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| Schlehdorf 38,5 x 48,5 cm |
CONSCIOUSNESS
IS THE DREAM WE LIVE IN
April just
might be the coolest month. Not cold, cool.
The new
flowers are braving it,
hanging in
there in loops and twirls
of color
and fragrance, too young, too inex-
perienced to
do anything else.
The Indian
restaurant sending out signals of
curry,
cumin, some kind of fried nut—no,
I don’t
mean that poor soul swaying on the
corner in
rainbow colored rubber boots, chanting
his own
private liturgy — I mean an odor of Triple Hot Chicken
Vishnu
spread eagled on a blanket of basmati rice
flowing into
our noses. People are almost naked.
We’re out
for a walk in the neighborhood, Kreuzberg,
Berlin,
following a topography of punk, of anarchy, failed politics, or
rolling a
big package to the post office, and people are
almost
naked — pale as vampires, the girls, fashionably
depraved,
seeking love and pleasure from the oddest sources,
from hipsters
minus hips wearing no-ass pants, no less, with slack unexercised
bodies and big
time B.O. — and now turning into the park on a Sunday
morning, virtuously
masochistic in sweats and running shoes, I see half
of Africa,
a Diaspora gathered in this not quite leafy not quite
sanctum and
they’re waiting stoically for someone either to deport
them or
purchase their dubious product, which you can possess in
moderate quantities,
but cannot sell to anyone, a very unsatisfactory
arrangement.
I’m breathing hard by now, thinking about anything
but what
I’m doing: a crazy middle-aged man in such obvious
respiratory
distress that some smart-ass young guy walking by
in zero-butt
skin-tight jeans and wearing a goddamn pork-pie hat
offers to call
an ambulance. Fuck you, I think, I feel, but don’t say
just puff
onward, and onward seems endless. In Winter
when the
path-
ways and
miniature meadows were thick with snow
and while crunching
up some man-made mini hill, I
encountered
a silver fox. In the middle of a city of millions.
Not a
symbol of whatever, I swear. Not a poetic devise. An actual silver fox
staring me
down with curiosity unhampered
by bafflement
or alarm, his bear-like fuzzy ears seeming to twitch
slightly, and
no doubt wondering, if that’s the word, and with
all due
respect to Pathetic Fallacy (animal version thereof), who I was running from.
April was cool, cruel. My Polish builder told me tat when he first came to Ireland 8 years ago he had three words/phrases in English: "Coffee", "thank you", and "fuck you" - the essential survival kit in a strange land. Will summer surprise you, coming over the Starnbergersee with a shower of rain?
ReplyDeleteNiall, I like to do a riff on an old standard when it's possible. See also for example "Mediterranean Woman". I can't seem to get away from an early obsession with Eliot. Ken
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