Three Fates

 

Nigella 60 x 50 cm acryl on canvas

THREE FATES

A woman speaks French

to her husband then slaps his face.

He understands nothing. How do you reason

with hurricanes, the fury of natural calamity?

Their three sons grow up strange in a handful

of provincial cities. They move out. One is

barely employed; a stalled novelist who keeps writing

or half-writing the same story: a large

peasant woman in garden clogs storms into a rustic kitchen

angry about something no male in the family can fathom.

Soup dribbles down Papa’s unshaven chin, he stutters—

and that’s as far as it goes. A novel about inarticulate fear?

The occasional obscurity of rage? Okay, his girlfriend asks,

what about the plot, conflict, point of fucking view? WHAT

HAPPENS ON PAGE TWO, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE? His brother Marcel,

a flamenco artiste at a casino in Atlantic City, is secretly

vain about his ass; Jean, the third and youngest brother, is a

pipe fitter in Toledo, Spain, and has backed into a passion

for gothic cathedrals, wondering what plumbing was like back then.

One day they return home to mother, whose hand’s still aching

from twenty-years back, her French as opaque as ever. On the occasion 

of her death she leaves each of her sons an extremely long, gorgeous

knitted scarf, her life’s work. They wear the scarves

everywhere. Until they start to choke. Then they understand. 

Land of Hope and Glory

 

Burst 60 x 50 cm mixed media on canvas board by Karin Goeppert

THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE….

The Speaker of the House

knows whereof he speaks. Trim

the hedges, says the Speaker, scrub

the floor boards, shine your shoes. There

is no order in the heart, says the Speaker.

The pursuit of happiness is fraught with discontent.

Can’t-get-enough appetite keeps coming back: says

the Speaker: Eros or Thanatos? The Speaker

prefers Eros, yet even the famously amorous French

signify orgasm as “petite mort,” making

post-coital melancholy a version of the afterlife.

Ungovernable tempers are attempting to form

a government, announces the Speaker.  “Order!... I said

Order!” (the man frequently quotes himself). There

is no order in the heart, says the Speaker, toking

on a Thai-stick with one hand, sipping smoky whiskey

from the Isle of Islay with the other.

The heart knows no order, says the Speaker

to his jock-strapped super-stud lover; just make sure

you walk the dog and feed the cat. Sniff the cork first

then taste the claret. Take care of little things,

they more or less take care of you. As it were. So to speak. 

Tales of Disaster and Ineptitude

Nothing ever stops 40 x 50 cm acryl painting by Karin Goeppert

TALES OF DISASTER AND INEPTITUDE

It’s time to rely on my favorite drugs.

Bowl of something pungent. Turkish kebab, 

side-order of fries. Shame tossed out

the window like a slightly warped Frisbee.   

Good to go, I go. No need to dump all

I own into a crippled shopping cart, stumble down a wormhole

the size of the Cow Palace, resurface in ‘73 at a 

Who concert, Pete Townshend pleading with

the crowd to cough up a substitute drummer

for the temporarily distracted (unconscious) Keith Moon

when I am lured on stage, bait being a free six-pack of Bud,

and acquit myself honorably in “Baba O’ Riley”)—

no, I’ll just show up half-shitfaced at dinner parties,

frazzled beyond repair by multiple confusions,

delighting my friends with tales of disaster and ineptitude.

Thank God Carnival is about to start. Party bus packed

with celebrants. Not an introvert in this…what are we precisely,

my dear Watson, menagerie, tableau vivant,

collection of wannabe hipsters? What a thing to wannabe.

Yet, here we are, all hyped up for shock and awe,  

posing for a selfie that future generations can admire,

paradise being whatever you post  

for instant posterity. A bag of glazed doughnuts

in Florida. A smile that won’t quit.  

Grossstadtgeflüster - Big City Whispers

A post about big city life - a somewhat cocky, fresh Berlin post. This is the city we live in, this is what we experience every day. We live in a part of Berlin that is a bit wild and where at one point the alternative scene lived. Now in the 21st century things are quite a bit different, a lot of gentrification going on but you can still find some wild stuff - like this video. It was shot quite close to here, in one of the subway stations of the line we take every day. 

Ein post über das Großstadtleben - frech wie Berlin oft ist. Das ist die Stadt in der wir leben, so erleben wir es jeden Tag. Wir leben in Kreuzberg, einem Stadtteil, der mal wilder war als die anderen, in dem die alternative Szene lebte. Jetzt, im 21. Jahrhundert ist alles etwas anders. Wir werden gentrifiziert, aber man kann doch immer noch ein paar wilde Sachen erleben - wie z.B. das video. Es wurde hier ganz in der Nähe aufgenommen. Auch in einer U-Bahn-Station der Linie, die wir alle täglich benutzen.

Cyclades 24 x 30 cm mixed media on canvas by Karin Goeppert

A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE SUBJECT

According to reports 345 people

in the city go missing every year. That’s

almost one per day. Nobody knows where

they go nor seems to care. Still, it

does give us a topic to explore 

on a warm summer evening as we sip wheat beer,

an intermittent fragrance of ginger and curry drifting    

out of The Black Hole of Calcutta’s kitchen window. A cyclist

puffing on a joint is just enough of a dick

to hog most of the sidewalk, which infuriates my wife.

Sometimes she blocks the way, but that’s martyrdom.

I suggest a couple of hands-on solutions. Carry a sharp object   

with which you can puncture tires. Or one of those little 

hammers doctors use to test a body’s reflexes,

which would allow you to attack the problem directly.

In a sprawling, dirty, loud, indifferent city

pocked with inner-recesses  

deep inside brightly painted courtyards 

linked by graffiti-spattered catacomb-like tunnels

it’s not difficult to conceal a blunt object. After

you wipe off the blood and finger prints, you’re good to go.

Near the subway station in Neukölln you can still see holes

gouged out of buildings: Russian bullets, WW 2. Francis Bacon

painted violence as the governing force of life. Yet all we want is    

to sit on a sunlit bench, roll up our sleeves, and let the world drift away.   

Morrocan Garden

Marokkanischer Garten - Morrocan Garden 50 x 50 cm acryl painting by Karin Goeppert

OLD MASTER ITALIAN PAINTING

is a lot about fabric and

its folded textures. Hair as a formal

statement mounted on what is

so much more than pretty  

in its aura of self-acceptance

that we can only accept it with misgivings—we’ve

known a few people with that dark magic: sign

up for my religion, they seem to say, or

turn away at your loss; either way you’re screwed—

and the pain of sorrow so exquisitely  

arranged in a Botticelli Madonna

that it could be the visual definition of

radically decelerated ecstasy. She looks like

she has a very bad cold, but you know

it’s more than that. She, this post-pagan,

strawberry blond Cassandra—she’s seen something awful.   

Here’s what makes her post-: she gives in too easily, no struggle.  

Too much pity and you’re lost; not enough you’re not nice.

Either way someone’s screwed. Outside  

a woman’s disappointment with you is text book,

almost clinical. What her face seems to express 

as you play soccer with a plastic coffee cup—

and which goes a shade darker

when you glance up just in time to glimpse a 

bright-skinned girl skateboarding by, glimpse turning

into elaborate, open-mouthed, speechless desire—

could render the stupid thoughtful for a second.