Bringing In The Harvest
Poetics
A dance begins within my heart,
and to my muse’s murmured tune
both of my encephalospheres
adjust their halting steps to please
each other’s choreographies
Bar Flying High
I get world’s wisdom through my nose
and I’m too cool to snap my fingers.
I wear gloves, actually, because
my velvet-skinned hands are holy.
Here and there I’m forced to kiss
wet lips; the ladies approve.
They buy me drinks and show the goods.
Eventually, between two fixes, I might sit down
and play some sexy piano Jazz.
The truth, of course, is, that I’m nowhere near desire
when I come with fingers spread out on the keys.
I still need the warmth of your breasts and a downer
to make it into the night.
And you want me to keep the gloves on.
After You've Gone
Prolegomenon
Police showed me the photos:
a swollen head on
the blood-soiled pillow,
the tongue leaving a gray
smudge on it,
limbs distorted
in rigor mortis.
Your beautiful, but now fish-like
eyes gaze into the heart
of another galaxy.
You write, that you
want me to go on.
Thank you for the pain!
I cleaned your last domicile,
then sat down on your bed.
I had told you
about that girl in Berlin,
sending herself to eternal
sleep with 80 pills of X.
Una nox dormienda!
How to live now?
I To inhumate your scent
I have to leave to puke, and
then I can’t stop breathing in
the scent you left on the linen.
Your body had disappeared,
warm landscape of desire:
They tell me, they
filled up an urn with your ashes
and buried it in wet mud.
I cannot close my eyes because
your scent numbs me;
I cannot stay awake,
because nothing can numb
this throbbing agony of loss.
II Golden Brown
Golden brown: amber on the beach at dawn,
your hair in late spring,
the fluid I inject into my vein, whiskey ,
the color of my lover’s eyes, which,
when she comes, explodes
in streaks of yellow and red and
turns into a soothing greenish-brown,
when her eruptions boil down and I hold her.
The light was golden brown on that August
afternoon when I first visited your grave nestled
against a slender birch, that swayed like a young giraffe
in an upcoming summer tempest.
I stared at the wrong date of death engraved
in your tombstone, had to grin because
you would have, too. Mom never got it right.
And you never knew it, but she loved you.
It’s become hard to handle everyday affairs,
the golden brown keeps me going, mom
swallows pills.
Bateau Caraïbe
It is so cold outside,
even the flakes
are reluctant to fall.
But through the secret
passage of my ears
my mind trips
to the humid,
rhythmically crooked
Jazz of a Caribbean coast.
To avoid clichés,
the vista will be all gray.
So watch us smoking in the mud.
Wait: that’s a reverse cliché!
Imagine the WHY of BEING
being drummed into mind’s
most intimate core.
You crave an image for
This sweet drunken piano discord?
Hang …on … it… is:
A festive cruise ship
red –nosed, yelling: Cheers
before it drowns
in a sea of booze...
Abuse Me As An appetizer
When she tries to kiss me
I turn my head away,
as I promised you.
I’m building up
a wall of silence
between her and me,
subtly, not to hurt her
more than necessary,
as I promised myself.
Somehow
I’m not in love
with anyone
but you
anymore.
It’s only fair
to abuse me
as an appetizer
for your dreaming,
to pay me back
in my own coin,
in the sweetest way.
Cold
It‘s cold outside: I almost pull my t-shirt down.
Sometimes when I rest I picture myself as big-toothed reptile.
As if in Kafka’s Verwandlung.
I can wait. Long. In the sun.
Absorb perfumes behind perfumes.
But women are for later. I just observe
it all right now, in clear daylight, getting baked.
What did you think: I sit in a park at a fountain.
I’m your usual unshaven stinking hobo. My advantage:
I know you, sweet, but you don’t yet know me.
“since I recently,” I say to no one but maybe
sparrows resting in safe distance, “ I feel like
maybe,I” , and I touch or clutch my heart,
“step back a bit or down?” I say to Jim,
but Jim is dead. Strange, I saw him just a second ago.
You know, if I ever should see a doc
I’d tell them I’m an entertainment junkie:
I really need to watch them all, those
Normalpeoplewhoworkfortheirlivinggoodbreadwinnersyouknow
My square and star-like alligator’s eyes blink
in poisoned gold-like yellow whenever one passes
here at the river side. I might get hungry in the dusk.
Dance So Good
Just before the day I’ll be dying more than a little let me show you some of those cozy niches I discovered wandering bravely along my private paths of madness. One of these hides up on a slope at the backside of an ancient castle. Back from the taxidermist you can put my padded body next to you on the low stone bench garlanded by bushes of lilac and inhale the panorama of the river delta far down below with all its seven shades of green and three shades of brown and the azure of the sky being messed up by the gray billowing clouds of sad memories.
Until then I’ll keep hovering above my nest of stones that talk of neighbors. I am unkempt and sweating, nude except for the shadow covering my genitals, sipping from a small glass of cuba
libre, with my lungs feasting on the biting smoke of my cigarette. I open my mind like a begging hand expecting metaphors like hummingbirds to settle down on it and disturb the perfect symmetry of the boredom of being.
At that flickering instance of the night, when sleep catches your breath, you tell the ruins of my mind to dance so good.
Faun At The Foot Of The Fountain
I wish i was a marble
faun at the foot of the fountain
in the heart of the market of the town,
where life swarms.
Instead I sit on the steps of that fountain,
squinting at the antsy rustling around me,
grabbing my bottle tighter.
I have since recently fallen in love with that
marginally overweight businessman
gulping from his pocket flask
while waiting for his tram,
because I love the expression of fear
in his face that I know so well.
And I love even more the posh secretary
smoking nervously, stomping her stilettos
on the sidewalk, because she
leaves her package of cigarettes
on the bench for me every single
day of her working week.
The rest I majestically ignore.
The same straying dog meets me at eight
with a mouth full of hedonistic laughter
and throws his meager body against mine
to get the night shiver out of our bones.
Desperate Gardens
I’m so used to getting up early,
that even when dead drunk
I cannot fall asleep at 6 a.m.
Not that I can do anything substantial.
I just lie awake watching the sun rise
and close my eyes and step down
into my brilliant mind and recite
my most beloved Roethke poem:
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade …
Eventually I’ll throw one blinking eye out
my bedroom window into my desperate gardens
and watch an old huffy crow
sit on a skeleton tree
observing ostentatiously
a shrieking flock of greed-bitten sea-gulls
passing by.
And then I almost wish to fade away.
Easter
Easter, say mid – nineties, my love:
Let me cite Poe to tell you just how much …
You are so pretty and your soul is so fragile
I just cannot show you yet
the pain that is tearing my heart into pieces.
Hurry on, you say, my parents are waiting,
Out of breath I take a deep look at you.
Oh, what a piercing pain right through my heart!
I do not love you anymore.
I’m falling out of love with you
right now.
And later at your parents,
surrounded by heaps of easter-eggs
I drink a lot
to forget
what I never said.
Black Ram (kara koyunlu)
High Society-ish we lie around:
There is a smoke a-wandering,
oil of opium, hashish and spices
palatalizing it.
One of the impressively
bearded Kurds in the lounge
of the hotel Kara Koyunlu,
has brought up the conversion topic again:
“Don’t you think
now that you’re bearded
and all” (was unshaved actually),
“that it could be heaven …”
”above,” I say and “later, maybe … “
Of all the women attracting me sexually
there was in Ankara only one*. A belly dancer
in that discotheque, where we had
lobster and well, I give you
that we had what you can’t pay for.
And all was good
until the psychopath
I had broken my bread with
all of a something sudden
tried to blackmail me and
in front of my hotel, never so
dear near to me before, I lured him
out of that vicious cab.
So he vanished like all good
bad ghosts do
eventually,
leaving me behind,
mixing my Raki with water
from the sink;
I left Ankara diarrhoeing
the poison out
for only once.
Our otobus cutting through
fertile poppy fields of Afyon.
In The Drizzle
Finally outside! There is drizzle, rushing pedestrians, faster heartbeats and I’m close to tears.
I don’t want
There’s a soft breeze and skinny schoolgirls in front of the barber shop and elderly working women clutching their purses and the eventual scream.
I don’t want this
Two flocks of dope fiends dance around park benches in the distance. The cherry liqueur is a smooth burn in my scorched throat. I dare to toss over bored gazes a couple a minute.
I don’t want this to happen
This place is for doves and bums and us. A bald head aged around 50 parades in front of the drugstore. I fix my dentures. There’s a hole for dope in my upper gums and my tongue tastes sweet blood.
I don’t want this to happen again
It”s raining but i keep seated. My smile is benevolent. Guess I’m drunk. From far the emptied bottles clank. I delirize Hopkinsish: How the rain as a heavenly force helps the municipal authorities to clear off the city parks washing them clean. I overhear morphinist chatter as I leave.
Then I run.
Left-hand Weakness
I have a left hand weakness.
My bass sucks.
Can’t keep the rhythm.
My right hand, though
is a funky bird
jumping easily between
5th, 7th and 9th
So I tell Max:
Play the bass line
and there we roll:
My right watermelons
over the keys
extensively while I
check out the chicks.
They always fall for the
solo-man, though.
Max’ fingers beat out
the syncopated rhythm
on the lower keys
octave-wise.
I could have one
[girl]
if I hadn’t had too many
[drinks]
So when we meet
in the lounge next morning
I have some taste of
Old Scotch ‘round my tongue
while Max chews on
some blond pussy-hair.
Rains Of March
Love, too, withers.
I feel best as a stone
in the sunlight
that screams: procreate!
Stranger, do you mind
if my eyes spit
tears of loss
into your grin?
Pain wants me to hate you.
But you’re just standing there,
first accident, then incident,
and I don’t have a reason.
And your name is?
We rest on a warm rock.
Suddenly you stretch out your hand:
Dolphins, mating! See?
Nature Makes Music
It’s funny and a phenomenon to dendrologists
how as late as in May the firs would silhouette
in a light green and beige mix against the
whitish-bluish sky to finally demonstrate
they’re still alive. Not yet blooming,
but birds, insects, bugs, spiders may already settle down
and all the other small flesh that lives
from the nourishing flesh of the bark.
That music the firs make in the night
needs fine ears to hear: subdued swooshing
and creaking and rustling and an unexpected sigh
when the wind bends the twigs too roughly
but they refuse to break.
On A Dream Lost
„Ich sah bunten Vögeln nach“
I watched the birds in colored splendor pass
[Zarah Leander, Der Wind hat mir ein Lied erzählt.]
I The addiction industry
(Setting: a candle-lit room in downtown Munich. About 20 addicts have assembled.
The Book makes its round: short incantations, mostly mumbled, are heard.)
There is Sara talking now,so fucking sexy it almost
kills me I can’t look up. She’s too hot to face.
But she’s is talking to me because I’m the chair
here tonight I want to run into the dark
and commit a crime to be shot by the police:
She is too hot.
She rides me and I yell:” we’re done!
Let me out!” – I need the sky to see
diamonds sparkling in deep blue.
We’re high on coke and do it all night.
In the morning she tells me:” baby,
you can stay”, and I run away and hide.
In rushs of desire we get out to get
it again and again.
Someone lit a purple fire she must dance to.
“Honey, I am supposed to
be sober and clean and good for the night.”
But you burn your breast with a cigarette
to show me, in order to force me to stay.
I stay. I die now, we die and I lullaby
into the sky of your face, a monster sweet.
then we sit there, sinners ashamed in a park.
We are back at the meeting, and you are mute,
only your breasts are speaking to my lust
and I go out and say: I need a cig.
After you left, my best friend
corners me in the darkest
corner of the candle-lit room
and “was it good?”, calls the police
to get me carried away
as I delirize.
II Ruhig
Mein Herz, es schlägt so leise in der Nacht.
My heart at nights, it beats so calm.
I am coughing, my lungs are angry with
me. I hardly sleep anymore: too
many dances of the mind hurt
me in the night.
The night rolls out on shivering silver.
We have passed out and in.
In times of war I raise my voice Walt-
Whitman-ish, and
we get strong in troubled times
or otherwise we die.
III chanson
We sing loud at the tavern :
Nous sommes Francais et Russes,
Some are Polonais.
Nous chantons: Je suis mort,
pour célébrer la vie si belle.
Le vodka et mon seul plaisir.
My love has died and I with her.
I cannot sing again.
I bit my tongue off in your
hot mouth, my song:
l’amour, une terre brûlée,
is dead.
Moon Man
I’m a moon man. My moon face waxes,
rolling out the hidden hours of dog days.
I house ghosts, bad-mouthing me. I mouth
apotropaic spells, wrap myself in serenity.
My dark side spits out fear in angry spasms.
My eyes have walked a mile of ice too far.
I‘m a moon man and now my moon face wanes,
rolling into the first light of late.
Pro Fairies
I need tough stimulants these days:
Jinns out of bottles of booze,
to help me invoke the spirits
of rainbows and waterfalls,
to recreate my private wondrous realm
of almost death-like peace
against the stomping gray of now,
to keep up my constructivist approach,
that modern form of optimism,
that always borders on despair.
Recovery
There are only fully-orchestrated
crash-downs, where I come from,
and where I will lie down to enjoy
some crooked priest’s Amens,
and a nice&noisy all-after-party,
with some real funksters aboard.
No Schweinebraten nor Yorkshire puddings,
just hard booze and alkaloids, that make
your endorphins dance out loud.
It may be a sunny day, with this wonderful fucking
blue sky, smiling at you, left-over mortals;
it might rain, and an all-to-well-known Himalaya-high
ceiling of gray will upgrade
your daily depression: Never mind, because my
omniscient pharmacist will take care of that.
In heaven, I assume, the Endlösung might
await me, or some even more effective
treatment to force me let loose my
poisoned, antisocial mind. Who knows?
Or up there, they will finally allow me to
blow my brains out, using the same
gun Hemingway used on earth,
let’s say: with diamonds nailed into gray matter?
When we die, nothing makes sense anymore,
or everything does. The difference is – cosmologically
speaking – minuscule. Family&relatives, of course,
might, on well-founded reasons, disagree.
The strangest moment, I’m now glad I have
managed to survive, was when I had to tell
the gardener, what dedication to leave on
the funeral wreath of my dead lover,
because my Dad was watching and he could
not understand, how to just speak out
those words, could cause me any trouble.
No, it was even stranger, to walk up half
a mile to her relatives, in a dark purple suit,
complete with gray tie, while they
were waiting in front of the morgue.
Rita Again
I resist the urge to hide,
take off my sunglasses,
wave a smile to Rita,
who stops her bike,
approaches me and
leans into my embrace.
“So glad, you’re not dead yet!”
She fires four lines of thought
at me simultaneously.
I answer to the fifth,
that sums them up:
Why are you still alive?
Afterwards we just let
our words make love to
each other, while our bodies
negotiate the facts.
I take down her number
in order to call her
not.
Stanzas Like Birds
When I’m hiding my head inside myself
Stanzas like birds from time to time
Infest my mind. It is hard to catch them.
They look beautiful flying away.
Tipsy Cakewalk
I think I am dressed sexily,
but in the darkness
the snow blinds my vision.
As we pass each other
you’re talking frantically to your lover
to pretend you don’t see me
stumbling into the grocery,
where I nervously grab
two bottles of rosé
and something cherry
and cream sherry.
I suddenly feel weak
and a tachycardic vertigo
grabs my brains and feet.
But of course I remember you,
long-necked girl,
with your appetizing
handfuls of breasts,
who so often rests
on a seat vis-à-vis to mine,
when I am drowsing along
in the metro downtown
as I head
South of the border
for work.
The Beguine
s'embéguiner ( to flirt)
I whisper in your ear while I bite your lobe:
Begin the Beguine, dance with me.
I am in a Swing rush on coke.
We finally dance into deep space out.
I bend you over backwards
Artie's instrument of pleasure sounds.
"So, it is really cancer of the lungs?" you ask.
and: "how long?" I say: "anytime",
and we dance and I sweat my fears away.
“How is it, baby?“ - „Dreadful, if not stoned to the brim.“,
“You don't seem to be“, she replies, and I:
“do you want my clarinet?“
She:“ anytime, as long as time is for you.“
and we kiss on the dance floor. It
glitters
A Hitchcockery
The guy from Sheffield took another desperate gulp
from the last bottle of my stolen whiskey supply.
It was a hot August night but he shivered heavily.
The sweat soaking his t-shirt was due to withdrawal.
He was a sympathetic junk of flotsam: George in need.
While I rolled him a cigarette I threw a skeptical
glance at him: would he be able to drive?
He was a truck driver, had run out of money
and gas on his return from the Balkans, because
a Turkish street pharmacist had gypped him in
Thessaloníki. We finally managed to mount the
tractor unit; he did not remember where his
trailer had gone. We listened to Cream’s I feel free
and were swiftly floating into a Hitchcock scene.
We parked at the city baths, a ten-minute walk to
the shabby drug bazaar. George suddenly turned to
me, bleak-lipped, and whispered that he had
just shat his pants. He told me he’d drive back to
my place and must have gotten lost in his private nightmare.
I met M., the dottoressa, in front of one of the joints.
She jumped up and down, pumped up with speed.
We sat down on a stone bench, where she fed me some pills
I swallowed cider. I looked at her face striped by trembling
streaks of moonlight. She had found a wealthy customer
but didn’t want to make the deal alone. That’s how luck is spelled,
I thought and she drove us to his house in her father’s limo.
A couple of stretched-out eye blinks passed and the three of us rested
amply oxycodoned at a pond overhung with rustling willows.
An eon later I stared at the nicotine-colored
ceiling of my own bed room, while listening with disbelief
to the sad voice on the phone: M. had died in a spectacular
car crash this morning on the autobahn to Frankfurt.
I inspected my pockets full of drugs to share with George,
but he had disappeared leaving an undecipherable note
on the kitchen table and a stench in the bathroom.
After The Party
Bits of contemptuous
conversations flash
into my mind and send
waves of embarrassment
through my hung-over
body.
It is usually then
that the phone rings
and I pull the plug.
Short messages cram
my mobile.
I’m not available.
I sense impending doom.
I crawl around the party’s
battlefield to find
some more of the
stuff that almost
killed me yesterday.
African Out Of The Blue
Just a geological second ago
all of us were deep dark skinned,
including even Mr. D. Duke’s ancestry.
We knew yams and hunting the savannah
afraid of lions – and in the darkness – demons.
We loved the nurturing green so much.
Of body parts protruding let me mention
only asses and eyes and needy lips.
That’s, what we started with, and a song
like a sad howl and a weapon from wood.
When in a moment sunken in deep,
known as meditation, I revive our
archetypes and watch them dance and sing
the joy of being, I catch hazy glimpses
of Mitochondrial Eve waving her
laughing brown eyes at me.
Out of Africa and into the dark
we moved under the brilliant immensity
of solemnly mute and eternally cryptic skies.
We raised our heads for a single singeing kiss of the sun
and just another geological second later we’re gone.
contents
Poetics
Bar Flying High
After You've Gone
Bateau Caraibe
Abuse Me As An Appetizer
Cold
Dance So Good
Faun at the foot of the fountain
Desperate Gardens
Easter
Black Ram
In the drizzle
Left_Hand Weakness
Rains of March
Nature Makes Music
On A Dream Lost
Moon Man
Pro Fairies
Recovery
Rita Again
Stanzas Like Birds
Tipsy Cakewalk
The Beguine
A Hitchcockery
After The Party
African out of the blue
Impressum
Texte: Serge Gurkski
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 31.12.2012
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