ballhaus

I didn’t expect to end up here,
aiming for Veteranen Strasse, as I was.
(My hand is growing
a small constellation, rough record
of days passing. Skin time is different,
but no less devastating.)

I have a book to write. Caitlyn understands.
I wanted her to read it. The book is
tectonic. Not finished. Never, until now.
I wrote her ‘take care’.
In the window I see from here rote Kisten
through the grey glass, pushing up
against dusk light. Someone attends this garden.
Bulbs are lit and I sit alone, and strangely
not unhappy. The day breathes, a woman smokes.
It has been nice to make some friends, talk
philosophy in German – which way is the way
forward. ‘It isn’t very good’, he said to me.
I could have countered with the same.
Music videos put white-trousered men
on craggy peaks. This life can be a Schande
for everyone.

Making work, making love, making
progress and making the count different, but
not necessarily better.
It is easy to be careless and make yourself
a life of disappointment. I saw myself
bitter and ground up in a future version
last night. We still held each other
and I dreamed
(my own) irrelevancy.

Her father died of cancer, her lover too.
It’s all very short. And spots constellate
on my hands, I notice that the mirror gets
far too much light in that position. One comes
to face grittily a new, unfliching beauty.

Getting older means plugging in less and less.
(There is no time-for. Just
a deadening of connections into ends.)
Machine obselete, and therefore old,
not the other way around. We do not quite
have the money to live. Things, things
may simplify violently.

I try to write trees and bodies, try to sing myself
into thought. The choir will take up
a lot of space. Tomorrow.
Tomorrow.

Men hold hands here. I slept on the couch
in the large Kreuzberg squat which was once
a school. Ateliers. Buyers sell
out people who know. Money is brainless.
Like poultry beheaded and running around
on bubble-wrap legs. The colour of butchery.

One must sometimes pause.
Who will read my poems and cry?
I would use the word grace. And can. Shall.

Oh C.
We managed to miss so much of the obvious.
And so that which was obvious has become
what we’ve got:
so many photos.

The chocolate cake tastes of coffee, and
the sugar will make my eyes rain
mute resistance. (On the next page,
I turn over,
and it is blank:

the colour of sandcastles.)
We quote from poems
that nurtured us – and still do –
my voice like a lamp, but do I see?

You
open the door that’s been locked from the inside.