Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends

Abendsee - Eveninglake 19,5 x 29,5 cm acryl/coffee on watercolour paper c/o Karin Goeppert

HUNTER GATHERERS

                                        

                                       Want to make us happy? Give us something to obsess on.

I know someone who collects mail boxes. Rural routes, Missouri.

Lock it up.

A woman, an acquaintance of mine, who scours

East-central Europe for Soviet era sex manuals—

a joint venture I’m in the midst, the mist, the miasma

of reconsidering.

Pull it back.

And there are some haunters of public libraries

who, forgetting to eat, faint over back issues

of Cahiers d’ Cinema or New Poetics, Volume XXIII.

Show it off.

A desire to acquire scratchy fuzzy echoes of music/

oral epics last heard live in a small corner of the Persian empire—

lock it up—

in a dead language, no less, preserved on thread-bare tape

   in an Austin, Texas vault.

Lock it up. Pull it back. Show it off. Lock it up. Defend it

to the death, if need be, against all those who couldn’t care less.  

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