I’m a pink elderly woman

with a camera and a hat Gaza

I look at my love

holding an electric wire and throwing the radio up to the ceiling, laughing Gaza

I’m an actor in the 1989 Holocaust day school ceremony

with a fake beard Gaza

I don’t take part in gym class,

put leaves in a puddle Gaza

pigeons and ravens search for food

in what the water left behind

pecking the wet sand

Translated from the Hebrew by Lisa Katz

A Love poem for Dana Guidetti

You are so right-on

Dana Guidetti

You are the breeze on the top floors of El Al building

You are the sword-pierced olive branch in the infantry emblem.

You are so right-on

Dana Guidetti

so right on.

You are so elegant

Dana Guidetti

You are the sibilant S sounds in Miss Sixty.

You are the crimson blood of the revolution terminated in its midst.

You are so elegant

Dana Guidetti

You are so right-on

Dana Guidetti 

Although we kissed when I was

wearing a helmet, at a rooftop party, a skipping CD, a dead couch

Yes, I wasn't attracted to you when you came over to my place

and Nimrod disappeared, to leave us together.

No I wasn't attracted,

but you are so right-on.

Dana Guidetti 

I admire each blonding curl in your straight hair,

but I'll never be yours,

Dana Guidetti

lucky for you

Dana Guidetti

You'll be sleeping alone tonight

Dana Guidetti

Without me

Dana Guidetti

and without you.

Translated from the Hebrew by Yuval Ben Ami

Coffee

The coffee sits above the saucer.

Under them, the table,

under it, the country. 

Translated from the Hebrew by Lisa Katz.

How to enjoy fascism

I will dip sweet fascism

in coffee,

bitter fascism

is good in salad, next to fennel.

Fast fascism

I’ll shove in my shoes

and the crawling kind

I’ll put in my garden to eat

mice.

The city is so beautiful!

The dresses are so short!

The coffee so sweet!

The salad so green!

No mice in the garden!

Translated from the Hebrew by Lisa Katz

Better business trophy 1971

guns – plucked eyebrows

battle helicopters – a tattoo on a breast

there is no god – just a general’s sour accent

tie up your children

tie up your husbands

women sing of money

men sing of women

tie up your children

tie up your husbands

women put on make-up for the ashtray

men flick ashes on the women

in the shopping center

in a green shirt

a childhood friend

tie up your children

tie up your husbands

he speaks about arabs

she touches his arm

colorful electric wires

the threads of blinking eyes

tie up your children.

tie up your husbands

journalist credentials

better business citation

and afterwards going home

Translated from the Hebrew by Lisa Katz

©roy arad chicky99<at>gmail.com

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