I
Any man’s soul

Any man’s soul is a piece of country
Not remote, not close, never neighborhood
But hovering as a landscape emerges
In the glowing noon sun,
No, I am quite sure in this, No,
Not like the fata morgana,
Then far more like the Fairy Morgana.
It shall change with every day
Though hardly perceptible
Impossible to see if you visit it too often.
But he who comes now and then
To him change should be observable
or even heard or smelled.
Also the change can be touched by sensitive fingers.

From such reasons, among others,
But often by consequence,
Quite unusual for me, by the way,
I frequent it rarely.

Just returned from such a visit
On your behalf

You said I owed it to you –
I found it different
Not, I admit, as after a tornado,
Neither recovering a long dry summer
But rather as if amazedly bewildered
By the generosity of beautiful weather
Of long sunny days and soft rain
The leaves drawn heavy and complacent
The flowers absorbed in pure narcissism
And the birds singing just
For the sake of song.

Any man could see
That some goddess had dwelled there
Reluctant to leave.
But I with a mind’s eye, why
Does it perceive waste land
Roaming on dumping-grounds
among the debris of used time
when it surrounds a paradise?

I wonder
Shall I tell you the truth?

II
Black

In the left pocket of my coat
Form the last winter I found
A piece of ivory black wood
Found on the beach,
Charcoal, I presume, from
The solstice bonfire of summer,
Producing images of the darkness to come.
In it, however, deep into its weightless
And yet resistant matter of darkness
A glow as if fire was still somewhere.
And I remember the Areopagite’s words of
The shining darkness
The second darkness veiled in the darkness
Which is but a pretended, though convincing darkness,
A pretext of a much more profound darkness
Behind which the third darkness dwells
The abode of our soul.
It must be obvious that evil is in the white
In the synthesis of all colors preventing
The safe conduct of distinctions
While black being no color at all
Transgresses perception and the intensity of senses
Using the hole as mimicry

But without the stamina to resist filling it
With softness.
There are indeed skulls with candles
Behind the hollows of the eyes
But damned be the ones who produce
Anthropomorf images of death.
Indeed, amber might display transparent glow
Miming the sunset
But the fulguration of death
Must be closed in the small closet
Of a charcoal.
It belongs to the left pocket
And is not harmed by being forgotten
For a while
But what the right pocket contains
I guess
Is a tattered unreadable slip of paper from God
Which we probably must have been able
To decipher
Some time long ago
Why else keep it?

III
Sleep

Socrates said:
Either there is a life after death
And we shall meet justice
Or eternal sleep without dreams
What do you prefer?
However, there is an alternative
Eternal sleep with eternal dreams
In sleep is rest, oblivion,
You know
But sleep without oblivion and without judgment?
People say life is a dream,
If so, dreaming is a dream of dreaming
This is trivial, I admit,
But I don’t want to follow the meta-races
In order not to bore you.
On the other hand if dream is life
Reality is a dream of life
And we shall be awake forever
Because we are dreaming.
Growing older I came to love sleep
But what shall we dream about in eternity

Possible worlds?
Rather necessary ones
But such might not
Emerge from our lives
So, how would they be like?

IV
Childhood

A psychologist once told me
”it is never too late to have a happy childhood”.
I asked him, if it could be
Too early.
Honestly, I am incapable of judging my childhood
But now when I begin to remember
Some images which belong to it
Or they seem to remember me
I wonder how bereft they are of emotion
They are objective
Detail-focused, photos, impressionist paintings,
Calligraphies I presume
Of a Tao picture written by a hand
Unknown to me
Without a trace of drama.
There is a strange indifference to happiness
In these memories
But a beauty of events
Stripped like paintings of a master
Who knew the importance of objects
And of eventing

As if he had been a true Chinese philosopher.
Who knew the significance of colours
And of forms
And their black ink outline
Stolen from the Tao by the impressionists.
Totally indifferent of points of view
But eager about perspective.
Is that what is left of childhood
A liberating anonymity:
“Ole was there”
Among the things
Taking part in events
The props and wings of which
Were far more important than the play?

Could memories be a message?
If I should produce it
In which capacity then?
The past made me
But I make the past in every second
So it would be circle-like
Such is shunned by philosophers.
Are they send from the Great Unknown?
Stupid to overrate one’s importance.
But a calligraphist there might be

Someone writing my memories
With a soft eidetic distinctness
Adam Smith’s impartial spectator
assigned a quite new task?
Could he be in the service of
Beauty?

V
Of colors

In this darkness the white elephant
Appeared colossal
But there was no red woman on his back
No black Madonna
Just the green caresses from leaves above
The yellow moon
Making shadows oscillate from brown to blue.
Yet thought is monochrome
And movements silent.
The polychrome world mingles noise with voice
Laughter with roaring swift echoes of distant wrath.

Psósophos – phoné
Let there be wonder
And errant songs
Recovered voices and well met deaths.

In hell’s huge pot it’s all white, anyhow.

The white woman of tenderness
The black pierrot

The yellow whale
The brown pope
The blue helmet
And the green violin
I adore thee.

Green smells of rotten sugar
Blue of brown peppermint
It’s time to let the white turn yellow.
It’s time to leave and come to the garden
In which the roses talk
Of train service.
It’s time to deny that mixing black and red
Shall produce brown
It’s time to adore the big brown hunter
Known by the ancient as the honey eater
Because naming (s)cares the game away
Game and god god and game
It’s time for ultramarine
And above us *dyeu-
*dyeu- for ever
Shining
Blue
But don’t underestimate black
burning glowing gleaming shining, flashing blazing

Our face is burnt by the sun
*bhleg- , *bhel-

We say that colors
touches the soul itself
We speak of warmth and coldness
Of clarity or obscurity of colors.
Contrasting these former sensations as
Yellow and blue
Investing symbolism in colors as if they were emblems
Yellow – aggression, orange – agitated, red – obsession
Black the void, death and the virtual

Red unites sexual desire with the skin
Thus attending the body from outside
Like a god

Blue is the harlequin
By the ancient meaning often
Yellow, the deep swarthy black and even white

But orange is the way
Gold would appear and taste
If it were a fruit

When green feels pain it turns yellow
Oh Chloe my lost love
My heart could not bear the jealousy

But isn’t there some kind of dance macabre
in all this refined symbolism?
Dead language dancing
Rattling over the graves of thought and act.
Why just not say instead:
Color LIVES color IS?

VI
Mr. Death

Some people would affirm
When asked
If they have met death –
And I mean in person.
They do not seem to form some special
Class of human types, however.
Now, I am amazed,
I must admit, but they all
Seem to converge on one fact
That death is shy.
This as nothing to do with his ways to appear,
It is not fear of day light,
Or some underground inclination.
They even say “discreet”, “quiet”, or
“Subdued” as if he were a cough.
They confirm that his face is rather ordinary
And that he does not smoke.
He even denies a drink
But never with the pretense “that he is working”.
His cloth is ordinary too
And his voice leaves no impression

He is only remembered by that
Which he is ascribed to do.
Unanimously they confirm that he seems kind
Almost polite, even concerned, caring,
And all in all rather sad.
But one, one only, told me
Another story of his impressions.
To this I feel obliged not so much
For the sake of objectivity
As for the sake of certainty
Which is the genuine stuff
Compared with truth.

One fine morning in May
This person, X, had this experience
With Mr. Death.

He had come from the place called nowadays
The Globe-Flower, you probably know it
Following Harlowe Street heading into City.
It is not long ago, so traffic was just as heavy
As it is now in the streets.
It was Monday, he told.
He had to go into a hotel
To relieve his bollows

And there in the men’s room
Stood the most beautiful, fullbodied lady
And pissed in the basin
Holding her monkey
As if she had been a man.

Our friend left the room in a hurry
And found another place
But back on the street again
He happened to be walking just behind her
Swinging her marvelous hips
Over long elegant legs.
Shoulders straight back, bosom flung forward,
Swaying its ripe weight
While the chestnotbrown flowergoldbundle of her
glowing hair
Waved in the wind.
Uncovering the finest, ivorywhite neck
Delicate as the stem of a flower from Paradise.
X. felt a hardly controllable desire
Strange to his usual ways – as he said.

Then even more alienated in relation to his
Normal mind and manners
He went up to her

Plainly stating his impression
And asking her to join him for a drink.

Her voice was warm and soft as she agreed.
In the restaurant she bent over the table for some reason
Or other and since he did not move his hand
He felt the nipple and the filled firmness
Of her breast.
An electric shock rose from his genitals
And went fiercely back again.
He immediately got an erection.
“Shall we go to the toilet”, he heard himself say.
And there, in the toilet,
She slowly undressed –
They had chosen the bigger handicap-room
And when she finally took off her panties
He saw a voluminous penis.
Then she smiled and took off her hair,
Her hands’ gloves of skin,
Her breasts,
Her face.
And there stood he,
Mr. Death,
Taking a brown trenchcoat from his bag
And a rather shabby pair of trousers.

He smiled with great kindness
Saying, that he was sorry,
But perhaps all this was due to the fact
That he did not understand carnal desire himself?
A transvestite,
Why should death not be a perfect one
Of these human types?
Why on earth not?
His manners had not changed,
He was still shy and polite,
His voice was mellow,
A bit anonymous,
With a quiet smile
He said go by to X
Outside the hotel and went slowly
Head a bit bent
In the opposite direction
Of Harlowe Street.
If X ever met him again
I shall not be able to tell.

VII
Debt

I do not know how much you owe others

I think purely in money-terms here –
By my sheets do not even balance in the positive.
So, it is a notion with long-term relish and intense relief
To imagine the state of being out of debt
Including to be unencumbered.
All the confused stuff of symbolic debt
Fear of castration and subtle musing on circumcision
Come close to nonsense
reminding one to untamed “skindapsos” not well-behaved aporia.
Alternatively, the concept of original sin gives sense
The tablet of history displays the truth
If any dish ever incorporated
The freshness and succulence
Of this phantasm:
Man is evil.
Homo homini lupus est.

The most terrible is the fact
That this evil is unnecessary in the light of evolution
There simply is no functionalism

Killing was never demanded by any reason
Among fiends nor foes
Freedom just origins in PIE *prijos “dear, beloved”
which in Germanic and Celtic comprised “friend”
it is conjectured to have related
to the free members of one’s clan
perhaps as opposed to slaves
who knows?
Freedom is cultured
Contemplative, even when done in common,
But why kill the stranger
There are just small communities
Becoming gruesome as they grew into nations
But what is a nation but a community among friends?
Why prove friendship’s worth by creating the class of excluded
The “antípalos”, the “xénos”
The barbarian
Half animal, half thing,
Who with a face
does not belong?

Where is the necessity?
And hence, even not any reason for evil
In our genes and in our souls
It is pure arbitrariness

Genuine capriciousness
In other words
It is the result of choice
Yours and mine.

The Old Testament had this knowledge
In its fables of Cain and infinitely it
Meanders through the texts
The flagellation of repeating what
Everybody knows
The self-tormenting search for a counter-example
Which is not
Or?

After all, He came in the end.
Transfixed and transfigured to the cross
“Stauróno”
And “kremáo” too,
The symbolic sense which Freud preposterously
Called “the murder of the father”
Because he hypnotized himself by this Moses
Who Michelangelo cut out of the marble in the shape of
An overgrown, immature and complacent, though tormented
old narcissist
uniting wantonness and power at their orgasm-peak:

To feel certain of one’s own mission.
The cross, however,
did not become THE symbol
Until the Middle Ages
Before that, it was the fish
His sign in the stars
According to some Western calendars.

I think it was Luther’s greatest achievement
To have phrased this so distinctly
In the Augsburgean Credo
Edited by Melanchthon in 1530
Finished as Confessio Augustana from 1540

please, remember that Luther was an Augustinian monk –
That God makes himself the debtor of his own guilt
That he uses the old Roman jurisdiction
The right of the creditor to use the body of the debtor
Who cannot pay
As he likes
Impaling himself on the dead wood
Of our miscarried memories
Of unrealized and un-confessed crimes

This blaming himself for our trespasses
Is not an excuse for Genesis

Nor a penance for an abortive plan of evolution
Of civilization and culture
For failing providence
And apparent scandalous lack of caring for the individual
It is a pure gift
A genuine mercy
To hang oneself in the capacity of one’s most dear son

Or perhaps even to chose this disguise, to fly in this slough –
On the wood of death
To suffer, to die, *-raeq
Not just the king’s duty
To give his slough to another
The “hydos”,
When the moon passes the constellation of Orion
No ritual, no incarnated tradition
But free choice.
This katallagé comprised
Us too
You and me
Feel it
Estimate it truly
Believe it
That it must become true

there once was ONE friend –
That you are FREE.

However, please, remember
That in a world pervaded by
Gods demanding sacrifice
And ascribed barters’ minds
And petty commodity-dealers’ ways,
The thought of the radically opposite
Even this very figure of thought
As pure ideation or conceptualizing
As mental imagery
Cannot be devised nor figured out
Created or invented
It can only happen
For real.

VIII
Depth

The mountain keeps the secrets of the sea
It was so often said that
The secret is on the surface
This is the secret
That means the ocean is mere surface
Upon surface upwards downwards.
Then the mountains lie
But why should they?
Let man keep the prerogative
Of deception
After all depth is not a concept
No idea, nor projection
It is far more than full belief
It is practice.

IX
Abyss number nine
(Song at the ceremony of solemnly promising never to drink soft drinks)

It’s mine, it’s thine,
It’s abyss number nine,
Please, come and join the festival
Of burned-down pine

The sky falls down
Even the fishes drown
The greatest mountains burst
The raising oceans rage with thirst
For dry land, houses, human flesh
I had to leave my evening dress
My Porche and my Picasso
Our au pair girl and our Eskimo

It’s mine, it’s thine,
It’s abyss number nine,
Please, come and join the festival
For marvelous decline

Giant meteors rain
All science is in vain
There is no secret tunnel
And no ascending funnel
There is no last safe road
no Noah and his boat
There’s no smart option of escape
It is once again the saurian and the ape

It’s mine, it’s thine,
It’s abyss number nine,
Please, Come and join the festival
We won’t recline

There is in the air
Sweet music everywhere
Wild rhythms, romantic and rock
It gives no sense but just a shock
We shall be dead
And have no burying bed
Since the old mother earth is gone
And we are done

It’s mine, it’s thine,
It’s abyss number nine,

Oh, Come and join the festival
BUT BRING MORE WINE

AND DO NOT FORGET THE WHISKY! OR I’LL ……

X
Freedom

Some would say: freedom is
Not to want what you desire.
Or am I wrong?
Is it not to desire that
Which you want?
I prefer the first version
Because to want is convention
Desire was never an object of manipulation.
Oh, the construction of the perfect breasts
The perfect vagina
The perfect bottom
But the flesh
The reality of desire, the flesh,
Is wanting.
Look at the new female skeletons
Accessible by sight and penis
From behind
The face was always disturbing
Unless we spoke of love
Which was neither desire nor want
But shear fantasy.

What on the earth shall we do
Without secrets of full thighs and bottoms
And well-ripened breasts swaying,
Leaning forward drawn to the earth
by their own weight?
Oh flesh, I shall sing of you
Even more beautiful when only
the eyes react to your abundance
and the snake cannot awaken at any call.
Orange-peel-skin, especially beautiful in young women
as if the mind had matured too
like wine and the eyes would betray more
than greedy innocence.
When the hair on the womb is still kept
Opposing the appearance of
Scheming children.
Carnal desire fooled us
Because it was delivered as a package
Of obligatory wants
It made us just like the rest
However sexually different we tried to be.
If a man will know what he really desired
He shall not consult his memory
But that which has not happened yet.
Ask your body what it wants

The answer shall never be satisfaction.
To mix up freedom with satisfaction
Is a terrible fault
What the body wants
Is the pause
The time to turn to itself
Neither driven by thought nor desire
Since wants always belong to the others
And the body is mine
I guess what we find is distraction
The right to be distracted
By a slight pain
By a cloud
By a voice
By silence.

XI
Heart

All these years he suffered severe stress
Inflicted on him by his own ambition
But also by a sort of strange
Neutral desire for precision
His heart’s eternal jumping
Enlarged it, until it lay as a sack in the chest
Waiting for the assembly of the first thrombus.
Strange, the diagnosis quickly
Made him feel relieved,
Free
To have a verdict
Freedom takes on many an appearance
Like diabetes
Called the harlequin of disease
Which he by the way also acquired.
He waited for the stroke
Prayed for a heart attack
Yet there are verdicts never executed
But in spite of this
Which should have prepared him
For the carpe diem

He could not grasp the moment
And began to nurture an older man’s
Wild desire for women’s flesh.
This is ridiculous
Like Yates after his prostate-operation
Vanity is like stupidity and complacence
In particular blatant in old men
To exchange fear with desire
As if everybody did not know
That here is a just slight, slight difference
And like the master Rilke
Debases himself indirectly quoting
A far greater master, Immanuel Kant, and
Spoiling the first Duinerser Elegie with
“Denn das Schöne is nich als
Des Schrecklichen Anfang”,
Beg me a pardon
How stupid can it be?
If such were true, my friend,
We would pass from the beauty of a spoiled heart
To the “aischros” of the moment of death.
But death is tedious, boring,
Uninteresting,
Noisy, this demonstrative competition with breath
Always lost like a racing game with a flat tire.

Listen to Bach when he states the obvious truth
That faith is the capacity to escape the fear
Of the angst for death
In his marvelous Choralbuch
However, beauty is in the trivial fact
When it turns its face against us
As if it were its back.
Death is Being-let-go
So closely allied to the errant cause
That it just happens.

XII
Inspector Morse

At some time
Usually at the peak of his career
The master detective
Has to clear up the murder on himself,
Whether before or after this incidence,
It depends.
There might not always be a motive
Nor any plausible reason why
Such things just happen
Like death occurs
This is a difficult case
But after all simple
Death is usually the same
And murder is a way meeting death.
This is obvious
Because inspector Morse was not
Inspector Morse
But a British actor
Impersonating him
And he knew who killed him.

XIII
Just outside the door

The master of thinking
Meister Eckehart –
He changed my aspirations
When I read him before I was twenty –
“Why worry about God
He is standing outside the door
Always”
And now more than forty years
Have elapsed and I have not
Let him in.
I ask myself why
And cannot answer.
I know he is there
Still, for certain,
And I think he has a key
To the infinite realm of my mind
Since I am the door and the lock
Why don’t I call for him?
Oh, many people, I guess
Are caught in the same predicament.
It were foolish to believe

That this was a question of faith
Not at all
It is in a way rather pragmatic
But also a question of courage
And attention
People like us do not bother in the end
Since,
And I say “since”,
His patience shall last to the last day.
Can one think of a betrayal,
Yes, I believe so.
I am a lock
I know who has the key
But I won´t be opened.
Why?
Liquor simulates it,
The opening,
But the door stocks.
There are so many wrong keys.
Eros, fame, oh, you know them.
But love, agape,
Everything can be simulated
Even orgasms of the mind
But he cannot be fooled
Even not by love.

So this is why we don’t open the door,
I presume,
Because love bars the entrance
In all its fabulous disguises,
Even the pretext of loving him.
After all, giving up love
Is to give up oneself
And this is much.

XIV
Love in the kitchen
(In honor of Rainer Maria Rilke)

When he came he found
The door half-open
She must have seen him coming.
He rushed to the sleeping room
But did not find her
Then to the living-room
To the library
But not until he opened the door
To the kitchen he saw her
Standing naked the beautiful bottom
Leaning against the working top.
In the settling sun her body
Was like amber alive
Warm flesh trying to break out of its form.
The body
This shrine for desire
So dearly bought by human suffering
This ultra-intimate
Yet borrowed property
This disposable armor

Of a material too precious to win or work up
This gift above all gifts
To give and to receive
In spite of this closeness to the sacred
Just, after all, a pretense for souls
Some tiny niche in the mind
Just gear, props, histrionics,
Inevitable failed transubstantiation.

As he approached her
They both smiled softly
For a while unmoving face to face
Exploring each other’s pupils
Then their lips met
And as he gently lead her to the big table
She eagerly stretched herself out upon it
Opening her thighs to lovers’ usual ritual.
After what seemed to honor mutual satisfaction
They sat down smoking
She naked still
Absorbing his adoring glances.
It was not until the very last suck,
Accidentally they smoked in the same rhythm,
That one of them noticed the one
Who had been standing for long in the doorway

Leaning to the door-casing
His face burning with darkness
Observing them gently
Though with what was probably solemnity
Standing silently determined without tension
Without the slightest impatience.
They were both watching him
Without a word
Amazingly unsurprised however
A bit anxious, I presume,
When he prepared himself
Very calmly
To fetch the one
He had been sent for.

XV
Love poem

If you were a song
I would know you by heart
But conceal it

If you were rain
And we embraced
I would dissolve in your hair
But I would return into the weather

It you were a trace
And I followed it and found
I would not feign disappointment
But just restlessness

If you bore me a child
My heart would shiver of happiness
But I would never
Recognize my own face in its

If you really loved me
I would joke

And pretend for fun
You did it for my money
And my “fame”

Because if you really
Love me
I shall not darken your bright love
With mine

Even, if you saw me as I am
I shall attempt to stay with you
But spare you the pain
Of asking me to leave

In spite I shall wait
Endless hours in a hermitage
Well knowing of your
Never-coming

But people now-a-days
Never love
Never resign
Never wait

And how should I claim

to be an exception
even if I prayed the words
to speak on behalf of me

Oh sacred words
Vehicles of deception
Yet always true.
True as love only is.
To the moment.

XVI
Le Luthier

This thought must have passed by
Most different minds many times
But I sense somehow
That few payed attention to it
Or is the truth that it shun us?
Though I cannot say why.
People in the business,
The professionals, the amateurs, the greedy dealers
And some part of a difficult to identify public
Pays much notice to the great Cremona-makers
The master builders of stringed instruments
Of course primarily violins, Stradivarius, Guarneri,
Bertolottti. Maggini, Amati, Bergonzi, Guadagnini,
Gagliani, Tononi, Storioni, Montagnana, Goffriller, Santo Seraphin,
Stainer, Albani, Schorn, Geissenhof, Thier, Gabrielli and Techler
Vuillaume, Lupot, Pressenda, Giuseppe Rocca, not to forget Carl Becker.

you can hear that I know a little about this stuff –
They fetch prices hardly to believe these days
In the great auction houses
Especially now that focus of investment has changed.

Quite a few recent makers have become well- known now,
And a few apparently forgotten, their prices rise to the sky
Take Giovanni Rota, you shall be amazed
Even the younger Italians rise to between 20-200.000 pounds,
The supreme French makers triumph in this matter too
And the still living are able to sell for 50.000 pounds at times
Van Zandt and Samuel Zygmuntowicz not even of Italian breed
As far as I know, at least.

He, however, was unknown.
“Forgotten” is a wrong term,
Because no one knew nor remembered him.
He was anonymous, a real unknown
One wonders whether he really had another profession?
It might be possible, logically by all means,
But by great effort empirically too
To collect his production,
Because, and this might sound strange,
If you have seen one of his unlabelled products
(or provided, often, with false labels, of course,
Especially “Antonio Stradivarius faciebat”, some wearing
The name of ”Giovanni Battista Guadagnini”, the yellow one-brown varnished,
And one red specimen carrying the label of “Carlo Bergonzi” –
During the years they made much ravage in the world of dealers, after all)
You shall never forget its perfection

Beyond anything ever made or seen,
And should you have heard the sound
Something shall have happened to you,
Something unforgettable … words fail me …
And everyone else.
Many, among them I, have had the chance
To compare one of his violins with one of the finest Strads
They all agreed that the latter appeared like the work
Of a drunken amateur
Compared to his.
Just the same with the difference of sound.
Even il Canone performed like a trencher
When the best of all violinists ever.
Leonid Kogan,
Once had the chance to play both within the same hour of day.

Now it so happens by pure chance
That I
Own one of his instruments
A golden-brown violin
Its age, I estimate, between
150 and 350 years.
It is as if such primitive attempts at identification
Normally so easily done by a not especially trained person
Are lost upon it, too.

But even far back in the mind vaguely
Secretly, un-confessed to one self
to consider its value
Would be to betray him,
I am sure.

XVII
Manus

One day when I took the fairy
For the short trip
Too short not to stay in the car
I daydreamed looking at the sky
Through the front page
And as a storm came up
A hand was blown through the air above me
But so much else is blown in the wind nowadays
So why pay attention,
A left hand, a right hand, does it matter?
It was not until I was going to start the car then
And drive ashore
That I could not help to notice
That my right hand was lacking.
Strange, though, that I hadn’t had
The faintest notion of it before?

XVIII
Word and Matter

Animals accepts death
One says
Because they are their body
They have no quarrel with the flesh.
Humans most often struggle
Not realizing
Why is it so hard?
When mind is flesh
So much more than any body
What is there left to understand
Except the soft fact
That voice is blood
The blood of the earth blown
And that the phantasm of matter
Is matter,
The almost devoured corpse of the word.

XIX
Mirrors

I cut in my pallate
Unable to see where I cut
But only using the blade
And finally the scissors as prolonged membra
In order to escape the gallery of mirrors
Prostheteon
Prostrated, prosthesis
But only to remove the
Bombastic tumour

The cancer and the knife

What did I learn?

Nothing
Which I did not know beforehand
That death happens
That body happens
That death happens with the body and
That body happens with death

There are no secrets
Only bodies eventing and
Events bodying
The rest is
Flesh and
Silence

And there is no mirror
Which turns a reality
Falsely projected into its own mirror
All Velasques’ mirroring mirrors
Mirrored for truth’s sake
But only infinite
Mirages
Reflections of
Moving singing invitating
Flesh
Disguised as bodies
Eventing in the mirror of eventing.

XX
Monotony

For us who belong to the people
Who believe that no Cartago nor
Any road to Damascus were offered them
A sad consanguinity need not be seen
As a common curse.
Sadness has its marvels
Like even desperation
While insanity is still temptation.
So were are the bleak people
Living in the bleak house
The house in which it always rains
But this does not imply fog
Serene rain exists
Clear rain with a limpid message
Of the saving force of monotony
The secret of the mantra
To hide in an atmosphere
Which is always the same
And by mimicry
In the end adopting it
Then waiting must stop

Desire hope and even
Wanting having and in the end knowing.
Rain-readers
Drop-interpreters
Adorers of the abolishment
Of difference.
Finally the rain will be the one
Who watches
And not you

XXI
The Therapist

A pastiche of one of Keats´ not that beautiful poems

Oh what can ail the
Knight of souls
Mender of broken minds
Of clipped and stricken spirits
Searching in forgotten granaries
Finding only your own concepts
In this autumn of social relations
No more than a cruel squirrel.
Finding tired fairies
And long-dead elves
Under stones
Almost impossible to lift
Never the marvellous.
A severe case of myopia
Removed the freedom of your glance.
An evil loitering in the end
A merciless “nemein”
Wild for possessing
the mind’s flesh.

Pretending to look for secret treasures
Drilling in a bright and banal surface
Impenetrable made of words
And death well-tempered
For this time of year
The drill rotates itself down into splotches
Of gray nonsense.

And finally
Feigning to have reached
The elfin grot
He finds nothing but
That which he was taught to expect:
The withered ghosts
of a childhood
No one ever had.

XXII
The Orient Express

To ignore distance is a capital sin
Superbia
Pride is too soft, wanton too close to vanity
Superbia is cruel, brutal, and for the sake of power
Neglects even its performer.
So, let us never meet by the interference of planes
Longing must be endured
Hope postponed
Impatience tamed
By the Orient Express.
The old Balkan
Rumors from Trieste before the war
Of Jewish intellectuals and Irish writers
Smells of coffee with ginger in
Cinnamon women
Once were stomachs and thighs beneath bosoms
We are becoming a bosom-less culture
Betraying bosoms for breasts.
Metaxis, not methexis still,
And yet, the bailing of the eternal ideas for the things,
No, parouisia, sheer dining

Migrant members of the ambrosia-club,
And then long after the wine and the brandy
The wagon-lit.
Could any mistress match the silence
The eye-ball-caress of the newspapers and
the sweet kisses of the fat, oval Simon Artz cigarettes
The Bourbon’s burn
and the so constant smooth movement of the
abdomen of the wheels?
From such travels I still remember something
Like birds’ steps during the night on the roof of the cars
When Longing proceeds to another cabin.

XXIII
My very own harpy

Our beautiful gold-winged bird
Has left us for the jungle
Hiding in the its deep
Untraceable.
Oh, my beloved harpy,
My siren, my sphinx, my female centaur
Wearing your breasts high in the wind,
To Zephyr,
Only Boreas tamed you
I could not.
You snatched my fresh meat
Stole my white horses
You lovely-haired
Wild lion-maned woman
Driven me to suicide
And not only being the cause of my punishment in Inferno
But joyously carrying it out.
You virgin-eagle
Your heart is a mixture of the predator’s
And Florence Nightingale’s.
But thou monster cannot sing.

Days have gone by
And I still miss you more
When do you return from the mountains
When do you feel mercy enough
To meet me on my way to Tartaros
To torture me with your smile?

You body remains with me
As a proprioceptive curse
Oh, remembering’s sweet pain
Long lost desire returns
To my loins
Like the spring to the northern hemisphere
Of the planet Body.

XXIV
Pilgrim

Peregrinus, in the languages of old,
”to walk across the acres”.
Once, one went across the acres of
the infinite worlds existing in every second,
some not more different than the twinkling of an eye from ours,
others different beyond imagination.
He went silently through their
impenetrable walls of time and space
in order to sacrifice himself
in some suburb of some universe,
He, the lord of the Multiverse,
To be born and crucified in our world.
Like a stone falling in the smooth
surface of the pond of infinity.
Eventum tantum.
Rings would spread as echoes through the Multiverse.
For ever silence returns Never.

XXV
Recognition

Dear friend
Would you be able to live without recognition?
Many a man are forced to do
But could you give it up?
This is an experiment of thought
a while worth.
No respect, not even contempt,
But totally unnoticed
An anonymous anonymity?
Hard to imagine
Because it means to be totally forgotten
But does it mean to live without hope?
Quite another hope it would be
Not the hope of another
Of community or a fate
But of silence, of being unseen
Unremembered, not being
In the social sense.
Is this freedom?
My dog longs to piss its tracks,
“Alfred was here”

But I am not allowed to place any marks?
I must not imagine myself
In human company
I must walk along the beach
And no one would notice an old man’s
Trousers rolled and nobody
Can ask “Who placed those footprints”.
I cannot even be called a fool.
Incognito, being without context?
But the event?
There must be events in such a life
Ask for them,
They are empty
Like the event on the first day of creation
To experience this empty centre of the event
Would definitely be worth it all
The pain, the loss of identity.
But what will you get?
Oh, my friend, knowledge,
Pure unpolluted knowledge.
Of what you ask?
Why should I answer?
Try?

XXVI
To my friend Th., who once love a Mexican woman of rare beauty

Roses and shit

Shit and roses
Death and dung
They relate to silence
As this song

I shall walk on the water
The Atlantic would do
To embrace you only
You only you

I should take on a bird’s slough
Transgress the skies
Suffer no-man’s temperature
For one look in your eyes

I would dance on the spires
Dive ten thousand miles
If I could read the next morning
Of your kiss in my files

I would tear open my body
I would take out my heart
If I could just be certain
That it could be a part

Oh, only one tiny
One small piece of your skin
So I could follow your blood flow
Just from within

Oh could I share you
With the breeze on your cheek
With this spoiled sunshine
What more could I seek

XXVII
Siegetics

Even the secretary shook her head
And the chief of department
In the sacred inner office confirmed it in words
Officials are seldom wrong
“You can understand, I am sure,
Mr. Lawson that is has a demoralizing effect
To go on incessantly
Apparently never wanting a break
Nor needing one
It is at least necessary to feign some fatigue
Or restlessness, even lack of satisfaction.
Some dissatisfaction cherishes leadership, you know.”
Bur Mr. Lawson insisted on some verdict,
Claiming that there does not exist any pauses in hell …
To what realistic mind could such make sense?
And consequently he was discharged.

However, who would believe that hell is comforting
So pauses should not just be something invented by man
Or demanded by his body
But a privilege.

Can we be sure of that?
After all we still ask:
“What do you DO during your pause”
And the answer can hardly be
“I pause!”
One must break off from something
But how do you break off from a flow?
Flow is the ideal nowadays.
Yet, doesn’t make sense without stasis
As privation presupposes possession.

“Now we need a drink!”
Mr. Lawson never needed one
Not even in the blue hour
He sat in the silence of days and nights
Being unoccupied
Now
And still did not want a pause
Which might be just “new” experience, to laugh, some drama,
A conversation
Or just a dog
What do I know.

Some people do not yield to time
They just do not obey it a mistake to believe that they simply do not notice it –
They keep it at a distance
By being it.

XXVIII
”Strumpet”

“To strum”, Capt. Francis Grose,
“A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue,” 1796
Have it: “to have carnal knowledge of a woman,
also to play badly on the harpsichord or any other stringed instrument.”
To love a woman
Is that like playing an instrument?
I do not know
Some would say so
But how do you play on
your own instrument
the self?
I presume that this relation
Is not carnal
Or is it?
The body of mind making love
To the mind’s body.
Bodying oneself
To caress your mind
By your inner body
To caress your internal body
With the mind

Lead it to an orgasm
And pretending
In love’s solemn ritual
Which we owe every whore
That mind is not a harlot.

But isn’t the orgasm of mind
Always pretended
And don’t we pay for that
With our body?

XXIX
The Angel

Few has been granted the opportunity
To buy Gabriel five big draft beers
Lager
On a pavement café
Opposite the central station in Arhus
Or anywhere else, I presume
In the first real summer sun –
I have.

Few have been granted to listen to him,
Accepting his request to join my table
Even if he looked poor, not shabby
But bewildered
Oh, I know autism and psychotics so intimately
So well
And here I misjudged
As usual, I nearly added
But first feeling suspicion,
Ridiculous
The fearsome man’s attitude
then pity

the pretended courageous one
With his mental and social state (of mind?),

Then realizing
Slowly
that his disconnected way of discourse
seemingly perplex
so hard to decipher
madness has its codes too
but his had none that I could detect
However, I later found out
That it covered another syntax
Another semantics
And that his stuttering
Were drops of eternity falling
From the mouth of *Dyeu-
Like gold ducats
On the pavement
From the sack of Puss-in-Boot
(please forget the cognate “pussy” just for now)
Muffled
In the black velvet of concepts
Like a Medici dagger
Following its inevitable path
Through the chain mail of my thoughts

Forward into my throbbing old heart.

There IS a language beneath language

How long, I ask you
Shall the lack of simultaneity between
Experience and sense
Not to speak of recognition
last?

Some lack of self-command
Of impatience
Would be proper here
Eventually
Don’t you agree?
Since meaning left us
And significance hesitates
In cases such as mine

Must waiting not
sometimes at least
Open the valve of anger
The pillow of rashness and desire
Which glues it to its chair
And betray hypomoné?

There is a play
After all
In which Godot
Only missed the train the first time.

I left him some more money
Because my train would not wait any longer
But having mounted the top
Of the gentle steps to the station’s entrance
By impulsion I turned around
Just as he opened his arms
And hundreds of white eagles
Took off like
A jubilate choir
Into the blue sky above Aarhus.

Hossianah!
And now
Too late of course
I remember what baffled me at first:
The overwhelming beauty
Of his face.

XXX
The body washed ashore

It was washed ashore upon the beach
This dark accumulation of sucked matter
visible from a considerable distance
And as we approached it in the summer morning it is difficult not to do so –
our uneasiness almost overcome
We all saw almost immediately
That is was a drowned thought
Even if it was not in particular huge
For a thought of this kind.
It changed color all the time
Shimmering from verdigris
To blue becoming darker or more light
Receiving orange, red, and violet like a rainbow
Or gold-bronze indefinitely metallic shine
Like a bluebottle, a blowfly
Feeding on rotten flesh
And perished mind.
Though, like an enormous unknown precious stone, too.
Almost unaware we rallied round it
Creating a sacred middle hand in hand

An untrodden, innocent and inaccessible
Middle, a meson
A post-empty place
Repeating a secret, infinite and never absorbed knowledge
Of this thought without a subject
The perennial thought of the event.

XXXI
The deep storage project
(To my friend the painter Hornsleth, in honor of his brilliant ideas)

Are we able to stop time?
At least we could fight it
By a shooting star falling from our dreams into the bottomless sea.
To fire a star able to resist the pressure
And filled with traces of memory
Meant to hibernate inside time
A hostage of the virtual
But also of that which we could still have been.
Technological Christus Victor
A sacrifice to our own destruction of Nature
An atonement with an angry mother god – this time –
The blood of man
A descent to the icy hell
Waiting 500 years for ascension.
To ally with evolution by encapsulating in it
In order to be found finally
As traces of a lost time
As memories of the future
Which only

That is the ultimate gift
Can be the generosity of the creature to the creatures
And then one day the miracle has come
A star of steel and ice
Soaring to the hemisphere
From the ocean’s bottom
The message to the multiverses
That life has been here.

XXXII
The diver

The best divers have a delicate skin
The eyeballs’ touchiness in every inch
The colder waters of the North are preferred by them
Since, even during summer, their armor
Glows through the chilliness of currents.
Dead bodies do not float, nor do limbs or bones
But songs do overflow, they drift.
Thus there once was a diver who sang to the depth
And what can it all be about, my friend,
But singing in the darkness of the deep waters
Having enough breath, but never knowing
How far yet
To the bottom?
Anyhow, words shall soar to the surface
All by themselves
Like pieces of wonderful wreckage
From a treasure vessel
Waiting to be found.

XXXIII
The Flavor of Sight

In “Timaeus” 64 D Plato writes about the nature of pleasure and pain. He plays with the
thought of an affection which is mild and gradual being imperceptible, claiming that the
affection which, in its entirety, takes place with ease is eminently perceptible, since it does
neither involve plain nor pleasure, and is beyond force. Thus the affections of the visual
stream itself becomes in the daylight a body substantially one with our own having the
most intense and clear perceptions concerning every objects that affects it.
What a vision of vision
That there should be an un-perfumed sight
That the organic glass of the eye-ball should
Lack any mouches volantes
An object watched outside the laboratory
Being in un-artificial circumstances
Yet, untouched by winds, moist,
And the smell of humans,
Without the sound of their voices,
Their unrest around us
A sight, which apparently fulfills
The function of the senses
By gently abolishing their natural inclinations,
An everyday observation without by-effects and aber-dabeis.
Oh, please tell me about it!

Flavor however, both refers to smell and taste
What does that mean?
Can the senses be bewildered by nature?
Are the phenomenologist philosophers actually wrong
And intentionality a lovesickness
With perfumed sails

Performing as topgallant ones
Salty distended to the point of bursting by
The furious storms in far oceans?
Is both being biased and unbiased
Mere illusion
Because the sight itself was provided with
Fragrances sweet from the beginning
And the food always speaking to you
Like colors acting out mimicry
In the black spot-rooms of your eyes?
Do words have a natural taste
Do even thoughts have their flavor?
Who shall know?

Then even the camera lies
Because the picture stinks
And celluloid is infected by the
Motives.
Infatuation, not intentionality
Though, and that is the wonder,
There is no desire, no interests, no motives
The wholly sea of things
Their chair sailing upwards the Nile
Nothing but event
Events cleansed of everything
But happening, occurring, becoming
The drama was deceit
And nothing
Nothing but ice, winter is the vision
Meters beyond Celsius
And the body of sight

The anaesthetized stream of sight
The easy and painless movements of worlds
Buried beneath glaciers
Is the real realm of seeing
And the queen’s throne
Lacks luster
Even the flames of light
The fire
Cannot be caught.

But doesn’t Plato speak about thaw
And about affections returning
To their proper places
To their natural conditions.
He speaks about the spring of thought
About the May-Body’s fragrance sweet flavors.

XXXIV
The grave
(a slight piece of a paraphrase)

The grave
No one, my love, do there embrace,
This place might after all not be that terrible
To us living in the restlessness and noise
From mass media and metropoles.
Since silence deserted us and
The gentle worm of contemplation
Slipped unnoticed out of our backs

The grave
Refugees from our own bodies
Improved and repaired
Embellished and dishonestly perfected
By pressing needles with silicone through
The sacred curtain of the skin
Wearing faked features refigured with replicas of bones
We seek shelter in our own corpse.

I wonder how they proceed in the morgue
With bodies now corpses?

Do they empty the breasts and bottoms,
The lips and the face
Like bathing rings from malodorous air
A lifetime’s absorption of greasy lover-hands
Or like water beds from water
Condensed coital repetitions?
Or do they leave it all untouched
The jellies and the antiseptic liquids?
During all circumstances the decay incorporated
In worms and mites
The stubborn work at the microlevel
Shall eventually do the job in the coffin.
I guess insects tolerate this stuff
And microorganisms too,
But if they do not
The islands of silicone shall swim
In the ocean of putrefaction around them
Like heraldic shields on a lost battlefield.
Wasted symbols of the vain bravery of sex.

The corpse could always
This possibility stays
Be given over to fire
But fire must be honored by dead bodies
Like a well prepared meal honors devouring.

Fire takes no considerations
Of persons
Of bodily merits,
Even false teeth
Artificial joints of steel and plastic,
Plastic in prolonged penises
And pacemakers shall melt too
From solidarity with forgotten Rolex-watches,
And the magician’s secret chip
Which made him able to open doors
At a distance and
Order objects to hover in the air,
It had its time.
However, porcelain parts might survive
but eyes of glass
shall perish too
Or like diamonds and rubies
turn black.

Fire being akin
Yet eventing from outside
To the heart’s glow which once
Transpired through the skin.

XXXV
The ocean’s voice

If the ocean could sing
If water had voice
If waves were violins
And the soft and great forces of
Wind winds themselves
I know their choice of tune
Oh, I know
The cantata “Zion hört die Wächter singen”
Von Philip Nicolai gemacht
Meistersinger “zu Hamburg”
And from another force of nature
Another miracle or wonder
Johann Sebastian Bach
Adapted and beautified
As far as this was possible due to the inherent
Superiority of Nicolai’s great achievement.

Music, John Dryden wrote,
Would transform everything to such a degree
That the dead shall live, the living die,
 When music shall untune the sky.

Perhaps we should think otherwise?
There is no death
There is no difference between life and death
Because the sea
Coming long before our time
Already chose the tune
Disguised in shades of blue, green and gray
Borrowed as weather changes
From the bright shining sky.

Do you remember how
Ernst Bloch in his first masterpiece
“Spuren” refers how Odysseus and his men
Himself tied to the mast
The crews’ ears stuffed with all kinds of material
To evade the Sirens’ song from
Drawing them to disaster and death on the coast
While passing them by
In full majesty
Orfeus standing in the stem
With his lyre singing
None of his crew with ears protected
In triumph sailed
On the laughing sea
Humming his tune too?

Oh, ocean,
Your song light years beyond desire
And solemnity
Singing for the sake of song only
And we must learn to be and act
In the same way
As if the passage itself
Was the goal we aimed at.

XXXVI
The painter

I wonder
Are shadows leaves too?
Sacred to the winds
Even to Boreas
Leaving only the shape
Being petals of the invisible corollas
Of phenomena
Although shading them
Unable not to stamp by their ability
To co-event light and matter
Lifting a lobe of the secret of color.
Masters of watercolor and acryl
Are the shadows
Tempera is all to crude
Oil scares them.
Children and dogs acknowledge their capacity
Of phantasm
Grasping for the shadows
Mistaken darkness for matter
But they get wiser
I on the other hand

Still deny
Because I know that someone
Ages ago was left
With one single leaf of shadow
Dizzy from the delicate hue
Of its ultramarine palpability
The sky incorporated
Taken the great Now with it
Like a soft drink
Prepared by Muses long gone
Or living still
By juices from unknown plants
Which taste like summer and almost invisible purple
Somewhere in the land of merciful shades
Behind the horizon.
I said “the sky incorporated”
But this was in this moment
Of the bliss of flora being un-fulfilled
Both by mimicry and mimesis
No Pleroma
Only the present of farewell
From eternity
Receding for ever into
Never.

XXXVII
The secret guest

They asked me to think of somebody dear to me
And I thought of you.
I admit that my love has been unstable
I did not appreciate your faithfulness
Nor in any way reciprocate
Although I wished to from all my heart I conjecture when looking back.
I must confess that I hardly know you
And I cannot claim that I tried honestly.
Sometimes I even doubted your love
Or even imagined you were gone
In bad hours of my life or
was it as banal as delectatio morosa
just pleasure taken in destructive imagination
even without desiring it?
But I always did regret and this regret
This guilt this shame darkened our relationship
And the charis which draw me towards you.
I admit I still feel it, even stronger now,
But you forgave that too, I know.
Some people argue terribly and believe love is that way

Because they embrace immediately after, with passion,
Or it is just a way to survey, another phantasm of being two?
But we never spoke to each other this way,
This is good at least our dialogue was always kind,
Although not what me concerns honest.
And now, when we are going to depart
And cannot be together here, where it were really needed
I feel a deep sorrow.
Do you know me?
I always believed so, but recently I came to think
If I could be wrong, since I never knew you.

They asked me to tell about one moment
In which I felt really close to you
Why can’t I tell about one single time when we were really united
Except for childhood, me running up some stair
To our summer house
In this belonged wonder land
And you following but this single time
Not like a shadow.
And I, am selfish, cruel, and stupid, and love myself,
Without love and hence, cannot love you.

They asked to write one line for you
To put it in an envelop

And tie this envelope to a white balloon
And finally open a window in the roof
But I, our self, I ego, ipse,
cannot reach you, my soul,
Every gesture towards you seems to push you farther away,
And yet I reach for you
What is the watchword?
“I love you”?
Who would believe that among the angels
When I myself cannot take it seriously?
Scared to mix up philauto with
Epimeleia heautou or even autophilia.
So, I chose to write this poem as a sort of amendment
Trying a last time to sense your presence.
And wishing that reading is among your gifts of course it might be – but you know perhaps my hand writing too well
And is already
Occupied elsewhere.
And I shall be the last to blame you.

Now, my love, my soul,
Soon we shall depart
I shall go into the black earth
The matter of the idiom
You into the realm from where you came

you will embark from the shore
On the vast blue ocean
That transforms hardly noticeable into the sky.

XXXVIII
The Shadow

I woke up in the morning
And I finally sensed through the mist of my lies
What I could not admit to have seen for so long
The shadow that grows in your eyes

I walked into the shadow
There was no regret, no anger, no hate
What else could I do who had known for so long?
But to hope for shadow as shade?

I went into the shadow
Stalked away into your glance as a blind
A man from the desert in search of shelter
In the soft shadowland of your mind

I sought in the shadow
I sought in the mountains, the plane
Leave I did everything behind
But my years, my hope and my pain

I found the shade in the shadow
I dwelled at a sea with no shore
And I found a serene darkness
Deeper than darkness, an abyss, no door

And I sat down by the abyss
By the bottomless dark in your heart
From the shadow and shade of your darkness
I shall never and ever depart

I shall stay by the abyss
Come my love, hold me tight
Every word has its own sun
Let us wait, let us wait, for the light