Karl-Marx-Allee

In May drizzle and
Bursting cloud,
The shoots shield the loose
Lying air, and I think
Of nothing but you.

I am in Richmond
And you are dismantling our bookcase,
Bulgakov and Nabokov,
Divorced, still harbouring
Last week's dust.

Your towel is left where you wept;
Wet washing litters the rack
In the kitchen, curtains flap,
And my wind-up clock stopped
With no one.

Now I cannot bare the
Sudden loneliness of trains,
and buses, and avenues in Kew;
And you, carrying wilting
silk dresses, bruised and new.

And my stomach is full of the
Indigestible bile of drink,
And the sorrow of early mornings
Lying in your dent.

Then I see us walking
Down Karl-Marx-Allee
In the dense dusk
Beneath the TV Tower,
Slowly suffocating

And I melt.

5 Songs About... Building

Kraftwerk - Metal on Metal



Peter, Paul and Mary - If I Had a Hammer



Tom Waits - What's he Building in There?



Lightinin' Hopkins - I'm Going to Build me a Heaven of my Own



Moderat - Rusty Nails

Oskar Nerlinger - Stadtbahn Von Berlin

False Syllogism

I am a character in one of those primitive racing games, the colourful scenery flies past me and I am static, bar the occasional impromptu sideways lurch.

The finish line, the solution, the redeemer reaches me, I don't reach it.

I clutch the steering wheel tokenistically. I fool the passenger beside me: I am not in control at all. The grain of the view through the rear window is incongruent; the scenery repeats itself every ten yards. Unheimlich. I am stuck, I am a rooted passenger and this will not cease until the end of the road arrives.

Bonnie Parker with Ford Model 18

One Hundred Years

Butterflies float into my room
In fatal, terminal yellow,
Blossoming with weary gloom,
Abandoning the sludge below.
Asphyxiated by the riotous chill;
Like the returning foetus
With an impulse to kill,
Dragging through the dew beneath us.

My heart's anatomy erupts
In the morning's bleak beams;
Choking and spluttering
Over last night's dreams.
If this rabble resists my death,
Darling - please call when I catch my breath?

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Grimacing head No. 13 "Der Speyer"

Subsultus

I am drained, something sears through my chest. I cannot contend with this again.
Water gathers around my eyeballs and it must clear because I am a man, and people are looking at me.
I want to collapse and pass out, to erase everything, because walking through this town feels like a funeral procession.
There is an echo, you metamorphised. The view from our flat is irretrievable.
We exhumed our relationship and fought like stags, and I gave up, forcing my forehead against the wall to knock myself out.
I wake up like a murderer every day, I have repressed the memory of you, the concealed body. I am in denial, such have I hidden you, and then I wake and you return and my heart pounds. This is too much to carry, I will be caught.
The bloody tissue, my nervousness when I lie and touch my face.
France appears; books, illness, depression, the Tate, Andersen's grave appear.
There is always an indicator.

To sleep sweetheart, to rest.

Frieda Pushnik, Armless and Legless Wonder Girl

May

And it was you collapsed on the floor, sobbing, and me standing over you with a sharp pain in my chest. And then you'd leave and I would be left alone, isolated and incapable of cooking or eating, doubled over on the sofa with your duvet over me and the walls empty.

Egil's Saga

Protect and Survive

The Accord

Venomous grey sky
Absorbs all sunlight.
Contorted umbrellas rattle
In the wind,

Cool air surges hither and thither,
Engulfing bodies and lodging
In impotent cracks and
Weary flagstones.

Idle, mundane modernity, trench mud,
Artillery fire, the pounding machinery,
What placates you?

Barricaded and disenchanted: the soul
Submits, gently the boots wander, with lust
The neurons thrust

Metropolis. The lover’s hideaway, the gut
Of consumption, the liver’s retreat,
Lung-busting austerity.

Divine love and divine reliance wither
With the thinning shadow
And construct a fleshy
Potency,
A messy conception,

Mass and matter converge in a loveless cycle,
In the noiseless chamber,
Redundant streetlights line sedate streets,

Currency plummets, the city weeps, dead weight
Meets in the underground, flows and throes
Through tunnels and sewers,

Sexless and loaded with mankind,
Consumed with humanity. Equatorial fate,
The doomed, infinite curvature.
A stringy thread spreads.

Libraries combust, the leaders concur,
Books burn like brittle bodies in the crematorium
In the outposts the pubs close three a day,
Ale flows freely through the floorboards,
Through cold clay fossils

Rapid disintegration in the streets meets
Mass and matter. Venerated are the brave,
The rampaging and ransacked embrace in the grave
Why recoil in terror from love?

Lying forever carbonated in each other’s arms.

Ménage plans span the parallel tracks,
The rusty ring roads,
The governor leaps!
Mass integration, predatory leering,
The wanton shareholder
In giddy delirium.

Cracks traversing the tiles, the pavement,
The solemn blacked-out windows,
Dividing motorways
Destroying turbines and pylons.

Atoms bind blindly
In the bedroom.

5 Songs About... Whisky

The Doors - Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)



Dean Martin - Bourbon from Heaven



Tom Waits - Jockey Full of Bourbon



Billie Holiday - Riffin' the Scotch



John Lee Hooker - One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer