Can't Imagine

 

untitled 24 x 18 cm collage, acrylic on linen board

CAN’T IMAGINE

Can’t imagine being addicted to cough syrup.

   Or living near an abandoned overpass in Topeka.

Can’t imagine fathoming the somber pleasure

   of a modulated cynicism

even as it rises like morning fog in Southern Bavaria.

   Or not listening to Portishead or J.S. Bach

or Charles Mingus or watching Rose Lavelle score

   against Holland in the World Cup from like four

   teen different camera angles and in slow motion.

categorically I cannot imagine reading a word by Dan White.

   I could imagine though doing dynamic yoga

   in a country where the humidity is roughly 90%

and people talk earnestly about animus and anima

   and colonic irrigation while sweat drips from their nipples—

but I’m sure I would hate it.

Attending a sermon at a megachurch in suburban Houston

   would be an enormity I couldn’t possibly imagine. Ditto going

to a Republican convention at any time but especially

   if Clint Eastwood was there saying stupid things.

   Can’t imagine eating Brussels sprouts. Or climbing Annapurna.

But walking numbly through a shopping mall on Black Friday

   in Tupelo, Mississippi would really take the cake—

which I couldn’t imagine eating or having not even

   if offered by someone of exceptional imagination. 

All that Jazz

Pliny Said 30 x 24 cm - collage on canvas

MORE OF THE SAME

“I’ve always tried to take

the most interesting path,”

an academic poet tried to explain,

“Hoping by doing so that I’d become

a path others might choose to follow.” Everything

we do is gesture, I wanted to add. But didn’t.

There’s so much explaining going on. Once,

my father-in-law, and in High German, no

less, said, “Have a seat, I want to tell you

all about the key to my success in life.” I knew

then I would need another drink, and later

the majority share of a joint. Most of us

are like brothers and sisters, twins, who don’t like     

each other. Angry siblings fighting over scraps of food  

and love, our mothers and fathers failing to notice.

If I’m a puzzle to myself, just imagine what you are to me.

Just another paranoid afternoon in autumn

 

Autumn is Yellow 100 x 80 x 1,8 cm - acrylic on canvas

JUST ANOTHER PARANOID AFTERNOON

Not the best day of my life.

One look at a crowd torn by indecision,

maybe hostile, “Are they like for us or against us?”

Pink Floyd might have set

some of this to music; mom, dad,

viciously festive relatives,  random well-wishers

all urging me to blow out the candles or

they’d chop me up into little pieces. What they failed to tell me

when I was a kid: strangers are almost always strange. And

everyone’s a stranger. Think I’ll duck out of this party. Well, an elfish girl

whispers, I’m not here to turn you on, but I’d stick around if I were you.

I know there’s a chair out of which I’ll have to struggle.

There always is.

Can’t help but remember climbing up one of those

tall buildings in the Financial District for a job interview.

Too gorgeous for words but scary assistants in their secretarial cockpit. I, sunk

in a chair very close to the ground. Knuckles dragging deep-pile or was it shag?  

Beige-haired boy/man in a baggy suit striding forcefully

toward me, half-hearted arm sticking out, eyes empty

as any sky above Needles, California, handshake

notable for its lack of quiddity. I have to leave this party,

sweet girl. And no, I didn’t get the job. Out on the wet windy streets

of Stadtmitte—German for downtown—a puzzle of trattoria and vegan bistros.

Obviously no one’s thrilled to be out. Every door is an exit.

The Debt to Pleasure

Plinius Sagte (Pliny Said) 30 x 24 cm - acryl/collage/wax on canvas

CRUSHED

It’s the Human Resources woman

two cubicles down, near the water

cooler, who has your mind wandering. Lost in space,

pondering distant galaxies, when you should

be holding up your end of a conversation

is where you are right now.

And someone has taken the steering wheel

of Katie-the-next-door-neighbor’s sanity     

and is driving the poor thing right off a cliff.

Not just once but, Prometheus-like, over and over again.

We are staying nowhere post-modern or

right-angled or anally suburban. Instead

one of those funky labyrinthine pink or white  

medinas in North Africa, smoky with hashish and incense,

where only the natives can lead us out, and boy

are they not talking, lips sealed tight

in sad compassionate smiles.

The old Greeks had it figured out: infatuation’s

a pesky deity called Ate’ about the size of a sand fly.

She bites you and you are gone. The only way back is

to give up, throw in a tear-stained tissue, watch rom-coms alone,

eating ice-cream with chocolate bits stuffed inside, crunchy

with nuts and just a hint of cherry, waiting for the phone not to ring.

Mildly Joyful Discontent

 

High Up 50 x 50 cm - acrylic on cotton rag paper c/o Karin Goeppert

MILDLY JOYFUL DISCONTENT

                                                             I do this I do that.

                                                                                   Frank O’ Hara

It’s almost day and I can

hear the fan whoosh by

and soon it’s five-thirty

the sky’s hesitant exhausted look

indicating more heat’s on the way.

Later on almost everyone’s outside  

wearing shorts which reminds me

of a poem by Les Murray

about the shorts-wearing season

in Brisbane so hot and wet there

people stick to each other by accident.

A few of us wonder how it might feel  

to be stuck on purpose to certain women walking by

(which is politically incorrect if hormonally inevitable),

a neither-here-nor-there proposition though

because so unlikely as to be nowhere.  

Karin is baking flat bread and

whipping up bowls of dip for a pot luck   

thing under the trees with a few neighbors

we hardly know and with whom we will talk

about this year’s heat wave, compare it to last year’s

the farmers needing subsidies yet again

and guess who’s going to pay for it all

climate no longer simmering but at full boil

ready to be served up by the Antichrist in D.C.

the spirit of our age riding into town on a golf cart

alcohol going down so fast that bitching and moaning

roll into one big beer belly of mildly joyful discontent

on this July afternoon in a backyard, Kreuzberg, Berlin.