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I Bought a House — A poem for Parsha Behar-Bechukotai

[additional-authors]
May 6, 2021

And when a man sells a residential house
in a walled city, its redemption may take place

until the completion of the year of its sale
-Leviticus 25:29

And the property laws are already getting complicated
when we don’t own anything yet, except the shoes
on our feet on this dirt at the foot of the mountain.

I think of this as I work in my socks in this house
on a mountain – The ink on the paperwork which
brought me here – still wet.

There are teams of propertyists exhuming the i’s
for their dots. The government has already told me
I’m on their list. They hope to see me soon.

My bank account keeps telling me it’s going to
need another signature before it releases funds to
procure new chairs; and I wonder, what was wrong

with the chairs we left at the other place?
I hope to live the full thirty years to see this through.
Before the bank claims their jubilee inheritance.

But the mirror has already shown me hair that’s
not the color of my youth – and some of it has
permanently left the building.

I haven’t said anything to my doctors, but they
keep sending precautionary emails wondering
if everything is okay.

It may have been a mistake buying a house with stairs.
I keep seeing myself at the bottom of them
a broken coffee mug nearby – the cats wondering

who’s going to put food in the bowls now?
So, launching into a thirty-year commitment
at my advanced state, was nobody’s best plan.

These systems we make – The word ownership
was constructed by humans. The Earth pays it no mind.
In a billion years (probably less the way this is going)

all the papers we’ve ever signed will have
burned away – All the poems we’ve written
no one left to reject them.


God Wrestler: a poem for every Torah Portion by Rick LupertLos Angeles poet Rick Lupert created the Poetry Super Highway (an online publication and resource for poets), and hosted the Cobalt Cafe weekly poetry reading for almost 21 years. He’s authored 25 collections of poetry, including “God Wrestler: A Poem for Every Torah Portion“, “I’m a Jew, Are You” (Jewish themed poems) and “Feeding Holy Cats” (Poetry written while a staff member on the first Birthright Israel trip), and most recently “The Tokyo-Van Nuys Express” (Poems written in Japan – Ain’t Got No Press, August 2020) and edited the anthologies “Ekphrastia Gone Wild”, “A Poet’s Haggadah”, and “The Night Goes on All Night.” He writes the daily web comic “Cat and Banana” with fellow Los Angeles poet Brendan Constantine. He’s widely published and reads his poetry wherever they let him.

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