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God is a can of Zyklon-B
And surely, father, you are god.
Vengeful and jealous, you made my orifaces bleed
For so long I believed you omniscient
Master of my thoughts, controller of my destiny.

Born a Gentile, you converted and were circumcised fully grown,
Raised me to be a good Jew. Of course,
We do not carry the same genetic memory.
Your blood cells do not carry neuroses.
Your ancestors did not die like mine.

(Sylvia Plath claimed that she could be a Jew, that she could hear the screams of the oppressed in the Nazi concentration camps. Do you hear them in my mother’s head, in my brothers’ heads, in my head?)

Sometimes I see fresh cuts
On the faces of my younger brothers.
I remember black eyes and bruised backs,
Rolaids soaked in toilet water.
You still haven’t patched the walls in my old bedroom.

You had me destroy books
That represented heresies to our religion but
You counted pagan mythology among my studies.
You loved me absolutely at my Bar Mitzvah.
I cannot resolve these contridictions.

(Freud said that if a man did not feel enough fatherly love, he would become gay. The women I date all look like you, move like you, think like you. I have never fucked a Jew.)

Enough wimpering, you do not hit me now.
I have survived my ancestors’ deaths.
I have survived your parenthood, and
The cold comfort of Judaism,
Even if I do not recognize myself sometimes.

I will not know who I am until I know who you are,
Man cannot know man until man knows God.
The lust for knowledge is a search for identity
That you and I cannot seem to find.
Are our destinations similar? Must we find each other first?

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