old von bredow waited ‘til his widow came in with legumes, greens steaming on age-old silver plates saying to their young amanuensis at the table i see they again in your country prepare to decide upon king of the planet. as a man he had a thing for inciting the blush of the bloody au lait suffusing her face to its roots in that t-shirt’s ruby décolleté; as a german he had a point to make. everyone on earth of a certain age not non compos should be in on this vote, don’t you think? the widow winked, passing plantains, though clear as a fake tear von bredow maintained an expression expecting an answer. by chance a natural disaster developed as they ate, god’s corpsecold windfeet kicking the city with hatred. rattled windows, the chandelier shaking lent drama to the socratic conversation. handfuls of dead, hair streaming, were lifted up despite their sudden waterweight by the fists of the weather in spate as the american stared in nearly sexual inanition at her Goethe-old, butter-drenched plate

.

berlin is best for breaking up; chums with bored disgust aver they never liked lamented her: his arrogance; the not so half to-die-for-ness that he or she with all love’s dumb encouragement of self perceived. they whom fortune in smiling scant months upon you reeved through burning shrouds of reflected happiness flock once more in droves to glooms reborn thick as spinsters to the perfume of a miscarriage

.

the grey walls of the hinterhof stained with the previous century’s rain under the drained eye of february’s glaucous light, so like an asylum: the courtyard’s box of underinterpenetrated lives in this vast stone machine of flatblock, drinking a river each day, flushing rich waste the other way, sempiternal, thick- walled, cough-muffling, papered in little deaths, breaths, sweats, farts, aerosolized desiderata smelling of cooked cabbage from the furtive biomass of neighbors he has never once heard laughing or singing. dante rings an old friend, dresses to meet him on a corner of the ku’damm he hasn’t seen in years. everything, he thinks, disappears. he never knew what or why his mother meant in all her litanies of vague complaint, staring over his milkblonde head as she ironed-on patches or stirred fatty ersatzes into cheap-n-cheerful soups or wiped the kitchen window of their lukewarm semidetached in Hounslow with never-read newspapers existing only to chronicle America’s rough usage of the world, but now he grasps her point was only ever to make herself heard if solely by him, dante, her son, at seven, his reason to exist as though by invitation. she seemed to inhabit a fenced sanitarium at the gate of which they could meet but never embrace. mother, what are you so sad about? so crushed beneath? so helpless at never-winning? her newspaper-lined casket still holds the cold broach of her engima-grinning. the friend,

a standard thirty minutes late mimes apologies from across the street, sackladen shoppers watching the Gay Ausländers meet with bemused irritation, mocked to every last light of their city’s radiance

.

getting sick in berlin its own black romance like love in paris a fling strangers too close on the metro fluids exchanged the essence of nameless kissing that rheumy-eyed grandfather with his pre-Euro Aldi bag his snotrag hard as a fossil may as well have had his tongue in your mouth with a persistent cough he is part of you even poetry is humbled by the couple you have become in fever’s capacity for regret

.

the paper explains how the wolves are driven from natural environs by dins and poison of compulsion’s development, the bipedals’ greedful encroach at epochgreen level of forest floor to force growling dreambrothers to bound from the brush, dogshaking oddments, needle and leaf, from toothcolored coats, noses to the road, after time long (as the cooling of new diamonds) in exile. a floss-haired child of Siemens’ managerial class reports being sniffed by creatures too cool to be dogs, too rank to be phantasms, in their country garden, l’heure bleue, late june, case two: retired insomniac circumnavigating a private lake on a bike costing twice what equivalent Romanians take home in a year was paced for what seemed like hours by loping blurs so rich in odor he fainted, waking shoeless, bent-biked in gentian.

the North American grins a glance over his paper at a waif on the long seat facing, gulpsniffing tears, thumbs mothwingwhite beating handy’s stampsized keypad of vapid lights, we fears it’s a bad breakup with her Abelard via texting. beside her to the right a woman Val recognizes, her legs entwined with a man’s who cannot be quite twin, but co-lingual cousin, flicking her lips with slim tongue in macho-feminist grace like young South Americans, black manes fused above marvelously lupine brows, then oilspilled down her shoulders, breasts, jeanlegs folded over the seat and his bold hands separating her thighs in futile’s best gesture. hidden by his paper and coat, the old jester, made stiff as a goat by the rutting display, contemplates taking what they would not freely give, this sin of pre-human

dimensions

.

the wallet is warm, ruddybrown, fleshily complex as an arrant organ or suave soft coprolite, baklava of the middlemanager’s luther-ordered life, clean as bleak boredom yet implicit sins are packed wherein a condom abides in a compartment beside five photos of lost kids, the cats, old boat, fat wife, a crescent worn through on the royalblue foil wrapper like islam’s caliper moon plus three hundred eighty nine euros the first two of which go to the purchase of a BZ screaming “wolf sighted on the outskirts of Berlin” plus a Ritter Sport savouring richly of sin he’ll eat on the Underground while reading it. underlit

as though by klieg light by welders he descends, chewing, the operaset of the stairsteps at the Friedrichstrasse stop to accomplished Bach on a Slavbusker’s pearl-mullioned accordion, the brown cascading fingers on toccataworn keys the North American tips with a fifty at which gypsy kicks free of stool, stands to switch to a pumping Lohengrin, the platform whelmed black in overcoats, sorrel furs, hell-blue veins, red chins, gold helms of Wagnerian hair raked by the tunneling winds

.

with his back to the window of the orderly flat overlooking Schiller’s golem at Gendarmenmarkt he writes his blog, the content of which is all his sins, from the unconscious nosepicking he once glanced to catch reflected in the u-bahn’s black glass to pulling a long one off
on the pic his memory took home of that cigsucking schoolgirl who brushed his arm on his way out of a news agent, Spiegel rolled tight in its burberry crook, her platinum fringe cinched to his fist on his belly in the daydream later like a bobbing light. regret floods in (sin's twin) as the pleasure ebbs, a grim shade shaking its head over the shock of the copious, the downright hale in a drib’s stead, the heady wipe-up job, all of it gone into the blog. Confessions of a Pedant in the Autumn of his Life draws a respectable village of hits every night, an audience delighting in foibles so nobly limned as to render, eg, his borgia fart at a christening (way back when) almost charming. logging off,

it’s out into the warm winter’s low-ceilinged bunker of sundown, hotel lobbies and monocustomered coffee shops as rundown blocks of yellow in the purpled armature of the pauline disbursion of converted light, the North American pursuant of darkling maps of homelylessness, his curiosity’s pickily feline lonelinesslessness on Jaegerstrasse fraught with clotting silhouettes, circumspect outbursts of halfchatter and horny mirth, a Geschaeftsmanner invasion from Duesseldorf platooning through, the brotherly violence of so many at march in a beerblind line against the baroque blue horizon. he sees one drop

a wallet like the pigeons’ kingsized tip; can’t wait

to write the post on spending it

.

(in honor of the end of an era)

you are a berlin at the center of which is a Bezirk in the heart of which is a cafe in the smoke of which rave the dogs and babies old beyond the saturated stains of all their days, the tepid milch kaffees and kretek-punctuated ennui-activated litany of welfare-subsidized complaints

you are a berlin of dogs and babies both, the merde-smirched Pony Hof, imaginary Schlosses atop ten landfill-bulges looming o’er this ganja-clouded yankee-haunted WG-rich terrain.

i love your streets, their birdshit dog-do juicyfruits, their smog-consuming, fog-excreting piss-fed trees; the orgy of the prospect of the easty beastie boulevards these trees line up in nude platoons like flashers bent and twisted in arthritic throes of esoteric agony. i love

your frank municipality; its endless wave of pidgin English ironies; the sonnet-pretty übermenschy whores of June the 17th, too late for Bloom, too blonde and cool, too cheap to prove a mystery:

they are berlin and we ride black with Ecstasy

.

-Cada uno lleva su cruz-

skinning the rabbit, ted inverts the inverted glove until the long hand of muscle falls from its grip of loose blood, clutching the grin of this morning’s funniest execution. slain by the sling ted’d made of malena’s old hose, the bunny tumbled with its fate-stone thrown clear through dark bush to headlighted street, ted waving traffic to a halt to retrieve it
by deafwarm ears to malena and dante’s cheering as for a goal. the dawn dome of planetarium rose to a glow by sun’s flush hole as they bore the corpse like some world-leader with eyes struck open home.

ted knifes the belly, scoops its coils and jellies in a system to the sink, the other two toasting long life/short death as ted decouples the head’s last permanent link. dante jumps

(he will always claim) (the thing) (blinked)

the candled air of the whole long flat rubs the windows with its sweat: ginger, clove and cardamon escaping the pot towards the black rhyme of ted and malena’s hair ted’s elbows on the table and dante’s perplexing stare in the ruby swirl of wine malena’s got she tells of the trouble with men and dante says we know a willing lesbian she shakes her head: i need something i can sink these teeth into (with a wink) hefting her breasts in the low-cut dress she jokes what about these? don’t you ever miss them on a winter’s night? dante frowns i swear i even eschewed huge dugs as a whelp i would not suck at mother’s milk and father’s mams were black with glossy felt, he giggles at ted who growls: not while i’m eating malena says Cocho kept peacocks when i was thirteen they would not breed, which made them twice precious, bleating in the courtyard even earlier than those ugly cocks, casting spectacular shadows like beardsley engravings on the opaline gravel around the villa, occasional prey to a fox our indian shot presenting it to mother who wore it to the opera like a (draining her wineglass) (with seductive indolence) queen

driven by the spirit of the rabbit or by the devil possessed, ted proposes a contest: whoever kisses best will follow ted to bed whilst the other does dishes. dante hisses you bitches and kisses malena on the mouth, vomitting chilean flags and passing out

.

of all the christmasses dante has seen and survived, this, perhaps, will matter better than the rest, the year he watched It’s a Wonder Life without sneering or crying, ted’s face in his lap, both still laughing over the fact ted had backed into the bedroom to the tune of bing singing, his head in one red ribbon wrapped, tacky card affixed to his hard-waxed chest, best promise of a new year’s happiness, whether or not the promise can possibly last.

he sees castouts on the snowbald, whorecold street: red-eyed ingenues, feud-ruined uncle-drunks and thinner-made, festivityless leather-blacks for whom republicans pay taxes, those shell-boned refugees, dressed for sheep, each at his own indicative velocity, though dante’s just out for a little blue air while ted makes dinner autistically. the street’s aglimmer-black horn in the twilight’s velvet case, straight and weighted tight to the evening’s queer lydian ache, the antediluvian tune of cold comfort, warm harm. dante sees

the seal-haired waitress from their favorite café, singsongs the obvious greeting and she breaks like an egg on his arm.

he invites her to the feast and ted finds the poor girl charming

.

the desert god comes in borrowed armour of sword-hard ice, the sky’s corpsetower of nine billion spirits burned crytal-water white, His flesh-cutting sirocco of sleet turns giant wheels to the highstreets of candle-lit Europe, grinding souls like miniscule diamonds for xmas stalls while the hawk-faced, kohl-eyed deity of djins sings madrigals

O superbest dissembler! O mask on a mask in a veil on a doll vast beyond any sane maths yet conceivable thine sunsmashing fist of rain-pregnant adamantine, thine pavement-cracking snowfoot, thine regenerative organ: seven miles of hard black wind on these bare lindens, mere hairs under thine godweight bent

.

Malena the foreign girl rents from the woman who rents from the man who owns the bathless flat at zionskirchplatz. notification by postcard came with the fact that a week before xmas, the man’s son, cramming informatik at tuebingen, will come to stay until the day after day one of next year. with 72 hours left to find a new bed she suffers giddy-but-desperate despair but makes herself up, does her highgloss hair, wears her very best amongst macintoshes at sankt oberholz in hopes of meeting a decent English-speaking student. but they’re just impudent

brats, not men, the effeminate offspring of America’s tourist classes, chatty-immature and porno-crass, unearned smirks illuminated by flashy nonsense from week-old screens, she thinks you’d never even survive a week of pinochet. Malena pays three milchkaffees and leaves to walk her bad dream along the Spree trailing smoke from the café. she makes her way

through the superfluous xmas markt behind the obligatory museum towards friedrichstrasse, from there to hallesches tor in kreuzberg where joke santas hang from windows like hung partisans and startled pigeons mount heaven like notes torn from throats of
muezzin

.

the down-angled pews of the u-bahn packed as a requiem mass for the xmas rush, black in its cladding the congregational hush plus invisible choirs of grinding rails and hacking coughs. every station admits more scowly hum to the crowd’s dark optical push. yon mendicant bitch, thin as the cold air itself, guilting face a hatchet chopping chips of loose conscience for small pelf, fronttoothlessly blocking the aisle while nearby noses sting, stalks off the next stop in her wealthless huff, mad as the newly deaf’s doorbell ringing.

the foreign girl follows the beggar up hauptstrasse through bruise-blue veils of daemmerung, red sale signs and christ-lights in low-slung flurries over overcoated, headscarved foot- traffic and then headlit rivers of cars. the beggar hurries flight-catching-fast in nothing but ashram pants, hugging that titless t-shirt with all but embraceless arms, nearly funny. later

Malena will wake, chided by dreams of the running

.

old von bredow and his widow in apparent years sufficient but too meticulous in their pleasures to ever be grandparents, somber-slim and softly rich as becketts, are again in the market for a girl to cook, polish, launder, drive, pose for his sketches and comply without kvetching with the importunities enticed by ripening youth. evidence of a recent bloodtest, a signed declaration of boyfriendlessness, sweet breath and high breasts to be presented in that order at the interview. the list of alumnae tallies a

fine-arts-in-berlin who’s who: the tooth-sculptress, the pain artist’s muse, the longterm girlfriend of two married antiquities dealers and the wife of a brewery-inheriting collector of restoration erections, plus the headmistress of a faux-french trompe l’oeil atelier of ill-repute. all have done well for art students. the first in the series, the

widow herself in 1962, 18 to von Bredow’s 30: blackplumed, supple, striking as a horsehair whip (father a) (cinematographer at Łódź) (one of the chosen) (few aryans slain by a) (jew in that era in a) (duel over a pupil’s) (paramour) she’d mix von b’s patented lacquers, gesso/sand/re-gesso/re-sand his grander canvasses; photograph, crate-up, ship-out each piece of his gigantic oneiric maps from the studio overlooking the Lietzensee and its petit bourgeois paths. later she even came to finish certain works and worse paint others ab ovo usque ad mala whilst the maestro napped. her man can live for what feels like years

without urges regarding the pinkerparts of the people. it’s the widow herself, blackwings turned to pearly bob, cupped breasts white as dresden pots in timebrowned hands who relishes the entering of that room kept sternly lockless, its unblocked view of three steeples, not even knocking. an applicant/supplicant buzzes

breathless down at front, the widow sips her salted coffee, walks the atrium with numbered steps, stops to stoop to pocket a foilship of gumwrap off the cloud-reflecting koi pond feeling

deathless

.

with love it’s the irrational that means the most, feelings we can explain aren’t worth the heart’s extortionate costs, feelings which confuse, shame, addict, dement, explode or transform the soul with magnificent disregard for the results are most real. they are cold-welded to the species, beyond control, the inherited gene jewelry from elephant-killing poets paleontologists call old. dante is strong in his passion’s clarity but weak in its need. his dip in the infinite rips his emotions’ skin
bleeding. masochistic distraction or fundamental need? but that’s what love is, dante thinks:

a regimen of poetic beatings we clamour like the Mecca-mad to meet until repletion. a tedsent postcard comes

from the Aegean sea: a gnomic joke on wellhung Cretans

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.

1. The Customer (middle-aged, North American, reasonably well off, lost):

berliners are terrible tippers, no? today she bore her ten-thousandth tray of beer and coffee, still they settled the bill awfully precisely. straight-spined as ever, when her studies finish and home reclaims her i'm sure it is she who will be served. but where is home? some

equatorial city, packed traffic like a split gut alight with hot necklaces? i imagine the weight of the green floods mountain's dark body, cocoa-leaves consuming the breakfast of the earth. and the erogenous smoke. and the scent of the indigene for hire. did her childhood mingle with

music in festival streets where every third face greeted was a christ and the mud so fat it tingled with that secret vitamin the too-rich spice of ideological blood? was she touched, or buoyed as in a flood

at market by fingertips black as beans, jostled by the magistrate's mocha elbow in line to purchase manioc, molasses, shell-fish or plantain? i'm certain she wore white dresses for sundays, shining against the novelistic sky like an offering. is there any truth in my imagination? conversation would enlighten, but as yet i only have courage to

overtip

2. The Waitress (young, “foreign”, sure of herself):

how can i bear this cold country, the lunar stares they bare to curiosities? i, the sapid black of heliologic scarring, most of all suffer breathing the dark air of their language. did i immigrate to apply the mercy of my questionable beauty to the aesthetic wound of this city? or was i driven by premonitions of hunger or political violence or just escaping the luxurious green cancer of equatoriality; the too-real sun; the chaos of the market; the life-threatening excellence of nature's stupidity? (even the graves) (stay obscene with) (fertility). perhaps after all i came to improve myself through sacrifice, denied even the occasional relief of merely belonging. you, too, know

the weird lure of berlin, her native race of Beamtendeutschemenschen, hungering for (yet set against) everything in us un-german

3. A moment of Loudness (for Mailer):

.

the recurring thing, sometimes a dream, shows So Cal’s fruits like fairy lights ted’s dreambody spools low over, and platoons of plucking mexicans planted in fudge-rich irrigated earth like fragile gold forms, in molds, like complex football-field-sized pendants, water stolen from the north and sold above worth to the children of the water’s thieves as juice. these

dreams increase as years here reproduce to root-split beds of German stone, his headlong dreambody nostalgia-blown through

mooncanyons overgrown with coyotes the color of playwright’s beard and carpeted in dawn’s blue loam, torched brush and shrivelled riverbed trojanfish amidst wetback-bones blonde headphoned paralegals learning mexican carefully hike over: la rabia, el deseo, el miedo, el desamparo.

born in ’68, adopted a year later and raised on the old pacific highway road in a stucco bungalow a young joni mitchell once considered buying on the cusp of fame, ted came to view all pool-blue skies, heaven weather and mel tormé records with an orphan’s lupine eye, growing into his resentments with a muscly black-haired thrust his legal mother cried out for years in the pain she’d thought to elude through adoption: la rabia, el deseo, el miedo, el desamparo.

even asleep with dante in bed ted considers his options, the recurring thing will continue without him:

la rabia, el deseo, el miedo, el desamparo.

every year this time old von bredow goes, already twig-thin and shaves his head, dresses in striped pyjamas shambling behind the trickles of kids tricker treating the streets behind Kaiserdamm but only intellectuals ever giggle or yell to go to hell

admitting we have somehow outgrown god and remembering that odd equation (god is love) isn’t it love’s novembering time now to go? honestly what does love when it’s being done do? all those midnights at home in unbroken-in shoes! so much heat and no light and even the heat is far less red than blue, rhetorical, for

Lust, not love, calls forth that fool Euphoria, her several-second duty of nil’s oracle, the propulsive stutter of goo’s stuck ventricle. von bredow does his widow and knows it’s true: what does who loves when doing it do?

anyone with fists can say Hate’s use: that ten-times blacker coal fuels rococo locomotives toward smoke-stacked suburbs of All Souls (and) (its lucrative piles of) (teeth and shoes). Hate is really something, it gets things done, it’s not obtuse. Fear adheres to everything; Sadness is as Gladness was; Hope the opiate of the masses and Compassion a simple sop to, or giving up of, callow youth. but love?

admitting we have outgrown god and remembering that odd equation (god is love) he thinks it’s time to punish the two for being so aloof; for both words mean their opposites the minute after screwing

(the widow complains strange) (gummi bears are) (harder for chewing)

dante and ted hire bikes, buy cheap wop wine, pedal hard for
Wannsee through miles of kilometers sleeked by fog’s drugged sneeze of light, slimey-soft, a convoluted cloth wiping thoughts on their bright brown, dark blue eyeglassed eyes; thoughts soon lost to the night traffic of Friday: time and its tired crisis, the thirty-niners and their out-sourced inner lives. they glide on lamplit awe around the unwrinkled face of the lake, joke and brake at a moon-smashed copse, splurge in turns over shivers of warmth-raped gentian gasping oh my god.

after which they re-embark, wobbling on. they see

battery-lit foxes rear up along the tarmac like hung partisans; see swallows sharp as shattered gramophone platters heaved over the treetops in a feat of strength. they park

where the bike path rises to a sudden rail crossing and need the drink.

(dante for his shyness and ted) (to think)