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.