Ripping Off the Bandaid – A poem for Parsha Nitzavim

God will once again gather you from all the nations,
where Adonai, your God, had dispersed you.
-Deuteronomy 30:3

I’m a rip off the bandaid kind of guy.
If the bad news is coming, don’t soften it.
I don’t need to schedule a phone call to hear it.

Just tell me.

I also, sometimes, just want to get to the good stuff.
I don’t want a lot exposition, or the slow burn
to the satisfying payoff.

I’m not binging this life.

I like efficiency. I like things to take only
the exact amount of time they should take.
if it’s supposed to take a long time

let it take a long time.

If it should have ended already,
let it end. Come to think of it, I could have
cut the last seven lines of this poem.

Including the last two.

I like to get meta. I can tell that you
are reading this right now. There never was
a fourth wall.

I’ve gotten off track.

So, if You’re going to exile me to the desert
only to bring me back at the end of the Book
what have I learned here?

I’m going to turn this Torah right around.

No, really, I am. We all are.
In just a few weeks we’re going to start over.
Read this whole thing again.

See if we can learn something this time.

Los 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 26 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 “I Am Not Writing a Book of Poems in Hawaii” (Poems written in Hawaii – Ain’t Got No Press, August 2022) 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.