today the north american rehearsed his imminent december in earnest in churlish old berlin, slippered and robed in the sublet kitchen, shivering a prayer for the errant heat. sleet flicked the windows like mean-spirited fine print, fall's premonition of winter's predicament. Val brooded over

eggs (his humble use of the birds’ unlived-in truth), juice, homeopathic fad pills and Al Camus' American Journal, a moody notebook posthumously fobbed off as lit (edited by friends) (he’s sure they kept) (the screwing out of it), the whole long day ahead of him to fritter as his divorce-diminished bank account saw fit, the dishes tombed amnesia-clean in kitsch-infested cabinets to rest. the sky became

not luminous, nearly temperate, muddled as a puddle reflecting it, he dressed all gray to honor this and met the sun’s sharp glittering glass amidst rainsick grass at the Gendarmenmarkt’s benches. from which

he stared at scary Schiller and Schiller’s musey mass of wenches thick at the base of his plinth, each so cruelly Presley-lipped, Hera-hipped and toothsmashing stone- breasted big and vivid enough to lumber down suddenly shattering a path across the pavement stones like derailed trains to shoo the shitty pigeons and snap the tourists’ necks. he respects the quasi-autistic bluntness of the populace, for far more truth inheres to insult than to ‘Murrican-style blandishment. his third wife, from

Minneapolis, trafficked in that language-unravelling style of viral euphemism; for perma-smile Liz fat was full-figured, crippled: mobility reduced, and the optically challenged with their swinging sticks and elevated chins were never just blind. the Germans frankly speak of the “geistig zurückgeblieben” and he is sure the fatherland’s retarded don’t mind.