Harvey Hockstein Rhymes: From Hardware to Software

By Harvey Hockstein

Born to immigrant parents and growing up during the Depression, Harvey learned many life lessons as he grew, some harder than others. He loved school, especially geography and social studies, but eventually joined his father in his hardware business. While he was famous in town as Harvey Hardware and made a good living for his family, there was not much time left for creative outlets.

When his daughter, Marilyn, passed away from Hodgkins lymphoma in 1987, Harvey joined The Compassionate Friends to share his grief and also began writing as an outlet for his emotions. Over time, his poems moved away from loss and grief to other observations on life. In Harvey Hockstein Rhymes, these thoughts and musings come together to allow all the guests of this life to share in his journey.

Once Harvey started writing, he could not be stopped. Through computer struggles and e-mail issues, he persevered to bring us his thoughts of love, life, family, loss, and the universe. In sweet, funny, and imaginative verse, we catch a glimpse of what Harvey has been thinking through all these years.

Being an overachiever, it took Harvey only eighty-plus years to bring us this book, which is comprised of just a sample of his many thoughts and may be called a short rendition of the last eighty-six years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524536237

Harvey Hockstein

I am a late achiever, being eighty-six years old. I may be called a very late, late achiever. But here is a short rendition of the last eighty-six years. My father wanted me to be a mechanic. He was a jack of all trades and a master of all trades. Both my parents came over to America on a boat. They were both ten years old and had to adapt to a new lifestyle. My grandfather and the oldest of the Hockstein siblings preceded the rest of the five siblings to this nation as they could not afford to bring everyone over at the same time. My uncle Sam acted as a “chaperone” in this fabled land where the streets were paved with gold. The first time, while walking with Sam, they were approached by a policeman, Sam assured my father that in America, we need to be afraid of the police. Ah, security! My father drove a bus and eventually bought a small hardware store in Verona, New Jersey. And that is where I learned my trade. I didn’t enjoy being a hardware man and eventually called myself Harvey Hardware. This was not the name of the business, but I made a living. In the eighth grade, I wrote a poem about Pearl Harbor. I read it to my parents, and they thought it was very good. Our English teacher, Miss Camp, made a change in the last stanza. I had written “that the sons of the Heaven were going to Hell.” Miss Camp said that one could use such language (the Japanese termed themselves the sons of heaven), so I thought of other rhymes but never considered them printable. My, how times have changed.

Book preview

Copyright © 2016 by Harvey Hockstein.

Library of Congress Control Number:  2016913887

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-5245-3625-1

             Softcover     978-1-5245-3624-4

             eBook          978-1-5245-3623-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 08/30/2016

Xlibris

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Contents

Guests In My Life

Let’s Have A Party

Phone Call

Insecurity

Dreams

A Home Away From Home

The Shape of Things to Come?

Lowly Soy Bean

The Thinker Thinking

Shoes

Eat Your Veggies

Pillow Talk

Pillow Talk

U & I

Poem Without Words

So Much for Originality

A Writer’s Lament also called I Wish

My Universe

A Million Kisses

More Than Bricks - Less Than …

Love n’ Stuff - 2012

Birthday Wishes

The Turn of the Wheel

Dear Friend - My Wife

Latrine Walls

The Loss Of A Child

The Skinhead Revisionists

Who Is Obtuse!

Who!

Wallenberg

Science, Faith and Economics

Deja Vu

Compulsion

As I Was Walking Down The Street …

Shadows

Romance

Rain

Reason’s Fair

Little Girl of Barcelona

Farewell the Morrow

Truth and Beauty and a Question

The Compassionate Friends

Lens of the Heart

Truth and Beauty and a Question

But That’s How It Is

Reverend Usher - Rest In Peace *

The Laws Of God And Man

Celestial Music

Moderation

Patricia and Prunella

Laughing Eyes

Many Moons

I Know What I Saw

Mother Earth

A Bond

The Lost Canyon

The Wind and the Echo

Love’s Waltz

The Marks of Legend

The Poet’s Eye

Laben ben Cohen’s Seed

Honor

And God Made Women!

A Verse Not For Women

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory

The Things Left Behind

Personally Speaking

Funny

Sans Formula, But With Faith

From Outer Space

Farfelberg, Oh Farfelberg

Farfelberg, Its Rise and Fall

Thoughts on the Demise of Farfelberg

Thwarted Dreams

Our Reward

Into Each Life

Ant Grace

The Solitude of Grief

Out Of The Darkness?

Love in Bloom

Once Upon A Time …

The Broken Silence

X

Frankly My Dear Scarlett…* or What Rhett Really Said to Scarlett

Why I Use Four Letter Words!?

Ouch!

Latrine Walls

Dietary Ways

Why I Envy King Tut or Keeping up Appearances

Forgetful Me

As Language Grows

L’amour Toujours, L’amour

Bon Appetite

D O A

Automation When Phoning or Help!

I Love My Kids - But

The Twentieth Century - Hear You The Code

Perspective

God Bless

Ball of Fire

The Boss

Science Says

Primum Mobile

Man And Superman

Why a Bug Be?

The Greatest Love

Amusing God

Monologue

Message in a Bottle

Past Understanding

More Indigestion

Potpourri

Flights of Fancy

Sing Me A Song

The Beauty of Love and Rose

Raking Leaves - Or Not

Desert Song

Nothing Fatal

Doing Things Right

Me, Them and the IRS

Much Ado

My Id, My Libido and ... Me (?)

Mom’s Wisdom

Kid Stuff

Why

Growing Pains

Resurgence

Seeking Anew

I Have Met The Enemy …

I Came, I Saw, I …

Grouch

Blessed

Some People

Perhaps …

A Grouch and His Lady

Hither, Thither and Yon

Where God Is

Gender and Equality Z

Worshiping

Old Age

Some Say

Lullaby

Some People

The Victors’ Piece! The Victors’ Peace?

There Is A Certain Type Of Person …

Poetry And Poet-Tree

Beyond Energy, Matter, Time and Space

So Much for Originality

Sure Things

Atlantis - The Return

Atlantis Found

Oblivion

Imagine This, Imagine That

We Agree!

Lost in Time, Lost in Space

The Empty Room

An Oft-Repeated Phrase

Treasures

After-Sight

Every Day & February 14, 2002

A Chinese Dietary Truth

Where Do Lost Things Go?

My Wife vs. Venus

A Fanciful Tale

A Lady’s Noble End

Digesting Philosophy

There Be Dragons Here

The Fabric of Life

Thatcher the Catcher

The Rookie

Schmootzman on the Mound

The Trinity

Tikkun Olam - Repair the World

Serpent’s Tooth

The Holocaust

Trust in God

Laben ben Cohen’s Seed

The Chosen

Rutherford Bell the Third

Winthrop Praiseworthy

Sadie the Good

SAFL (Saf-ul) and Me

Funny People

Castles

Dr. Suess, Einstein and Fairy Tales

Once Upon a Time (sicle) BCE

Truth in a Bottle Book

Blind Sight

The Voice of Experience

Her Name Was Di (Double Entendre)

Samson’s Chest

The Two Faced One

Father Time

Seeking Anew

This poem is dedicated to our daughter Marilyn and to the many sweet souls I met at TCF

And the Poet’s Workshop here at Cedar Crest

Harvey Hockstein

Guests In My Life

Those of us who do survive

We who live amongst ghosts

To memories of loves and deeds

To these we raise our toasts

Once I sang a song of good morning

For the promise of day had begun

Now alone and nodingly quiet

I view a setting sun

Once I sang a song of youth and caring

And I looked into love’s eyes

A melody sweet and friends to greet

With everyday, a surprise

So many songs of past times

Melodies without tears

But now I’m off key and wasted

Living in the joys of yesteryears

I can’t sing a song of tomorrow

But I rest happy in yesterday’s haze

Thankful for all the hugs and kisses

For all those sweet bygone days

Those of us who tarry -

And are the last leaves on the tree

Of aching limbs and tired souls

We live in memory

Dismal the days of old age

Mind and body slow to react

A blessing that the short term memory goes

And the long term stays intact!

How thankful I am for the guests in my life

For all the things they have been

For all the friendship and love displayed…

Thank you for dropping in

Let’s Have A Party

Let’s have a party - for no reason at all

We don’t need a caterer or rented hall

A few people we’ll have over and serve canapés

Caviar, wines red and white and crudités

We’ll have some relatives and some friends

Nothing gargantuan and nothing that offends

We’ll have a few drinks and sing a few songs

The in crowd we’ll invite (not the Smiths or the Longs)

On Saturday night - they can sleep it off the next day

Some smart conversation - What do you say?

Some laughs, a back pat, a reminisce or two

Let’s have a party - we’re way over due

The last party we had - it was a flop

Sammy wore on his head an old rag mop

And Greta got drunk and up chucked her all

The police arrived on an anonymous call

Some good china got broken - a pattern now dead

The sink clogged and overflowed in the head

Our nice wood floor was scratched by Old Twinkle Toes

And my good suit was stained to add to our woes

Melvin made eyes at all the young chicks

His wife, Linda, got in some pretty good licks

Jerry did his thing with the hula hoop

All in all, it was a nice quiet group

We lost our oldest friends - they got real mad

Something was said that must have been bad

I can’t remember too much of the party that night

I do remember there was a fist fight

Our water mattress developed a big leak

When June and Bob, in rough play, gave it a tweak

What were they doing in our comfy bed?

Visions of naughtiness come to my head

Let’s NOT have a party, the reasons are clear ...

Well - maybe a party sometime late next year

We’ll invite over a few friends - if we still have some

Let’s have a party - but we won’t come

Phone Call

Are You That Abe Lincoln? Are You He?

Suppose you took an old phone book*

And gave it an eagled-eye look

And Abe Lincoln was what you looked up

And dialed the number Abe Lincoln? Yup!

Are you that Abe Lincoln they write about?

Whose devotion to common man left no doubt

In your ambitious and growing mind

That the apex of creation was mankind -

Lincoln of high-hat accentuated height

Using it as office for copious write -

You can’t fool all the people all the time

Nor erect a platform with the voice of a mime

Are you that Abe Lincoln of wit and pun

Who, as he started his political run

Stated "Some accuse me of being two faced

But if I were, I wouldn’t choose this one!"

Are you that Abe Lincoln who said

America is the world’s last best hope

Who hoped emancipation would

Reverse the curse of the hanging rope

Are you the scion of February twelfth

Muscled, tall, lean and of good health

Are you the mourning father and mother hen

A compassionate heart, a man among men?

Are you the Springfield lawyer known as Honest Abe?

A politician who may have knee-bounced a babe?

A circuit judge who rode the rounds

Later the depository of dying sounds?

Whose very heart and brain were true ally -

A joke, a laugh and a wink of the eye

Let’s hear it for the common man thought Lincoln

In this sincere and not eye winkin’

"God must have loved the common man -

He made so very, very many"

But of airs and double talk,

Lincoln wasn’t having any

A house divided cannot stand

Let’s pray for peace throughout the land

With malice towards none and charity for all

Bind up the wounds - hear my call

But, brother smote brother with emotions wild

In Gettysburg, where corpses were piled

In bloody fratricidal fray

The brothers donned in Blue or Gray

Are you the Abe Lincoln who heard of bodies hip deep

Who saw so many young laid to sleep

And wrote of Four score and seven years

Who in Spartan fashion held back his tears

Lincoln, whose tired face of furrowed maturity

Belied the courage of tenacity

Writer, poet of vision unbent

Backwoodsman, lawyer and President

He who studied by fireplace light

Self taught - whose young dreams took flight

Of melancholy turn - who understood

The innate strength of the true and good?

Are you that Abe Lincoln?

A sad smile, a sigh, of hopeful view

The softest steel that nature can brew

The people - Of, by and for - the people YES

Forgiving soul of warm caress

Are you He?

Answer me sir, what do you say?

How could you wake to each new day?

To see more blood and more death

How could you draw another breath?

’Tis said that The pen is mightier than the sword

And you, a man who concedes there is a Lord,

Has stooped to fight a bloody clash- and what for?

This a questioned and protracted war

In slow and soft well balanced words

Hollow cheeked visage a head above the herds

Ideas milled through heart and mind athresh

There are times when ideas are worth the flesh!

"Many a life is lived but in vain

Wars started by calloused minds insane

But if there ever were a righteous war,

I believe to my very core,

That we fought for the future of the common man

Our nation - conceived and dedicated to a plan

And blood has watered this fledgling tree

So that every man may live in liberty"

* * * * *

What a technical world in which we thrive

Pushing buttons, we hardly have to strive

To gain access to a world gone by

And pierce with knowing the murky sky

Strange, how the phone company can connect with a soul,

And thus ascertain a man’s visionary goal

And so there lives within the minds of men

Abe Lincoln - a pacifist who laid down his pen

* A little time improvisation

Insecurity

When I go to bed at night

I fire a small electric light

So that if I die before I wake

The Lord will see which soul to take

I don’t wish to demean the Lord

Who knows me from the madding horde

He well may know each sparrow that falls

But I feel that He may not hear my calls

And pass me by in doing His rounds

And poor dead me making muted sounds ...

Some say I have an inferiority complex

Down on myself with my own self hex

And that I’m really more than just a cog

(Lying there stiff as a log)

But I feel that a light must burn

So that my Father will not spurn

Those last remaining parts of me

And take my soul heavenly

Oh, Lord, I promise to be good

And not debauch the neighborhood

Oh please God, don’t pass me by

For my soul will be eager to fly

Beyond the realm of mortal man

And start my eternal non-life span

Dreams

She carried the child nine months to the day

And birthed her in a most joyful way

We felt of her small beating heart

A new life at its very start

There arose a dream within ourselves

Past the point where simple mind delves

And we saw a future of joy and pride

But dreams are tossed by time and tide

Our hearts were light, our souls were fed

When first light fell on her downy head

Our dreams were vain, our dreams were naught

And solace cannot ever be bought

Her life cycle was soon complete

From birth to death in quick retreat

If I, in God’s image, am truly made

Why is He so quiet and staid

And with me, does He shed a tear

Feel guilt and burden WE must bear

* * * * *

Pray, I will see her in future sight

No longer fear I the darkness of night

A Home Away From Home

Autobiographical??

When I visit I like to see

A room that looks a bit like me

A room with a little dust

A little out of order… for I trust

That such a room, so my mind is told,

Is a living room and not a prison hold

It has the warmth of a little fuss, a little muss

And ingratiates itself to this old cuss

And so I feel relaxed and at home

In a room not touched by fine - toothed comb

A number of books shelved askew

Newspapers wet from morning’s spilled brew

Things a bit deranged and out of place

But the warmth of welcome in my host’s face

Are the things I’d much rather see

Than a room sterilized and spot free

False perfection in house and self ...!

I rather see things disarrayed upon a shelf

And sense the feelings of life in bloom

And enjoy the reality of a ... LIVING room

The Shape of Things to Come?

Mary had a little lamb

Its demeanor soft and mellow

But Mary’s docile little lamb

Pranced on