'He leaves his body as a pledge of his goodwill.'
                                                      Oh yes,
and there's a few limp fivers left in the till.
                                                      For,
seen from the obscene point of view of death
                    a corpse definitely gives birth –
decaying flesh falls off, and that which was so purified
comes into its own – dead matter melts away to leave
the purified remains; a naked spirit rises
                                        and what's left
in memory takes on a new life of its own ...
                                        Flies, flies.
I'll open a window, dear. I don't know how they got in. I'm
not that far gone. Could you kill the little fuckers for me?
          That's favourite, if you will.

*

          I hate to bring up the subject of nakedness, dear.
So did the writers of the baroque. When they did they liked
to leave a nasty taste in your mouth –
                                                     only in the beyond do the blessed
enjoy incorruptible flesh & reciprocal pleasure
in complete purity. Venus stripped her admirers,
so their crime of lust lay unconcealed. Bacchus was naked
because drunks can't keep secrets
or throw away their possessions – here, take my hat, my suit
I wasn't really enjoying wearing it.
                                        They demonized the ancient gods
recommending pious mortification to the flock –
& statues of idols juxtaposed with dead men's bones
banished from memory to remember their ideas.
Does this remind you of anything ? No? No?
Wait till someone's run off with your clothes, another struts
around, more arrogant than ever, spouting the half-baked ideas
you threw off for the price of another packet of cigarettes
smoke vaporised in an atmosphere of denunciations
where counter-accusations carried no Weights.
                    I exaggerate?
                                      Try surviving on what I did. Yes. Yes.
All your complaints are disallowed by parasites you've harboured
preparing one last feast on your flesh
                                        as they wait for you to go down.
Tenured racists strut around the States
as world authorities on humanism.
(That bastard Adorno had me tethered to a pauper's desk
and wrote his name on my ideas, the ones he stole, corrupted –
          I was naive in those days –
Had to be to pay the rent on crumbs from Institutes.
                    I'm an old-fashioned sort.
Transience, eternity ... confront each other in me
the death-mask of my messianic youth, my middle-age, a fate
in the camps I was lucky to escape
                                        on the lost border of flight
when the little hunchback tampered with my revolver.
                                                            My writing
stopped right there.
                    Blood in the milk & milk in the ink
                                                           like
the Angel
of History (a dead man's trope, if ever there was one)
I had to watch in silence
(the price of my survival, so it seemed) while the whole murderous play
was played: singed, broken wings – not caught in a wind from paradise
but in the breath of hell, my mouth open in a silent scream
and struggling to close my eyes
                              my broken ribs
hanging through cooked flesh.
                    Rat armies gnawed there. Yes, I rambled
in broken shoes, a cardboard suitcase containing an old suit
a bone comb – a book I'd read a hundred times & one I'd written
          I became the nameless one
the sailor without papers
                              who signed up on THE DEATH SHIP
as a stoker in the black gang – trying to find some Poland, some dump
long gone; my Berlin childhood, my ... who? what? my life happened
not to have happened – not to me, not to anyone.
When they opened up the camps
                                        I watched it on the big screen
somewhere in Italy, believe it if you will –
                                        I hid there for two years
in the turfed cesspit
of a country cottage owned by the Ginzburg family.
                                        Socialistes de salon, but kind.
                       (That lot seemed to go on skiing right through it.)
Ben and La Clara
                      by the heels
                                    a Milano.
Old Ez in his cosy Pissant cage –
                              they should've strung up the old shit with them.
                          Or turned him on a spit. The Unwobbling Pivot.
Big tattooed eyes
                     shovelled onto trucks, into open pits
gone off moon sausage meat
                                   black bread, an ear of mildewed corn
between ten thousand of us.
                                 Do you hear me? Do you hear?
With your mildewed ear
                               of corn?

*

Ah! thanks for the chocolates! I'm feeling satanic this afternoon
ready to initiate you into more forbidden knowledge
though how you've never heard of it's a mystery – and a boon.
Life's a chocolate caramel.
                                   Perhaps you'd like to chew it for me.
I used to like those ones in the mauve foil, the way
they were always the same all the way through. To tell you the truth
I'm more for surfaces than kernels.

There, I knew you were a kind girl really.

          Ever heard of Josephine Baker?
          The Queen of the Jungle. I was in the front row.
                              Now,
of course, you can get it all on CD.
          Except the stuff I liked –
                                        The Ooompah Jazz for Whites.

*

                    Socrates said that knowledge of the good
makes good actions; and Aristotle built his Ethics round it,
happiness, good ways, politics. All bullshit, I'm afraid.
Truer of the knowledge of evil that shines forth in the night
of mournfulness with a subterranean phosphorescence
glimmering from the depths …
                              baroque polymathy
was knowledge of the black arts, the manichees, astrology.
Demons are so-called by their knowledge, said Augustine;
who should've known this, he went through the whole lot,
refuted them on his way to the cross.
                                        How could his friend so-and-so
whose diplomatic career carried him far along the whitened roads
be said to share the fate of Josie Nobody, the fifteenth
daughter of an Alexandrian slave, born on the same date?
          How could a fig scream when you plucked it?
Even if it was occupied by the Holy Spirit. It had no mouth.
The Holy Spirit had bigger fish to fry.
                                        That sort of rubbish –
the Midas touch that lends significance to everything
          and kills it.

*

                  I used to dabble in that sort of thing myself
for some reason it attracted me
being part of what was concealed, of non-official knowledge,
obliterated traces told you what they thought
the people, the people –
                                   I thought it highly possible, I wanted
to rescue whatever had failed and sunk
into the dank downworld
                                 the Sargasso sea where human sports
and wrecks are stored –
                                  there, all there in the German baroque:
a contrast of high and low, the former aspiring to aether
the latter struggling through – and say what you like about me
my dear, my dear child: I knew which side I took
I thought.
            I thought the way it all shaped up
this mundane fantastical I loved
was feminine, of the female body,
of the world of the Parisian street women,
what such a woman remembered or forgot
or passed on to her daughter.
                                   I see you shake your head.
You're quite right, my dear.
                              Quite right.
Stick to the light of reason. Light the fire, could you?

*

                                                            Could you look
inside the wardrobe there and pass me my dressing gown?
I swopped the Paris silk for the English wool.
                                                  It's so itchy here!
Got sick of the place at the finish – Sartre's pompous rhetoric,
          Paul Celan getting ready to join his mother
          in the Seine's black soup.
          Mutter, mutter. STAR
          (I told him to ignore that German shit:
          a tough circuit to crack
          his guilt-loop
          a Moebius strip –
          to forget is to betray, to remember
          exploitation, travesty.)
          I always thought
          he looked like a conjuror –
                              the too beautiful eyes, the smile,
the nothing up my sleeve
                    for me it had been almost everything
          that tiger's leap
          onto the gazelle of memory
          (not you, my dear!)
          to drag your formerly darting prey
          through the strait gate of the NOW.
                                                  I ran away again
when sixty-eight didn't pan out –
                    if I lifted up a paving stone
                                        I'd want to find more than sand.
Your hand.
So strong and brown, like Jeanne-Marie's.
                    You know, I like that child's poems
even more than I used to – are they so complex?
                                                          prefiguring everything?
or just the lights a shattered glass reflects
as an American
poet sang
             of the Sermon on the Mount?
Anyway, they count as much - or more
than any cynical flâneur. I liked Guy Debord
just couldn't see late capitalism
as he described it, balanced out in clauses of Hegelian rhetoric.
I'd have wanted to upset the flow (too much swept away by it)
          moi aussi
                    J'ai fumé de l'eucalyptus.
I'm still drinking the ragpickers' wine.

*

The purely material & absolutely spiritual
banner poles of the satanic realm. The guilt of the allegorical
observer, the so-called melancholic (me) is ...
… is that he betrays the world for knowledge.
Guilt.
      The House That Guilt Built.
                              The Tabernacle of Terror.

*

I wonder whatever interested me
                    about allegory. I expect it came from a desire
                    to obliterate my past, my dear,
                    to get a job in the German academy –
                    (much good it would have done me)
                    my dear, my dear –
          I know you hate it, that's why I do it, it's my revenge,
you see, on your more unlovable aspects which I doubt time will purify
or purge of their actual meanings. Ah well, it's all
for now, as well you know. Well, isn't it?
Mein liebe lip?
                    I'm no god, but I feel I should be,
fallen into an alien world, become evil, become a creature
sitting next to you with the deadness of a figure, an
abstraction from the pantheon
                              in a world of magical, conceptual beings
which is all we are to each other ...
                                        if I said
I was still up for it, you'd think me like Giotto's cupid –
an ancient demon of wantonness with bat's wings, claws.
And you'd be right, my dear. I'm twisted and skinny now
          still harping on
                    like an old saw.

*

Nobody knows the trouble I see. I'm tired, tired of light.
Nobody knows but Jesus. Christ.
          Redeemer of the stories of the small.
                    Nobody. Knows.

---