klipschutz's "Italiante Lullaby"

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klipschutz is the pen name of Kurt Lipschutz. Author of, most recently, Mr. Congeniality (2021). Before that: Premeditations (2019). The Erection of Scaffolding for the Re-Painting of Heaven by the Lowest Bidder, long out of print, is a collector’s item. He has co-written 100 songs released by Chuck Prophet. Along with Jeremy Gaulke, he edited Four by Two. (A complete set (12 issues) of the handmade minimag resides in the Special Collections Library at UC Berkeley.) Prophet/klipschutz continue to move Temple Beautiful: The Musical forward. klipschutz lives in downtown S.F. with Colette Jappy and three cats.



ITALIANATE LULLABY


Plutarch came later, Insistius insists, smacking the white marble with an open-palmed grotesque arthritic hand. The Principessa nods and glides away, out onto the balcony above the River No, where indifferently encased in taffeta, she plucks my heartstrings like a breeze, with her boredom, breeding and alarming stature. Far below, toothless witches beat rugs against filthy walls, imagining they are their dead husbands, while hot-to-trot shop clerks make sure their cheating boyfriends know no peace. Plutarch weighed and measured, to the ethical duro. Insistius again—our very own crapulent Cassandra. The Principessa is now in dishabille, singing softly to herself, a musical fountain that I die each day a little more in thirst for. Her beauty mocks my limp heroic couplets. Later, when she cracks her door to murder my resolve, I will steal into to her chambers and sob as she reads tabloids in her canopy bed, stuffing cotton in those ears that drive me wild. When, at four a.m. I’ve had enough, Insistius will still be going strong, hectoring her purblind faithless cat on the sources of the bard’s Roman tragedies. 


© 2022 klipschutz

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