L’Étranger

still-life-l'etranger by Astrid Trügg

Way past midnight –

Need to connect.

Betwixt the mediocre

And the Never Again

The Anger

The Cry

The Why

My darling boy

My precious one

Will you be

L’Étranger, too?

I want to point to Conrad

Read Nabokov out loud…

So hard

So futile

So wrong

My darling boy

My precious one

Will you alight,

And get it right?

Chaos clings to me like ivy

Paralyses every urge

The wherefores

The wrongs

The cries

My darling boy

My precious one

Will you succeed

To break the spell?

Lowliness and schemes

Gorge on the backbone

I weaken

I lose

I quit

My darling boy

My precious one

Will you asphyxiate

Your talent, too?

Ent-täuschung; Ent-zauberung

Zweifel und Zaudern

No salvation in the

Arms of La Bohème

Mauled by Amoebas

Their tunnel vision versus

My kaleidoscopic eyes

From the histrionic mistress

Back to the lawfully wedded wife:

To Socratic Discourse

Of Our Wretched Time

My darling boy

My precious one

Will you conquer

Its rotten heart for me?

One finger in ten -

Saved by the Dell.

Zero

Zero done. Zero left.

Start over. Tabula Rasa.

Can’t carry on, can’t carry on,

Can’t carry on.

It’s the night train

Speeding into darkness.

How long from here to the planning stages?

How dare I wish to die

When others have no chance to live?

Zap, zap, zero.

When the pounding pain in my head subsides

When I ignore the nasty twitches

When my words carry me to Elsewhere…

I had such exclusive arrangement -

Circumnavigating the Need

For Identity’s Balance.

Broken, washed-up, manqué.

Ein gescheiter, gescheiterter Mensch.

Every day I do as I like

But do I like what I do?

Following every impulse

Driven by avoidance

And fuelled by fears --

A Chaos Creating

Wastelife

“Actors eat no Onions”

“The Passion and the Ecstasy”

“The Long Road”

Shoes and Handbags

Kaffee und Kuchen

Damage and Neglect

And the Howls of Despair

From the Opposite Side

Of the street

I wish I were Black Cat

Sprawled out,

Basking in 5 o’clock

Sun-roof warmth.

Did I mention I came close

To burning down the house?

Ins Wasser gehen...

Millais, Ophelia

B2B – and what does 175 mean to you? It’s paragraph 175 to me. Throughout my youth, my adolescence, § 175 was homosexuality, and someone born on May 17^th would invariably be labelled as such.

The only other paragraph that was as well known was § 218 – the one prohibiting abortion. We were the generation who wrote dialectic essays about the abolition of § 218 and never ever had to face the choice between “Engelmacherin” and “ins Wasser gehen”. Such euphemisms, both of them! The first refers to an abortionist as someone who makes angels. How sick is that? The second is a reference to a popular method of suicide for girls who found themselves in the family way.

Was Ophelia their role model? Did it become fashionable in the 17^th century, or did it take the Pre-Raphaelites to popularise it?

I knew someone whose birthday was the 17^th of June, and that, to me, held far more significance: 1953. Uprising. Squashed. Claimed by the West.

Now usurped by October 3rd as Day of German Unity.

Green With Envy?

Greens: forest, olive, verdigris, reptile, broad bean, apple fool...

Depth and spread of recorded words found wanting, we rummage for similes in the natural and made-made world - with varying success. Rendering the precise colour of what we behold being one of the less demanding tasks. One would have thought.
Yet, even clichés fail to deliver. Clichés: those victimised linguistic gems, deemed so apt when first conjured into being that their very popularity eventually turns them into the object of derision.
And yet, so imprecise, so utterly wrong. Emerald green – some traffic lights are; eyes? Never. Mine own are green, essentially; but also grey; there’s a hint of blue; there are speckles of gold and blotches of brown; and they change from day to day and mood to mood.
How can they be green when that is the colour of grass, of peas, of mint? How can ‘mint green’ be palest green with shades of blue when the herb is nearly as dark as cucumber skin? How can that same ‘mint green’ be called ‘jade’ elsewhere, and ‘jade’ in turn stretch to cover ‘turquoise’?

Strength

Image found here

Butterfly-winged, all shiny chiffons and mischievous smiles, the sprite thinks you’re her possession, her iron reserve, her nest egg for a rainy day.

Weakness, dependency, interminable infatuation – is that what she thinks when you endure what she hurls at you? When you, without so much of a whimper, bear up to the acid burns she administers? When your hot-tempered heart suffers searing sorrow but begs for further torture? When you tear out your soul like the gory innards from a disembowelled body, and lay it, as a cat places a slain starling, to her feet like a gift?

The little fool, projecting her very own personality defects! It is Strength! Strength, Courage and Perseverance. Does she not know you’re a Dragon?

When she eventually comes round, will you concede that she’s a mere moth? Nothing but a figurine from a cheap Christmas cracker made of pewter; dull to behold, cold to the touch and hollow through and through.

Ironically, you’ll always have her because you felt it. She’ll lose you forever because she did not.

Triptych

Triptych for soprano and string

Patricia Morehead

1.
Ascot & Arcadia, Brum & Berlin: Cycling & Cancer, Death, Equations & Fractal Geometry, Honesty (brutal; lack thereof), Infuriating Juxtaposition of Kindness and Loss of self. Mask (slipping), Narcissistic Offender, Propaganda (your Dad’s). Quintessentially: Rights, Sex, Truth & Uterus. Venom Winning? X-axis, Y-axis… Za-bee-na.

2.
Bizarre maybe, but encapsulating my week. Incidentally, I used to accuse this word - “bizarr” (~ bi:tsar) - of being a false friend. I believed its connotations of grotesque contrasts and incongruities pertained to shapes only, not people, moods, behaviour.

3.
Tell you what was bizarre – in its 'weird', 'freakish', 'ludicrous' guise – raking through the books at Oxfam. Hoping for striking titles such as “Howzat” (my sudden interest in cricket being of a purely theatrical nature), I spied, scattered amongst the sports themed tomes featuring predominantly male-oriented topics, a handful of surprising paperbacks: “How to save your marriage”, and “How to make your marriage work”.
Clever Oxfam volunteers with a wicked sense of humour?
And would the (exclusively male!) authors advise: “Less Sky Sports, more costume drama” ?

Flat Green Sphere

Green Hearted Sphere

Artist: Beatriz Cruz
http://www.redbubble.com/people/bettycruz/art/5638175-green-hearted-sphere

Your flat green sphere dangling from my wrist, my parking ticket snug in your back pocket. Midway to ruinous hours all around the Wrekin, when you can’t place Chelsmley Wood and Brownhills north-south-east-or-west from HOME. Never ending dual carriageways into nowhere, while impatient sunbeams and white lux cars are encroaching at frightening angles. Finally a sign: Heartland’s Hospital. Inexplicable standstill relates to cardiac and traffic arrests. In reverse it’s German: Stillstand - which the PC corrects immediately. (Auto-correction gone mad!) Consider B2B revival - you’re good for my writing when you’re gone. The rest is unnecessarily kabbalistic: AG at 20 to 4, later than you in AMS? 7 pages from Kontra-B. into Double B, more fun than 3 times 1 by Coen this morning. Red hatted Fly Agaric splashed with white polka dots and its connections with insecticide, shamanism, trance, berserkers, soma, luck, New Year, Father Christmas, and prancing, flying reindeer. At 4:10, 175 words for my darling boy, my enfant terrible, my prodigal son. Contemplating amalgamation of blogs. Restraints good, Freedom of Expression better.