GAS Featured Poet: Igor Goldkind

 Igor Goldkind is an author, poet, and independent scholar. At the age of 14, Igor served as a volunteer Science Fiction Coordinator for the now wildly popular San Diego Comic-Con. It was in this capacity that he met Ray Bradbury, whom he asked for advice about becoming a writer. Through Comic-Con, Igor also befriended Theodor Sturgeon and Harlan Ellison, two of his major influences. He worked in the British comic publishing industry and is best known for having coined the Graphic Novel genre as a global publishing genre. In 2016, his award-winning multimedia novel published by Chameleon Publishing IS SHE AVAILABLE?, broke ground in combining Poetry, Comics, Jazz, and Animation setting a new bar in electronic publishing. He continued to blend poetry with art in his new work TAKE A DEEP BREATH, Living With Uncertainty, an illustrated collection of essays, poetry, and short stories confronting the pandemic in personal terms. Igor writes and lives in the San Diego, California but misses the UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_G

Suicide Note

There are a still a few options open to you, apart from death.
Which is after all, inevitable and not so much an option as the fast forward to the point where there are no more options.
Living is dying anyway, so why speed up the process?
To avoid pain?
Many have endured much more than you and still clung to the delays to the inevitable.
Is it because you no longer feel of worth or of value?
To whom, yourself?

Perhaps your judge is drunk or wanting in discernment.
Perhaps your judge is just wrong and his judgement awaits over-ruling by a higher one.
Who are you after all, to judge yourself?
If you are so worthless then your judgement is suspect its certainly not worth acting upon. What if you went and saw a movie instead? or got drunk?
Or went to sleep?
Or made love until the dawn found another hanging judge to sentence you?

Do you want to die because life is absurd and void of meaning?
What took you so long to notice?
Does your slowness make you want to speed things up?
Trying to arrive sooner to the destination because you already know what’s there? Instead of death you could seek laughter,

which is really a form of dying;
a release from the known into the unknown by way of catching your breath in its own rhythm. Inward and outward.

What if you were about to hear a joke you had never heard before that made you laugh so hard that you woke up into the wide open world that contains this one?
If you die now, you might just die before hearing the joke that would wake you up
To a world where you no longer wanted to die because you had found yourself already here,

Where you belonged
where you were all along,
not living or dying but blinking and breathing like this, Like this, like this...

                                *****

The Line You Walked 

I am my father.
I am my father’s son.
I am my father’s father
I am my daughter’s son. 

I am the line that walks these dots
Connecting one Pole to another
One foot follows the other
From Lodz to Ellis Island to Brooklyn to Washington to Marseille, To the frozen thunder of L’Ardennes, 

Munchen, Salzbourg, Yale, San Pedro, Cham Kom, Chichin Itza Lansing, San Diego, Berkeley, Paris, Heidelberg, London
One arrow pointing to this hallowed ground
We stand on now. 

These dots, these stones, these memories We tread upon:
What you could not take with you,
You have left behind 

For me, for us
In the meaning you finally found 

Behind eyes glued shut
Behind my daughter’s eyes glued open
In wonderment, in curiosity
In the mind’s intrepid search for the reason in it all. 

Stepping forwards, stumbling backwards.
Looking up, looking down, looking sideways at the world.
Looking over your shoulder with a joke, with a laugh and a dimpled grin. Man makes plans while God laughs.
Student, soldier, teacher, brother, husband, father,
Grander father still. 

Between these dots
We can see the being of who we were, Who we become and who we are: One in the same. 

I am my father.
I am my father’s son.
I am my father’s father
I am my daughter’s son. 

Your work, my father, is not yet done.

    For my father, Dr. Victor Herchiel Goldkind 1924-2011