B.Z. Niditch- Three Poems

CINEMA VERITE

Forgetting Visconti
for one night
and tuning in
to Tuesday Weld
in "Pretty Poison"
about a cheer leader
then "Snakebite"
which scared
the pants off me
all because
you passed
on to me
in living color
the three "R's"
rebellion
rejection
and resentment
having no answers
to your album
of questions,
preferring to open wide
my third story windows
along the Channel
and play tenor sax



PROMISES, PROMISES

The promises of love
are not for a night
in a noisy warped
amusement park
when emotions climb
like roller coasters
which flood light over us
in a spectacle,
what about
our shredded nerves
of a Dear John letter
in the morning
for convenience sake
kept in a musical box
in a deafened past
that often makes
us cynical,
yet love was obliging
when Eros calls on us
with lighthearted gestures
upon a melancholy day
and slips out like cat
in a black handbag
with big changing mirrors
you carry
by the fun house
in your over sized look
of goodbye.



ALIBI

Nature,like time
pardons
every memory
its forgotten miles
of word loss
from the cold reality
of a gentle affair
as you trudge up
the great blue hillsides
trying to find that crevice
of your former love poem,
it's summer now here
in your absence
with my new watch on
you handed me
for luck
by these Japanese trees,
bidding a farewell
to a curious letter
I cannot locate
framed to the earth
into innocent oblivion.