No one names you. There’s no sound, no voice.
You’re left alone enclosed by the dark boats. The ground you stand on
Is uncertain, and the words you have
Are not those whose wreckage is required of them.
The separation you desire
Is not the tedium of assured departure.
You have no liking for the brackish water
You care nothing for the wind gusting through the trees.
Rather, you would say, rather go where the cruel dawn arrives in darkness
The palace whose utter ruin I have been.
Your one love is for the night as night
The words gaze at you and take your substance for their own.
Saturday, 25 June 2011
ON HIS MORTALITY
The doctor told me: get on with it, smoke your Virginias and drink your schnapps!
It’s obvious that with or without them we all have to go in the end.
In the mucus membrane of my eye there are for example traces of a cancer:
Given time it will see me off.
No one need of course despair on that account.
Each one of us can hope to see a good few years yet.
We can still stuff ourselves with blackberries and chicken.
Though it’s true we can expect a real pain in the gut one day soon.
There’s no way to set things right, either with the bottle or by kicking up a fuss.
Such a cancer grows undetected on the inside.
You could be scratched from the list
At the very moment you are walking to the altar with your bride.
My uncle, for example, kept his trousers pressed
Long after he’d been marked out for the kill.
He bloomed like life itself, but these were flowers for the coffin.
Every hair on his body was diseased.
For some it runs in the family
Though they don’t discuss it.
They can tell a bunch of grapes from a pineapple,
But when it comes to cancer and a rupture, they admit nothing.
On the other hand, my grandfather knew precisely what was coming
And let the doctors rule his life accordingly.
He was fifty by the time he got fed up with it.
A life like that is fit only for a dog.
You and I know better than to envy any man.
No matter how he lives he’s got his cross to bear.
As for me, my kidneys are in trouble
And I haven’t been allowed a drink these past five years.
It’s obvious that with or without them we all have to go in the end.
In the mucus membrane of my eye there are for example traces of a cancer:
Given time it will see me off.
No one need of course despair on that account.
Each one of us can hope to see a good few years yet.
We can still stuff ourselves with blackberries and chicken.
Though it’s true we can expect a real pain in the gut one day soon.
There’s no way to set things right, either with the bottle or by kicking up a fuss.
Such a cancer grows undetected on the inside.
You could be scratched from the list
At the very moment you are walking to the altar with your bride.
My uncle, for example, kept his trousers pressed
Long after he’d been marked out for the kill.
He bloomed like life itself, but these were flowers for the coffin.
Every hair on his body was diseased.
For some it runs in the family
Though they don’t discuss it.
They can tell a bunch of grapes from a pineapple,
But when it comes to cancer and a rupture, they admit nothing.
On the other hand, my grandfather knew precisely what was coming
And let the doctors rule his life accordingly.
He was fifty by the time he got fed up with it.
A life like that is fit only for a dog.
You and I know better than to envy any man.
No matter how he lives he’s got his cross to bear.
As for me, my kidneys are in trouble
And I haven’t been allowed a drink these past five years.
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