Christmas

Wir wünschen Euch ein schönes, geruhsames Weihnachtsfest und einen guten Rutsch ins Neue Jahr!
Danke, dass Ihr unserem kleinen blog die Treue gehalten habt.
Kens Gedicht "Gone" ist für all diejenigen, die auch dieses Jahr jemanden verloren haben.

Mit den besten Grüßen
Karin und Ken


We wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Ken's poem "Gone" is for everyone who has lost someone this year.
Thank you for following our little blog.

Best wishes,
Karin and Ken

Daphne 38,5 x 28,5 cm Pastell/pastel

GONE

                               

How different are we? I mean from each other.

I know if I sit down next to you I will

think of something to say. Not the

weather, perhaps, so much as Climate—

heavy with electrical storms and tsunamis

and other bad omens—will be our theme.

When did I learn to read the map of your moods? Any time now  

I’ll be listening for that excited breathing that leads up to

an elaborate statement about life on earth. Such as

your notion that if all human error—Right Wing wackiness, for example,

or a double-header on some stinking sweat-pot of a summer day in NYC,

speculation of any sort about mind-body, or the perverse

maneuvers of schizoid sub-atomic particles, etc.—were eliminated

we’d lose something of our humanity, which might not be

too bad. Or very boring. Or just not possible.

Your whims were little eruptions, not always pleasant

but strangely sustaining. Or maybe I’m making all of this up.

At the end, which always seems so abrupt, there are only

a handful of particles left behind. Each in the singular.

The last word. The harsh whisper. The plea that can only be ignored.

The sight of your back moving away like a sail, like this poem. Gone.

Happy Hour

 

untitled 40 x 30 cm Aquarell/Acryl/Dispersionsfarbe/Kohle

NEVERTHELESS

Looking for a little inspiration

in asphalt melting August,

the more unlikely the better, we attended

happy hour at the Sheraton Palace, beer a buck fifty  

a pop and free chicken wings in barbecue sauce. Debs and their

penguin suited dates; a few politicians for rent. Holt asking, “So,

what are your dreams?” Karin wanting to be a writer. Brad wanting

to be smart, smarter, smartest. “Albigensians or Alsatians. Jesus, Brad,

who cares?” I complained, not wanting to want anything, but lazy

that season, thus unable to do the hard work of being nothing. Soon

I was rapt with my own vision of make believe. Imagination  

an easy, graceful girl till she meets the critic who lives upstairs,   

then the fighting never stops; broken promises; threats of abandonment, etc.  

What about that first draft of a novel suicidally consigned to flames

in a rusty barrel, vacant lot, Providence, Rhode Island, pleasantly surprised

homeless people huddling up for some free heat? Or Byron

burning Shelly’s corpse on an Italian beach? Not exactly  

the same thing but what about that? Do you have an opinion, a theory?

Not in the mood to answer questions, afflicted with the munchies     

we stopped for breakfast at a diner on the outskirts. We were 

implausibly young. I can’t remember our faces. Nevertheless, nevertheless.

Babe

Weststrand - Westbeach 50 x 70 cm acryl on cotton canvas by Karin Goeppert

YOURS TRULY…ME

& then she left you.

The drift of formal decline,

structural flaws, cumulative neglect,

whatever.

You had been enjoying a modicum of fame

& no matter how undeserved, you savored it.

Always away on lecture tours, addressing

enthusiastic corporate execs, fund managers, even sending

into conniption fits of self-satisfied glee

                                                  the bristling cohorts of private equity.

You were taking self-improvement to unheard of lows.

I just didn’t want you to come home

while I was tying my shoe laces, that’s all, Sylvie—lovely,

lovely, and a wonderful cook—having absorbed most of my tension,

making coffee now. By the way, can you pay me back that

hundred bucks you still owe me & return my putting iron, a number

three, surely gone to rust by now in a damp corner of your garage?

Thanks for everything. Yours truly…me.  

Kim Kardashian's Ass

 

Ebbe (Diptychon) - Low Tide (Diptych) 90 x 30 cm acrylic/spray paint/ink on canvas

KIM KARDASHIAN’S ASS

A thief put a knife

to my throat and said

give me everything you got.

I emptied my pockets and out fell a volume of Shakespeare.

Then some essays by Schopenhauer.

He stabbed me, I think, not so much

for my taste in reading matter

as for the all too voluminous proof

that I read at all. Read too much.

Read as if in defiance of the world, its lousy zero-sum options.

The wound wasn’t as deep as the Grand Canyon

nor as broad as Kim Kardashian’s ass

but look for me tomorrow and you will find

this promiscuous reader and epicurean

anarchist, and all that that entails,

in a world of pain.

To say how much we know

is to admit nothing

but we do know someone’s coming for us  

in the Swedish dark coming fast

and nobody seems to know when

and we never know why, just as we never know

why good fish tastes like chicken, but there you are

or why I am standing on a sidewalk

in what appears to be Dallas, Texas

at four in the morning a knife sticking out of me. But here I am.

La Mer

Maritim - Maritime 80 x 80 cm acryl/oilpastel/spraypaint on canvas by Karin Goeppert

SOMETIMES LESSER, SOMETIMES BETTER

There you are being pushed

   along the coastal path

by an eighty-mile an hour wind,

mouth hurting from smiling so hard.

Your spirit, escaping, races around

   like a balloon cut loose

at a child’s birthday party

but remains in your body because

frankly it has nowhere else to go.

On the umbrella pines, which are

leaning away like boxers on the ropes

who want to fight back but cannot,

   is light

the color of good English marmalade.  

The wind is

spitting wads of foam all over

   a disappearing beach. Meanwhile

Just three miles away in an atavistically

   smoky room,

a woman whose smile, without light,

has declared her absence, returns briefly

to show amusement  

   as your sometimes lesser, sometimes better self

shifts groaningly its fat ass from one side

   of a barstool to the other.

Divine Intervention

Morning Walk, Uffing 50 x 70 cm acryl on canvas by Karin Goeppert

DIVINE INTERVENTION

If children laugh at you, and dogs bark at your hair,

don’t worry about it: they love you. Who wouldn’t?

And the world is not a shopping mall. It is a garden,

a garden within gardens. Prowling beneath the fronds

are beautiful animals, and we love them hard. And

there are moments. There are still some moments.

Someone I know, a poet of sorts, once told me

he went for a run on the island of Samos.  Up through the olive trees.

Fresh Aegean morning, just before the heat drops

its full weight on your head; the quiet unruffled sea giving off

a beaten golden sheen. Not even vaguely devout, he nevertheless

raises his hands and praises Zeus. Offers thanks for the literally

awesome light and its revelation of gnarled limbs, the writhing trunks

and a Swedish or Danish girl in shorts and t-shirt picking her way

down the path smiling at me as if after a night of love. And for

the goofy little gesture of lifting my palms to the sky I thank you as well.

Would be greedy to ask for more.  Not that that’s ever stopped me.