Ashes for Breakfast (8 page)

Being a dog is having to when you don't want to, wanting to

When you can't, and always somebody watching.

Being a dog?

                        It's the bad smell attaching to your words.

 

2

“Get out of the light,” you say, talking to the demon

In the glass gone blind with looking,

Giving you the glad eye these many years.

Its harsh glance pierces your face

Like a spy from the clan of the X-ray spirits.

When you turn your back, your fear of

Going rigid turns with you.

Till something's certain …

                                               behind the grins.

Even in your phantom image, the brain scan

Picks you out. If only partially.

An alien among aliens, you stand out

As they stand out in you.

                                        With walled up frontal bone

Every refuge is left behind you. Will it be too late

By the time the autopsy sheds its bit of light?

 

3

… umpteen years of service with a view of barbed wire fence,

Trotting back and forth upcountry and down, only a dog could endure,

Captivated by his lead, trained to behave from infancy.

Even asleep, the tiny gap in the wire

Shrinks to the size of a bullet hole behind his ear.

A smacking of the lips proves even dogs have dreams.

The thing that sets his juices flowing is the idea

That parallel lines meet somewhere.

Where Pavlov stands for the residue of spirit

(instinct mobilized, a zigzag compass)

Dialectics is nothing but … dumb loyalty;

An ear for the feeling in his master's voice.

The moment of clarity is the lightening before death,

At the end of the trial.

                                        “
Like a dog
.”

 

4

You look old, young hound. Atom age old.

Curious in the mornings, heavy with leftover scraps

Of vivid dreams, you amble into your day,

Penned in by the traffic streaming by, the lingo

Printed on flattened wood pulp, the mush

It takes plenty of cunning not to gag on.

Because what you are supposed to be, your phenotype

The fetish, broadcasts to everyone: a German.

White … male … medium build … brown hair.

                                                                     It might do

For seventy years of existential struggle.

At best, patience might hold back the drool.

But the greatest threat, even to you,

Is from stupidity,

                                the buzz of brain activity,

Of which it's said, it creates itself.

 

5

From the junked buzz of the early years,

Led out on to the black ice of shy objectivity,

You go rigid at zero with an excess of signifiers.

The roar of empty promises,

Vacuuming out words, gestures, expressions.

The garish dreams lighten in the laundry,

Chemically bleached, printed with some nonsense or other.

Resistance at the century's end retreats

Blatantly into the brain.

The only thing to keep you up, simpleton, is laughter

At an animal caught in its own toils.

It's the only thing you could begin to take seriously.

Asked what I've spent night and day thinking about,

I sometimes have the presence of mind to reply: “
Nothing
.”

 

6

Homo sap., the animal with letters after its name,

The only one to lie, to obey the logic

Of appearance and deception. As you'll see

If you cast your eye once over a newspaper.

Twice … careful now … and you're caught.

What good is your skepticism when so much is taken on trust.

When you breathe (like nitrogen) illusions

That are rumored to be the stuff of dreams.

Bit player, with your head in the fog,

Think of Socrates.

                            When he swore, “By my dog!”

A world of opinions smashed to smithereens.

As any child will tell you, the very first word

Paradoxically produces a misunderstanding

That it takes repetition to clear.

 

7

I was happy in a sandy no-man's-land, I didn't do verbals,

I was a dog, wanting for nothing or not much.

The faith I needed to live by came down from on high.

God was an airplane, camouflaged like a cloud

By the enemy, remote-controlled, to lull me to sleep.

But I remained stoical, eyeing my terrain.

When I stood to attention on all fours,

With my dynamited pelt, the ground earthed me.

In the West, so they said, the dog precedes

His master.

               In the East, he trails him—at a distance.

As for me, I was my own dog,

In the suicide strip, equidistant from East and West.

It was only here that I sometimes performed

My
salto mortale
in the gloaming between dog and wolf.

 

8

Reason, as Joe says, this two-bit hell

Is this place where the self whistles up a storm;

Where fear and curiosity strike a balance.

Fear: lest it suddenly disappear

Without trace on the path of curiosity.

Curiosity: what it might be like, to live without fear.

It produces a little drama

Along the border marked by reason

Through perpetually new straying.

I am not here, it says.

                                           I am not there.

And its games of hide and go seek confirm:

I is none other than this border dog

Keeping a watchful eye on itself.

Who will guarantee that it won't leap on you

If you quietly remove yourself from circulation?

 

9

Now listen to this: in the obituary they wrote about me

In my lifetime, they said I was so sweet-natured

That they wanted to keep me as a pet.

It makes me ill to hear them drooling

About my loyalty, my affection, my trustworthiness around children.

Tripe! There's a term for everything alien.

Looks as though time has caught up with me,

And my voice is swimming in the confession:

“I was half zombie,
half
enfant perdu
…”

Perhaps eventually space gulped me down

Where the horizon closes up.

My double can look after me from here on in.

My orneriness is puked out, plus the question:

Do pets have lighter brains?

 

10

Just as well you can't read my thoughts,

The film I've got running in my imagination.

“My life in reverse…” or how I blindly

Patrolled the minefields in no-man's-land,

Myself just a cipher in a simultaneous equation.

No longer simultaneous, and I'm free.

The landscape sinks back, a new brownfield site.

Ever since I got out of here, no one knows me anymore.

The sand blots.

                            Guard towers are forgetful

As eyes, relieved by sockets.

The two or three names for the place of separation

Are already gone.

                               Now nothing is left to recall the trick

By which a strip of land became a hole in time.

Just as well you can't read my thoughts.

 

11

And you? Have you forgotten where you're from?

Is it starting to dawn on you how much damage was done

By so many years of humiliation and slapstick?

What a country, where a word on something topical

Provokes more than the unsayable

Remaining unsaid!

                                                Whose voice

Is swallowed during the attempt to chew your gubbins?

To cotton on right away to what's happening, and what isn't

Can be sophistication.

                                                In this instance, it was lethargy

That prompted you to stand to attention brain-dead with exhaustion.

What is life anyway? Everything's replaceable

Where hypnosis rules and
my duty right or wrong.

Don't kid yourself, in the paradise of dogs

Piss on a tree trunk is the stuff of dreams.

 

12

Dog among dogs awake at night in the firing zone:

       How was it again, your stomach growled? What at?

       At the biscuits they tossed you in Prussia?

What was it that kicked you in the back,

Was it the cerebral cortex that said, “I know”?

       Was it the supply of fresh blood?

What a dog's life, and at what a price.

       No underdog-victim twaddle, please.

It takes ethnographers, with their coconspirators' look,

       To understand fear. Animals often appear as humans

       In their works. As far as I'm concerned,

I was embarked on a long sleep. I was a machine

That liked it when my buttons were pushed.

       So and so many strikes per minute. I struck. They struck.

For the apprehensive, the quickest way from A to B

       (and back again) is the ellipse.

Break a leg … Artificial intelligence

       Has planned ahead in the event of a breakdown.

       The only question remaining is

Who will fix you if your machinery breaks.

As an
homme machine,
you enjoy La Mettrie's

       Protection, and don't need an alibi.

You function, that's enough.

       And good old Hobbes will pay the bill.

Unless he's tried shock treatment, no one can say

       What he lacks. Plunged from ignorance,

       Your whole life opens up. In free fall,

A projector scans the table of defeats.

Punched strips of naked fear. Things go black

       Before your eyes. Could be dazzlement

That says it wasn't Vico or Machiavelli

       Who said history is blind in both eyes.

FROM

FALTEN UND FALLEN

(1994)

VARIATIONEN AUF KEIN THEMA

Fortfahren … wohin? Seit auch dies

     Nur der fällige Ausdruck

Für Flucht war, für Weitermachen

     Gedankenvoll oder -los.

Was aufs selbe hinausläuft, wie?

     Zug um Zug einer neuen

Erregung entgegen, einem Gesicht

     Zwischen den Zifferblättern

Im Schaufenster, Brillen für Liebe,

     Für schärferes Fernsehn, Särge

Und Möbel zum schnelleren Wohnen,

     Wo Engel an Kassen saßen, taub

Gegen ihr süßes, nekrophiles Hallo.

 

 

Wieder vorm Telephon, in der Vitrine

     Wie unterm Glassturz, kaum

War die Tür zu, erstarrt, ein Objekt

     Für Passanten am Straßenrand,

Starrst du auf dieses Tastenfeld, Ziffern

     Wie der stellare Zauberwald

Am Nachthimmel … dezimales Mandala

     Das mit Erreichbarkeit lockt,

Mit plötzlicher Nähe, Geflüster, Verrat,

     Sogar Liebe — alles codiert

Wie seit langem im voraus, ein Leben

     Auf Abruf, und kaum gewählt

Explodiert eine Stimme in deinem Kopf.

 

 

Unterwegs zwischen Mutter und Äther

     Auf Sendersuche, den Pulsschlag

Des blutigen Hasen im Ohr, anästhesiert

     Wie unterm Handschuh die Haut

Von tausenden Innenstimmen, — wer weiß

     Wer da jedesmal sang, klanglos

Wie im genetischen Chor der Refrain.

     Großmutters
Ach
oder das
Hhm

All der steinernen Gäste im Keller …

     Bis den Mauern der Schweiß

Ausbricht und du dich flüstern hörst:

     Was für ein Aufwand an Panik

Für ein wenig abgeleckt werden, nachts.

 

 

Und morgens schießt aus der Dusche …

     Wasser, was sonst? Rot und Blau

Steht auf den Hähnen für Heiß und Kalt.

     Daß die Haut sich in Streifen

Abschält, bleibt ein alberner Alptraum.

     Kein Dorn im Handtuch, kein Blut

An den Fliesen — das Röcheln im Ausguß

     Heißt Hygiene, nicht Tod.

Und ob Seife noch immer aus Knochen

     Gemacht wird, der Schaum

Auf den Handlinien trocknend, sagt nichts.

     Ängstlich belebt, an den Haaren

Herbeigezerrt, stirbt ein kurzer Verdacht.

 

 

›Jedes hängt seinen Gedanken nach‹

     War kein Motiv für soviel

Unterwegssein, blind für den Fakt, daß

     Auch dies sich vergißt. Bald