Time

Hagebutte - Dog Rose 39 x 39 cm

CHANGES

Let’s go to the movies

and be someone else for a change.

Self is a burden, we are restless,

we are human, we are restless.

Brad and Angelina let’s be them for a while

or a good not merely good looking Gregory Peck

in To Kill A Mockingbird, a man who does his utmost

and says Yes Sir in such an emphatic fashion

that he must be ironic (right?) but we know that

irony isn’t what he’s about he’s about Justice

is celluloid proof that liberalism ennobles

and I would love to be Warren Beatty in Shampoo

he who manages to have sex with an especially obtuse Republican

businessman’s wife, his mistress and his daughter

—talk about hat trick, talk about Triple Crown—

who’s played by Carrie Fisher, masterpiece of a

precocious high school senior in blue jean cut-offs

or classic tennis whites I don’t remember exactly

who consumes contraceptives and aces physics French

chemistry and is bound for Stanford where she’ll go to bed with

only those professors who can actually teach her something

new which is a mix of back story and conjecture and wishful thinking

and has nothing to do with the movie I would like to be in

and then there’s the The Big Lebowski of course the

“Dude” not brilliant by a long-shot this slacker’s slacker

enthusiastically addicted to bowling and White Russians

and yet he’s almost a new category of human being

complete and perfected in his not entirely indispensable

uniqueness & I’d like to be Michael Corleone

when he finds his vocation & dons the mask

of cold judgment as one of his henchmen leans

forward & whispers in Al Pacino’s (Michael Corleone’s) ear that

all of his rivals have been rubbed out, which is good, they’re a nasty lot

& Pacino looking impassive and utterly Sicilian like fate

itself walking out of an alley-way in Palermo flipping a coin

a young man, probably in his late 20’s, and that’s the contrast

that makes it stick, relative youth crossing over to the Dark Side

which is not a good place to be but a place we like to visit

sometimes because we are restless and we are human, we are restless.

To Kill a Mockingbird

Opening Credits - composer Elmer Bernstein

Mysterons

Rot und Grün - Red and Green 50 x 20 cm acryl/collage by Karin Goeppert

SUPERNATURAL

In order to stay in the good graces

of God you go to incredible lengths

of servitude and inconvenience

even transporting the Sunday school 

brats in that dilapidated station wagon 

your atheistic step father left you in his will  

as post-mortem revenge, as if knowing what   

sort of missionary use you’d put it to,

six little heathens practicing  

a version of human sacrifice in the back seat.

Now if this doesn’t get you a first class ticket

to heaven, there’s nothing left to do but pray  

while cicadas, inspired from On High, cackle in the wind.

If there was such a thing as ghosts they’d play poker on the roof,

smoke our stash, tap into our booze supply, grind

chips and dip into the carpet. One of them of course

would have to be addicted to snuff, leave empty coke cans

everywhere full of brown spit. He would be the one who

left the blue-grass red-neck records out of their sleeves

and all over the floor. Ghosts don’t haunt

                                                      so much as plague. And what’s

worse: not even God can kill them: they’re already dead.

Witches still exist. Today you can see them sashaying

atop perilous designer heels, not brooms, long clean hair shining

on the pallid beaches of Maui and Mykonos  

and not only do the waves gasp and froth, the wind breathe

in fits and starts. Trust me, bro, not only the waves or the wind.

But the only man who has their ear whispers

wicked things therein, the right spells, a promise of tickets

as he gently squeezes your nipples, darling,

to the coolest award shows in town( he looks a little

like Jack Nicholson, circa The Witches of Eastwick,

the same shit-eating grin, the dark glasses), which is all we’re interested in.

That, and how high our shoes can get, in every shade of

witchy pastel, every ice-creamy warlocky hue. The world looks on, spellbound.

Mysterons by Portishead

Lost in the Woods

Treeline - pastel by Karin Goeppert

MÄRCHEN

Something’s seeping through the cell’s wall.

Perhaps a minor disturbance

an interior monologue

going on a little too loudly, a touch too long,   

something blooming in a syringe maybe

becoming an object of study, or an x-ray of your system

invaded by extraterrestrials.

And all you want, all you need

actually, and as soon as possible, is a drink—     

but it has to be in the right neighborhood—

a hut, say, on top of a 

mountain near Munich

where you order a tall cold beer

from a short warm woman, put your feet up on a chair 

with hearts carved into its hard wood—and sigh—

and wonder where your shoes went, and how the grass

got so green, and how good it feels on bare feet the grass  

lifting you even as you flatten the prickly green blades,

wonder if this young, somewhat overweight waitress

dressed in a Dirndl (a word with a vowel

missing in action, mutely crying for help in a dark German wood),

knows where you are going, and how you will get there.

Siegried's Funeral March by Richard Wagner
The Symphony Orchestra of the LISZT SCHOOL of Music Weimar

conducted by Marek Janowski

5,672 miles from Home

3 Flowers 50 x 20 cm mixed media

THE KISS?

Climbing a hill on the outskirts of Stuttgart

in late April, actually we were sort of

swerving, being young, like atoms in that grand poem

by Lucretius, handbook for enlightened

atheists, forsythia blooming

yellow all around us, apple trees soft

with white blossom and a beer garden

hundred meters or so above us

whose gate we found closed and locked.

There was a sign that told us why, but I couldn’t

read it: being a foreigner makes you instantly illiterate.

A radical reduction of related intellectual skills as well.

After a while even a kind of insanity becomes the norm.

Flowers trembling in a sympathetic breeze anyway—

Keats would have loved it, would have had

 a 19^thcentury Romantic conniption which might have

led to “Ode on Swabia”—but still no cold beer.

Five minutes later, it seemed, and it’s Carnival in Stuttgart.   

No shortage of anything cold. The parade outside Clara’s or

was it Sarah’s office window just above the Königsstrasse?

Early February, revelers wearing feathered masks

in the dark, blowing off pagan steam. Your friend was  

all alone and we talked. You two taking turns rushing off

to the WC. Spiked punch filling low capacity bladders.  

Then you were back, and she wasn’t, whispering moistly 

in my ear “Did you kiss her?” Strangers smooching in the shadows,

conducting instant love affairs in cobbled courtyards. In offices.   

Then you gave me a look that said—or at least I think it said—

”She will tell everyone you are boring.” I don’t think so,  

I answered in my thoughts—not if SHE kissed me. 

 

R.E.M. - Half a World Away