The White Stripes and the Thirty Year War

untitled 50 x 64 cm oil/ink/oilpastel

AS IF…

                                                         for Heinrich Heine                

As if we were on stage together     

with Jack White and a recently resur-

rected Jimmi Hendrix and were strumming

some strange tandem guitar-like thing  

as Jimmi and Jack struggled to keep up  

an assortment of groupies oiled and ready 

and sandwiches and cold beer awaiting us                                                                       

backstage the entire retinue impossibly high

as if the morning were like a girl on

one of those vast expensive sidewalks

in the Kurfürstendamm and mounted

atop a stack of pallets she’s munching

strawberries in voluptuous slow-mo

as if she were all alone in the world

as if we were all alone in the world as

if five of your best enemies were hanging  

from various fruit trees in the front yard

as if the aftermath of a battle fought  

in the Thirty Years War had taken up exactly  

half of your property as if your neighbors were   

scandalized by all this unexpected mayhem    

as if what they thought mattered anyway.

The White Stripes - Seven Nation Army

Greetings from Kaminibassi

Kaminibassi 18 x 24 cm Ölpastell - c/o Karin Goeppert

WHILE YOU WERE OUT

The trees were offering their support.

They signaled this by shaking out the light in their leaves.

I watched a jogger steam past; a multiply tattooed girl

in unlaced combat boots sweep the door step

of a tavern, smoking and muttering beautifully,

her mind a mess but obviously still functioning;

traffic thickening in a bottleneck. You are trying

to decipher my message, wondering if you should

just give up, maybe go out for a beer, perhaps talk to the

neighbor you’ve been avoiding for a year or longer

because he always looks as if he has bad news for you

but is asking himself whether it’s worth it,

whether you really need to know

that the land lord is contemplating a substantial rent increase,

that a three-generational family of Serbian gypsies 

is moving into the apartment upstairs next month,

or that your wife receives a male visitor every Tuesday morning

during “home office,” and that you just might be better off,

in the end, clueless if relatively content, an occasional reader

of what life was up to while you were out.

Schumann - Piano Concerto 1st movement 

performed by Dang Taih Son

Paavo Jarvi conducts l'Orchestre de Paris