Wednesday 27 July 2011

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?

Monday 4 July 2011

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 17th 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 17th century, or did it take the Pre-Raphaelites to popularise it?

I knew someone whose birthday was the 17th 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.