blonde is the new black, old the new young, dumb the new hip, homicidal the new horny, forever the new never and berlin the latest “berlin”, our sidewalks hosed of all those merdes, our surly shopgirl refitted with a shit-eating grin, her second loss of innocence, her mons on the clock, knotted hair uncoiled, tits by the kilo waxed, boiled, packaged for puritans. Ohioized and personality-free and catnip to adipose tourists. her smile is just

the skull revealed, though only old berliners know this.

2

give me your trustfunded poor! your goggling tourgroups yearning for things to say they’ve seen! the wrenching retchers of your mini bar! send your celebrities with room-temp IQs to me!

it feels like a punishment he long ago adjusted to, if he does not cook there won’t be food, and it’s never even good, or not in terms that real cooks use, though in a way it’s a sign of hopefulness he never cared to master this, for the men he knows who cook so well are invariably betterhalfless, they learn by force the indelible diagonal of sleep across that bachelor bed and never change but grind away at raincolored sheets and underwear making relic filaments instead. they play

at cards in clouds and suckle hard cigars in luciferous bars called things like Hairy’s Pear, or The Bear, trading vagina jokes for pokertips with dante-aged blokes (with their) (halos of smoke and) (intestate dread over) (eye-bald) (heads)

dante exhales the sound of the wine he follows on to ted

after they spoke he walked to carry his thoughts through a fog-numb berlin, september’s kill of dirt-gold leaves, lamp-lit breath and double seraphim (the couples out) (in matching coats) (to windowshop in tones as hushed) (as awed librarians)

he sought the cold to clarify his longing for such comforts as her tantalizing call half-promised: a stove-warmed kitchen and the cook in it, the postprandial dinner fadged in minutes; and imagine the phone between her shoulder and her Rossetti chin, no man to lift a spoon to then, no man to press her back into, no face-lost man in her book of kursiv hair, nor judge of the taste of her curry paste with his tongue-tip, lips, blessing kiss, breathless air

this walk in the cold was the closest he got to being there

what is the heart? a drum explaining Life to the body, or the red-walled bedroom of a lonely dream? let’s say it’s a newborn we take everywhere with us, a baby we can’t bear to leave, kicking as we carry it from point to point unseen like parents of a changeling or a vestigial teen. is His

as beautiful to Hers as Hers was to the god She did not care to keep?

in winter the foreign girl sings with her cocoa voice as she pedals her bike uphill, some think she’s puerto rican, a chica mami, untamed, some berliners claim she came from israel, or fancifully others suggest her family fled in well-bred exile from old red money, or black brazil

boys walking home from school who have committed to memory her body smashing the wrinkled mirror of the heated pool, who have committed to memory the superbity of green her eyes enjewel, or the beach-burned gold of her shoulder blades at the Strandbar at Monbijou’s gates, pause talkless as she crests the sundown hill shifting gears, each alone in reverie about that foreign girl turning 34 next year

there’s a dead sparrow on the brick walk in the garden, breeze-ruffled feathers on its thumb-sized chest suggest flight though its blood is a page-thick shadow on the brick she kneels on, probing with a twig. it’s gone

south for forever’s winter. the foreign girl’s lover calls her to dinner, she uses her fork to poke the chicken’s liver

future cities as gift shops in the earth’s museum. future kids with sky to play with kinda boredly and mutagens to dabble in. future sex like polio eradicated: no his’ or hers’ just thems’. i see

those long thin silver twilights, perforated like player-piano rolls, performing the weather. yes i see golden characters with violet tongues licking themselves with vile aplomb like cats. cats i see on commemorative coins. coins i see in teflon-lined sarcophagi. brazil will be miles of amusant bonsai forests itching with speck-like game and stars in trillion-tonned lots by deed and obscured by a Moon in flames. Lo

i see books of the ancients in Sino-African translations inscribed on long blond strands of hair: The Collected Works of Pearl S. Buck in a hooker’s wig those golden cats shall wear. Yea

I see berlin in this vision though we’re no longer there