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a questionable moral choice

a questionable moral coice

My pale, transparent reflection
in the window pane confirmed another aspect
that I had omitted
when thinking about the ever morphing,
transitional aspect of every physical space.

I was a transitional being as well.
Everything had to change.
Only yesterday I had been a child,
and it had seemed
that I would be a child forever.

Growing up had always seemed to me
to be some kind of failing,
a questionable moral choice.

now it was apparent that I, too,
would eventually have to grow up.

My mirror image clearly
was not that of a child
anymore.
My other self was hovering
between the trees
lining the residential street
and the book shelves reflected
in the window.

It seemed like I was sitting
in a fabulous natural library,
looking from there
into the confined space of the reality
of my room
like at a framed painting
that didn’t concern me much.

It looked like a peaceful place,
that library,
like a place right out of someone’s mind.

Like a place where one would forget
time and space
and never feel hungry or tired or aggravated.

My stomach grumbled as I thought about that place.
Being of real flesh and blood I was hungry.

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betrayal

betrayal

the death of his unborn son,
for the stonemason
it felt like a betrayal.

death was to be
a professional matter,
something to take place
in the realm of his customers,
who commissioned him
with carving memorial stones
for their dead,
not something to occur
in his own private life.

does not every profession
come with a privilege?
was it unreasonable
to expect a reprieve from death
as long as he carved memorials,
folded hands, lamenting angels?

he felt he had been let down
though by whom
he could not have said.

an atheist
in the service of the church,
loosing his unborn son
felt like a disciplinary measure
for his godlessness.

he had a system of inner convictions
unacknowledged rituals,
replacing religion.
he held on to the sacred
in the profane
he did not believe in a creator,
an organizer, a final judge,
and yet
he knew to have fallen from grace.

and no place to handle his complaint.

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transitional typeface

transitional typeface

dancing trees
the wind’s in a capricious mood today
writing in fluid script
with sharpened branches,
ink black against the grey sky

the message reads itself

letters legible
against the light of a sky
illuminating the thin calligraphy
of the wind
like an algorithm
flickering on a computer screen

the program writes itself

and the i observing
how letters are spun
out of branches
sharp like pencil tips

feels thin
elongated

a simple serife
tailing from the edge
of a letter.
i, a transitional typeface,
spelling the rational spirit
of enlightenment.

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genius

Bild

tarnished brass bracelets jingle on your wrists,

over your shoulder you carry

the same scratched leather satchel

full of papers and books.

worn sandals on naked feet.

even now,

i recognize you in an instant.

 

it’s winter.

you keep well in the background.

between shelves M-Z in biographies

you are not at risk.

 

you have had your share of abuse

and are weary of it,

though not afraid.

 

the red letters of a franchise bar

reflect in the deep black tar

of a recently paved parking lot.

another new strip mall.

the evening is patiently enduring

the loneliness of a friday night.

 

people climb out of sport utility vehicles

half the size of their houses, i assume,

and file into the barnes & noble

for a grande non fat latte

and some magazines or bestseller titles

to while away the hours.

 

and you, in the background,

leafing through

a mussorgski biography.

how in the world this got there

you can’t imagine,

then Frank Zappa,

but that’s not why you came.

 

finally, your head clears.

you carefully deposit yourself

in an armchair.

still, no one pays attention.

the anxiety subsides.

the numbers start dancing.

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Uncle Gustave

Uncle Gustave

wearing a black ribboned straw hat, gustave,
uncle gustave,
slowly walked down our street
with the help of an ivory colored walking cane,
vulnerable, yet erect like a king who
though victoriously
has fought his last battle and now
has nothing left to prove.

 

he left his sun yellow house with the forest green shutters
at exactly 2.10 pm every day the weather was fair
to an agonizingly slow approach of his bench.
even the birds stopped twittering and held their breath
as he was passing by
for fear to startle him.

 

his bench: dark green under an old chestnut tree,
facing away from the the bay, towards the street.
he carefully sat down, pulling up the legs of his dark suit,
and i climbed onto the bench right next to him,
but threading my legs through the wooden lattice of the back rest
i saw the silver water of the bay, the light caught in the crescents
of the small waves the undercurrent stirred up.
he looked at the street, I looked at the bay,
and we were silent
or talked in low, whispering voices.

 

we both knew he was dying,
right there and then,
and then for some more days to come.
we did not mind,
neither the three nor the ninety-three year old,
i had not been alive for the longest part
of his life,
and he would be dead for the longest
time of mine.

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map of a brain on fire

map of a brain on fire

i will write up the contract
entitling you to
a map of my brain, that world on fire,
almost like the contract
we roughly sketched with a yellow pencil stub
(for authenticity)
on the ripped-out fly-leaf
of the iliad in my grandfather’s study.
(sacrilege!)

we were children then
but that is not an excuse

i will write up the contract,
not for nothing
did i go to law school to learn how to
negotiate that what cannot be agreed upon,
how to arrange the terms of a transaction
that is to lead to mutual discontent,
for content is not to be gained through negotiation
and mutual discontent will have to do

we were children no more then
but that is not an excuse

your signature stands in for
your body so it better be water proof ink.
maybe we were smarter still
when we used that yellow pencil stub
to draw a contract
that neither of us meant to honor.
we were pirates after all.

children do grow up
but that is not an excuse

so let us sign it in waterproof ink then,
against our better judgment.
here is your letter of entitlement,
all i ask in return is
the right to keep that old flyleaf,
signed in pencil.

good luck to you now.
i forgot to inform you
that this kind of contract cannot be
specifically enforced,
but then again,
you didn’t care for the flyleaf,
did you.

we are but children.
and that shall be our only excuse.

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‘Where Wild Things Are’ Author Maurice Sendak Dies – NYTimes.com

'Where Wild Things Are' Author Maurice Sendak Dies – NYTimes.com.

Sendak has been most influential as an artist and illustrator to my work but even before that his wild things encouraged me to be WILD when I was little and to STARE into peoples’ eyes and tell them ‘BE STILL” when they were showing their terrible claws and rolling their terrible eyes. I still love his obnoxious, headstrong creatures who cut through all the embellishments, the sugar-coating, the lies about the children’s’ lives, and I admire his life-long refusal to deliver educational commonplaces to kids. I LOVE HIS WILD THINGS. I LOVE HIS PIGS. I LOVE MAX. Thank you, Maurice, KING of WILD THINGS!

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The Little Gargoyle


I’m looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.
Yeats, A Woman Young and Old

The little Gargoyle was sitting, the last of his kind, still as usual, listening to the faint sound of human voices from down below that the wind today seemed to be determined to carry in another direction. The Gargoyle sighed. Many days now he sat unmoved by the simple signs of social life the parish displayed on the little stage of his vision field. Sometimes he thought about the times when the others had contributed to his own observations with descriptions of what they could see. They all had had places of much greater exposition and had enjoyed a better view of the human spectacle down below. His own place in the shadows of the rear entrance suited the much less elaborate work that the artist had employed by carving him, basically not intending much more than creating a somehow sophisticated rainspout.
One might have thought that his first decades of existence must had been filled with envy or humiliation as his far more artistically executed companions had not failed to point out the aesthetic and social difference that clearly existed between his own simple self and their proud display. The truth was though that his nature was as simple and good willing as his face and that he had always preferred listening to talking and had been glad of their companionship despite their arrogance. Over time as boredom had led to an increasing tendency to quarrel among the more prominent members of the little society they chose him to confide in when their antagonists were drifting off to sleep, a deep, dreamless sleep, not unlike death, but the little gargoyle – clearly a failure in this respect as well as in his aesthetic execution – unable to retrieve his thoughts had been sitting alert and looking out into the night waiting for another morning that should restore his companions to him.
When they were all finally hovering quietly in their respective darkness he had often asked himself if the stonemason had known that he had been awakening the stone with his hammers and chisels and had he known would he still have chosen to give life and then abandon his creation? The little gargoyle of course had the patience and endurance of all stone creatures and one night, one week, one month of silence meant little to him. But he found that by never being able of sleeping he had lost some of his countenance, his stone nature, and during his long nights of silent thoughts while the others where embedded in an enviable state of coma had developed an inner life that didn’t seem quite suitable for a simple gargoyle.