English and german poetry and prose. Free Entrance!

Sa., 19th of November, 8 p. m.

Kap Arkona, Granseer Str. 6, 10435 Berlin (Prenzlauer Berg, U8 Bornolmer Str.)

SlamChannel brings you the first-ever animated Slam poems, as performed by Slam's hottest voices.

This is a very cool site with plenty of poets.

Next Meeting of the Another Country Poetry Group Sunday, 22.05.2005 at 16.00 h

To all Advanced Poets: Buffet style food will be provided and besides some gossiping and socializing we will read and discuss old and new works. The overall aim of the group is to collect an anthology, loosely concerned with Berlin and what living in this city does to you. The anthology will also contain prose and all authors are welcome to contribute! So far we touched on these subjects: Airport Tempelhof Three Berlin Locations: Potsdamer Platz, Zoo, Tiergarten Berlin Nightlife Summer in the City

See you then – the Another Country Poets

The valley forge The village smith The smell the smoke The ringing sound of the hammer's stroke The red shine inside And deep inside the fire The white glow

It draws my attention My emotions Into a maelstrom Where I meet my desires Including the ones I don't like

Outside the horse is patient Inside me there's white noise The fire's heat makes my face glow What the noise means I just don't know

Too many colours Too many noises Too many thoughts Too many feelings Too much of everything

You aren't set back to zero innocence Through the white noise Lilies come in many colours And only one of them is white

And if your coat has too many colours You may end up with no colour at all Not even grey Let alone white

(July 2003, © Gerhard Charles Rump)

When I went into the video store and the girl said two fifty, I said: But I've already paid! Yes, for yesterday. But, do you mean that one has to return it on the same day? Yes, she said, and added that her colleague told me of course. He told me nothing. Yes, he told me of course. But you weren't even there! I had started to shout, but she knew her colleague, he told me of course. He told me nothing! And a speck of foam from my lips settled on her bust while the shelves reeled and my hand came out and with strange clarity I saw this great horn ramming her body through flat it came down on the counter with a magnificent slap. You needn't spit at me. It wasn't intentional!, I bellowed.

(May 2003, © Barnabas Thwaites)

I take my stubby, stupid hand and take my stolen pen, poise them over naked page, then put them down again... I have stood at a Katherine* cliff face, sought out the actual spot, felt at the very same place where once a black man stopped, smelt the weight of ages, boggled at it all: the same two feet - or two foot six - from the same space on the same wall where he had raised his gnarled hand and thought nothing of Time, where I could think of nothing else as I raised mine.

Elsewhere I stared at a stencilled hand and gaped at what it meant: he had seen himself as stone and sand, umbilically lent, trodden his ever-ever land before coin or cloth or clock and one day raised his nothing hand and stamped his simple nothingness to rock.

• a town in Australia

(1994, © Will Paine)

There was an old pope in Rome, inviting some guests to his home, with a Fisherman's aid in a corner he played to create better humans of loam.

(Feb. 2003, © Sylvie)

As the barrow stone in the stunted woods warms, smooths, in the spread and steam of horses blood the winds insist your choice knife gripped, riding a sprinting breath you turn to ask Claudia but she's wrapped in the sun tethered halfway to the sky <

As bubbles lifted from the buzz of conversation by summer evening earth's exhale we inform the curious clouds where we reform, take shapes, play snowballs with the crystals play mirrors with the stars and turn to ask Claudia but she just nods up from her wooden Hexenhaus to castles in the air <

At the point where the poppy gathers the sun by the ashes of hope by the bloom of the martyr's fire breath sucked to choke muscles aching to flame the songs of the sparks infuse your head in the heat of the moment you turn to ask Claudia but all her desert eyes reveal are steel glimmers in the smoke <

The foam passing of the crest slide to the wallow and through past visitors, past surface dancers, past runners, hunters, flatland dwellers, past grasp of wind and moon down in the still you turn to ask Claudia but she just cradles you and rocks laughing with the rhythms of the deep <

(Sep. 2002, © Alan M. Raphaeline)

A strange form this, not rhyme yet poetic, casually attracts attention: I render words and play with form and content on some most potent, personalised themes soon finding that initial letters too take over how the texts will come over - in stumbling crudeness / metre iambic, caught up in A to Z and Z to A.

(Aug. 2002, by Kai & Alan)

I can cook, But not for the next forty years. I want to see mammoth thighbones On plates instead of chicken giblets, So I can conk him, K.O. Xena style.

I can iron, But holes will appear in his sleeves If he doesn't lift hot metal To brand his arse with: 'I can do it; it doesn't take balls.' I love to hoover, But at times I wish the damn thing was bigger, Big enough to fit a beer belly and scrambled eggs.

I love to make love, But I'm not the missionary visionary anymore. I want to lie on red satin sheets with silver, Thin chains woven through the shine, And I want loads and loads of French black, Lacy bras with holes at the peaks, So my nipples can see what I'm doing for a change.

'Roll over Meat Head', I'm coming, Here's your Indian take-away, Hot and spicy, Hot to sizzle the beer in your guts, 'Get on down' with the onion rings, 'Get your freak on.' 'Make some noise, ooh ah.'

I'm out of here on a five-day rail trip, Dressed combat style; inside I'm slinky, A sack full of stringy lace is slung Over my love rocking hips. I can feel the bumps from Wonder Poking out like ostrich eggs, ooh, It feels good to sit on the climax of things.

The next best thing to 'fuck-you' Are ham sandwiches and slices of hard, Hard currant cake where you can find The occasional cherry. Pop.

(June 2002, © Maroula Blades)

There was something about you and your capitulation, something déjà vu, as if you'd had it hinted long before you suspected that you'd had it and then finally knew. I won't dwell on the last phase when I studied your mask at my leisure after I'd walked before you into my maze and then invited you to enter. And I had to leave you. I felt no pleasure in severing you from a false placenta, and I won't dwell on the ugly loneliness of your struggle outwards to your fate at the centre.

No, there was something about you and your consolation when I placed my rook where you'd hoped I'd put it, about the way you cradled my taken piece that takes me back to the way you took it. I was happy for you in your brief happiness as you misinterpreted my exhalation. You had all the info and all the evidence and about an hour to go until my Explanation

You should live more, make mistakes, love, build, travel, and not assume that your gratification cannot but mean your opponent's grief. If you'd studied me, read my motives, come on down to my nether level, then what you'd taken for my resignation you would have recognized as my relief.

No, there's something about your plans and your pincer movements, the way your horses strut and your monarchs preen, the way you prefer a bloody battlefield to the calm of my village green, something, too, about your struggle and the rubble that it leaves, about your squanderings and wanderings and the wastefulness they weave, something about your body and the way its language proves that from your first pawn it's only ever going to be checkmate in approximately 57 moves.

(Apr. 2002, © Will Paine)

1 is none 2 for you 3 means be 4 neither nor 5 grow and strive 6 learn the tricks 7 go to heaven 8 feel the weight 9 you're in line 10,11,12 do you think you found yourself? 13 to 19 you're way too keen 20 you're empty.

(Apr. 2002, © amanda sabine strauch)

I dare these plains. I shall not balk.

I stare ahead.

I try to talk

to Rolf, my partner in a dare to take the train to Jo'burg Main, to brave such "muggers", beat the pain

heard in mom's voice.

She's right. She's wrong.

She doesn't think,

she just says: "Don't!"

But then we're there, the only whites in - press and push! - commuting blacks. That one man, joking, looking back:

Still tells the joke...

He looks at us.

He switches tongues.

He humours us!

I'm glad I came, I'll tell my mom. But thinking then: Will I return?

(Mar. 2002, © K. Bosse)

I'm a 6-foot, flat-footed grizzly, Ma name's Earth, I'm rich like the four seasons. Is it my black shades that bother you? Thick shades, which protect a sensitive soul. I'm tame, tame as you can get in a zoo, But I don't eat from hands; I eat roots. You're afraid of me, shouldn't I be afraid of you? For history books don't tell the whole story. What about the young ones you ravaged, The so-called savage that could take pain Turn it into a playful fantasy game. Your men called it a 'dubious flirtation'. One two buckle my shoe, sister run, run, run, Iron marks on her bruised ankle-bones, Bellyaching hate lashed at her back. Tarnished by time, shovels emboss stories,

Remains of the skin-war lie in the Deep South. We were born between tall poplar trees, Where blacks scratched, bled, wept, and lost skins to pain. Sometimes we were hung in a tarred feathered drift. That's why I'd rather be a grub than a king, So I can inch beneath the scene of things, Nibble the core, scatter pips, for I have issues, Spanking issues concerning black and pink.

Why are you eyeing-up ma melanin? Would you like a spot to rub off on you? Original sun lotion, ma love potion That shimmers in the sun like a glazed cherry. Hate's smoke rises, burnt offerings moan, I climb vines on the back of consciousness, Exercising blackness. I wear the 'dumb dumb' mask, To uncover the 'Nature of Prejudice'.

Why are you still staring at me, white woman? Is it the strength in ma paws that bother you? I'm the old phantom, who's been around for centuries, Boo, why do you wonder if I might attack? Would you like to see me in your menagerie? To stroke my sensations when Caucasians are gone? Lady, look to the zenith and see the best of me, Standing proud outlined with studded diamonds.

(Mar. 2002, © Maroula Blades)

So you twist and you turn as you try to sleep, and what stops you is some kind of fuzz; through a milling drone, an insistent tone, pitched deeper than the insects buzz. While you wrestle with your bed, it careens round your head like a siren - cum - warning sign, and you try to make out what it's all about

• are there words in that groaning whine ? But when you could kill ... it falls suddenly still ... Just the echoes of the crowds at the night races from far beneath the hill. In the morning you wake to the usual ache and the vague awareness there - by the cold breakfast plate, the five minutes late, by the way they don`t seem to care: by the chill in the train, by your slow running brain, by the flat of your greetings fall: by connections missed, and the way the talk shifts, by the nonsense you pass on the wall, by that unspoken no, - you half realise you know, it's just you never quite got to the night races, never knew how to go.

By the end of the day, your cares dont fold away with the neatness the others attain: and in the leaving race theres hardly a trace of the smile you sought to maintain. So you go for a drink and you try to think why that place isn`t quite where you fit; then it's home you go to exchange your woe and in front of the box you sit; watching pictures on the screen of the breaks between the actual meetings of the night races, the periphery of the scene.

And if you should start to wish for a part of the glamour, the wit, and the cred, of the people who know the right knowledge to show with each move of each aquiline head; of that place where your own simple style could be shown, to contrast the laboured device, of the changelings, whose airs, make a mock of your cares, in opinions they`ll never wear twice. Still it's no big surprise when you fail to rise, and search the streets for the night races and penetrate their disguise.

In some dream you may know of the emerald glow, of the scarabs on their crystal track; of the fireflies´ show, while the cordials flow, and the betting goes on at the back; of the music whose strains sing surcease to your pains, of the dancers whose every delight is to whirl away for a year and a day, in the space of a single night. But when the girl at the door turns and asks you for ... it's just ... you never got a card for the night races and you never remember more.

So you go through the reels of the clean machines wheels, and you work on its pads, and you work on its rails, and you usually sleep, and you usually wake, and you never know if it fails. You travel worlds apart, and you travel to your heart, but you never travel that far: and you generally know which way to go, and you more or less know what you are. And you fear it might fall if you heed the call - never knowing that it's only the dreams of the night races who ever hear it at all.

(Nov. 2001, © Alan M. Raphaeline)