I'm beginning to understand your disaster

Sitting in the Ambrose library today, I felt my emotional state slip back to where it idled during my years as a university student. It struck me that my defining characteristic was jealousy, and that that jealousy usually sprang from that which I had no power to know: relationships I couldn't categorize, personal histories I couldn't read, those things left unsaid that tantalized me with their endless unrealized possibilities... I had just been reading essays on the formation of Israel, the first Arab-Israeli war, propagandistic early Israeli history, and the class struggles between Ashkenazim and Sephardim/Mizrahim, and everything synthesized under the green glow of my experientially remembered consuming jealousy. This came to me, and since I've been such a delinquent in my blogging of late (big surprise), I decided to share it with you, my dear Internet and friends.

Folklore is tenderizing my brain

with the incessancy of envy

Eretz

you are and have ever been

a beautiful, mysterious woman

the Levantine Helen of Troy-

and imperishable

The possessive man is consumed

obsessed

driven mad when he considers

who had you first

and so your twin lovers

your conqueror, your conquered

rally armies in the night

in the name of monopoly

since

first love is the only poetic choice, after all

I have been cognizant of their struggles

illuminated the points

where their arguments from entitlement fell apart

I was your dispassionate reporter

but now I feel it

feel the pull

as green as Jezreel

I wrestle with Iago and feel myself renamed

as

Israel the primeval wrestler

beckons to me from shared identity

and I insinuate myself

into the split

personalities of your sinful

suitors

my jealousy brings clarity

You are the righteous temptress

the siren song that pulls

these thousand ships

from every direction

to a shared shipwreck

at the altar of paradise