I cannot stop my mind from getting entangled in strings of words and world. I used to share the resulting lumps of text with other anonymously via my Twitter account, but due to the demise of the platform I had come to know and love since 2008, I have not only moved to Mastodon, but also started collecting my sketches and poem on my own website. Surprisingly many somehow wanted to be written in English. To help those of my friends who struggle with German jump more easily between the English texts, I am placing them here on a separate page (as well as incorporating them in the general collection).
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I patch my dispatches
with batches of lore;
if one of them hatches,
I just let it soar.
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I'm iamb, delicately dancing on the tightrope of each line:
my feet gently advancing, balancing the metric thread of time.
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These hours are ours.
This minute is mine.
A moments that towers.
Time to employ
life to assign
to quiet
to joy.
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Prose is quite often just a pose
neatly wrapped and tucked around the woes
of the visible surface outside, as opposed
to the poetry hidden inside.
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Yesterday, so long ago, @whatisaletter asked what writing feels like. This was my reply. Still feels true, even after an oddly lonely day that wrapped sunlight around me and sent January bees.
I tidy up some crumbs of world.
I nudge the heavens into place.
I tie each moment to its spark,
I hoist the sails of time and space,
I tickle stars into the dark,
transform my soul and words to glue
that trickles through each gap and tear,
that binds the world and makes it true.
So. Here I am. Why should I fear?
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Tingle, tingle, little mind,
how I wonder what you’ll find.
Far through words and books you soar,
gluey with ideas galore,
tingle, tingle …
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I will not flood your feed with retweets.
I won't comment on every crumb of news.
Instead of being influential
I'm juggling languages and views.
I wonder and I write about my wonder
in tiny sketches of reality.
I draw with words, not GIFs or JPEGs –
so naturally you won't follow me.
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On oceans of ink
I set sail
for word worlds splashing
their unjotted swell
all over my hands.
Into my labyrinths I force them
into the glyphs
cut into my fingertips.
They hold and carry
my ship my shuttle
across the abyss.
They bend
the dark surge
into letters and into adventures.
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Rhymes are mere twirls of sound that twist two lines together
and twine a thread of thoughts into a stubborn cord.
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"More time, more time!,"
you cry and sigh,
"more time to play and write and rhyme!"
But there’s no need to beg and pray:
Time streams towards you anyway.
A flood of moments. Day by day.
All you must do is to assign
this gushing fountain wisely. Shove
it towards folk and things you love.
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I care
for my share
of the whereverywhere.
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— Back to the top of this page —
Reading tempts the stinkbugs
to squeeze through the blinds
rumble through the dark room like approaching thunderstorms
and squat on the story
shining from the book in my lap.
So I take measures, a deep breath and a handful of light
to hide in the depths of my duvet.
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Books bubbling from boxes,
some reddish like foxes,
some green like bamboo:
all cornered for you.
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Between two mountain ranges of books
that have sprouted along my hallway
runs the crevasse of a mighty rift valley,
a canyon, deep and full of woes
of horrid dangers for bare toes
when I fumble through its crumbling surfaces
to the bathroom or kitchen during the night
without turning on the light
for adventure purposes.
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I'll make my bed
in a book tonight.
Pages my pillow,
pages my cover,
words my delight.
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— Back to the top of this page —
Always is a fountain of paths
a bubbling bundle of threads that gush
out of any here-now place
far out into the vibrant space
of time. A flood of ways to explore. A flush that washes from shore to shore
carrying you as well as me
weaving the tightropes of time that we walk
into a spatial reality.
(It just struck me how "always” isn’t a temporal adverb at all, it is space disguised as time or rather time translated into space, all ways. This is a first weak attempt at turning this into a poem.)
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The hearing, the thereing,
the seaing, the faring,
the holding out throughout the day
means that I'm a bit unokay.
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All that effing iffing:
if only, if only …
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Attaching is both
an engineering activity
and a village in Upper Bavaria.
I'm unaware of any attachment issues of Attaching and its Attachingians.
My hypothesis is
that unemployed English present participles
are camouflaging
as villages in Upper Bavaria in between gigs and gings.
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Mumbled Map of a Monday
Masses of misses.
Masses of mess.
Messy misses.
Muse? …
(Muse?)
……………… (Miracle?)
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I don't like pitying people.
I find serendipitying them far more productive.
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O Serendi, I pity thee
with all my serendipity.
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Too written to tire –
too wired too tied
or something like that:
That’s all for tonight.
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Please allow me to write
on behalf of you
but on bethird of you over there
and on bequarter of the shy one
hiding behind you
as well.
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Some joy lumps of spontaneous overgeneralization concerning English plural forms:
goose — geese
moose — meese
choose — cheese
mouse — mice
louse — lice
house — hice
spouse — spice
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Is there an official verb for the act of committing whataboutism?
Whatabouting?
Whataboutizing?
Whataboutismisizing?
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Far from all real agents of change
are gents;
indeed their actual range
comprises all scents of humanity
who strive to keep up common sanity:
the yeast, the leaven that helps us ferment.
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Let's be more manifold than any origami manual could ever cover.
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Deeply hidden magic powers
in all English words do dwell
since writing every one of them
requires you to spell.
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How many pigs
to mend a pigment?
How many pachydermic parts for elements?
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The devil's in the details, fuming
and fumbling them apart:
Poking them with his pointy fork,
coating them with faint farts of pork,
then twiddling, twisting, tangling them
into a bulky lump of art.
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Even them, evening:
Even the bumps, knobs and nubs
that have taken root in a fertile day's chaos.
Balance them.
Even them, evening.
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Weak verbs for weak achievements:
I've chosed.
I've beginned.
I've writed.
I've speaked.
I've runned.
I've standed.
I've stinked.
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Damn write – I'll write.
Damn write – I'll right.
Damn right – I'll right.
Damn right – I'll write!
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"Let's go for a walk tigerther!"
said one big cat to another.
"I prefer to be alione,"
said No. 2 and stayed at home.
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Flutterflybutter.
Butterflyflutter.
Flutterbutterfly.
Butterflutterfly.
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Don't even.
On second thought, don't odd either.
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What if ferries turned feral
broke away from their moorings
to roam rivers, lakes, oceans
fervently ferrying random folk
cross waters, twixt shores
deep into spiralling adventures.
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All the drifting
the dreaming
the inbetweening.
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I don't have an English degree.
I only have English – undegreed
undegreedated
ungreedydated
ungrategreeded
crumbling crusts of sounds
between my teeth
and under my nails,
unhammered.
Nobody will believe
that I can and would
anything
with these speckled traces
of letter lines.
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Meetings, methinks, are not actually methings
and might not sweep masses of folk off their seatings,
although they seem to be seething with sense.
For all those staged selves do not help us to see things,
but rather obscure them with treacherous creakings
of halfhidden splintering confidence.
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If you mean well, then be one:
a source, a fountain overflowing.
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— Back to the top of this page —
How can I long after?
My longing comes first,
like joy before laughter:
not water, but thirst.
And so, as I sense
my whole being hum,
I'm longing towards
all the things yet to come.
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I weave my carpet as I fly
through tousling gales of time.
My fingers grasp for threads of why
as dizzying chances rush me by
beyond my reach, much as I try
in feverish surrender.
I balance on the threadbare cloth
knotting the fibres, darning tears,
and noting other carpets lie,
a safely moored flotilla:
a peaceful archipelago
of coloured squares deep down below,
too far down there for me to climb,
as battered by the gusts I pine
and try in vain to anchor mine.
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Mazing
Vibrant amazement is the key
that we explorers, kindred spirits, carry everywhere
as we prospect and roam
through thousands
through all the burgeoning locks and possibilities.
Until we, unbewildered by all this bewilderness,
pick one.
And turn our probing key.
And feel unfurl
a maze of wonder from its slumber
in each grain of reality.
Its curling avalanche entwines our wandering mind
that marvels and gets lost in joy over the miracles we find.
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In mazily mercurial turns,
like trembling seismograms
scribbled into the lingering syrup of the air by puzzled dragonflies,
the leaves keep pressing, printing and erasing tattered patterns
against, into and from the church wall and my mind,
as I walk past and pray.
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Wrapped in night and tucked in fear,
I remember I'm still here.
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Reality, reality
keeps avalanching down on me.
Hurls chunks of hurt,
spurts in my path,
crushes my day,
seething with wrath.
Another wave
roars down the slope –
all I can do
is roam and hope.
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Shrill rays of twittering mark the murmurations of ideas that billow through my body, flickering with feathery ease.
Their sparkling plumage glitters galaxies
across the oceanic abyss of the distant seas
deeply inside my self, my soul and mind
to help me navigate. To help me find
a path of meaning through the wayward waves.
To pave some certainty across them with their rays.
O lighthouse flighthouse brighthouse
pulse your shine
in guiding flushes through my dancing veins
rein in and realign my fluttering weather vanes
to let me love all that is me and mine.
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I stepped out into the day
like into a painting
and back in again
with all the paint still dripping from my shoes,
leaving puddles in the hallway.
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Sprinkled into the grass
like a patch of poppies
I lie breathe watch.
I sense my rambling thoughts part
from all the beyonds
where I've sent them
from distant thens, future and past.
I sense them return,
as they slip back under my skin
to join me
snuggled into my NowHere
my Self.
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If only knowledge worked like teeth:
the new one pressing from beneath
and gently pushing out the old
as life and time entwirl, elapse
as underneath fresh sense unfolds
to fill the newly yawning gaps.
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Thoughts scratched with worries
and sore with blisters
from grazing against possibilities.
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I do admit: I carry pocket pebbles.
You never know when you might need one, three or ten
to do their magic, ground you, mend
or merely lend weight to an argument.
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Board game brimming
with secret rules
trimming of evening
shadow jewels.
In your field filled with sun
dark tokens prove
that you're waiting for me
to make my next move.
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I'm longing for a sense of belonging,
belonging so deep, so close, so tight,
that unbelonging becomes unthinkable,
uneverbegraspable.
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My loneliness
is a violet panther
that stirs at dusk
bares its abysses
and sinks them
deep into my soul.
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Reality is random piles of pebbles:
solidified heaps of events lodged in a river bed
with all the might-have-beens and yet-to-bees and sometime-possiblies
swirling about them
to keep their gathering alive
and our dreams fed.
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We witness reality crumbling each day:
trickling whispers of smidgens,
soft scrunch of decay.
As its avalanches roll downhill like tears,
we're facing the neverbefore in our fears.
We are drifting on
towards uncertain weather …
So let's all be glue
and hold our world together.
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The extreme political right
thinks that it always is —
automatically.
For its name’s sake.
How are its people to get their bearings and navigate
when they keep confusing judgment
with direction?
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— Back to the top of this page —
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Always rising, holding and falling,
seesawing, swaying, rocking and sprawling,
calling out, heaving, hiding and lunging,
steadily soaring, perpetually plunging:
the mountains, the mountains
as they weave and prance
as they billow and dance
as they breathe along the horizon.
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Sow a handful of star seeds up into the sky
beyond freezing fog and clouds.
then hurl your hopes straight up into them
to make them grow. To help them sprout.
And as each slumbering seedling starts to swell
pray that you'll burst through all your layers and husks of shell as well.
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How kind of the world outside
to place itself in rain’s path
help me hear it unfurling
and allow me to listen to the listing count
of tiny joyful encounters
of drops and their counterparts
far more substantial
than their jostling whispers
as they collide with themselves in midair.
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Klonk! sounds tousled woodpecker, hitting fireladder.
Rumble-squeak! sound claws, stuttering down metal beam.
Swish-swash! sound wings, flapping in futile attempts to reach feeder, unleashing drop cascades from washing line.
Scrunch! sound fat balls as beak finally finds them.
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Imagine what it must feel like to play the lute:
to fill a tiny string of time and universe with music absolute.
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The kitchen a mysterious cave
brimming with bottomless darkness.
I let myself glide out into its depths
towards counter encounters between fingertips and surprises
lingering bubbles and pockets of time from Sunday
like the forgotten bowl full of evening tea
whose warmth has long danced off into the night.
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— Back to the top of this page —
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Sky bright and liquid in the draining light of dusk, like mercury;
a giant scrying bowl so full of futures
that it's impossible to choose and tell even the simplest one among them,
like: will the night be deep and coruscant with stars or dull with cloud,
since it's impossible to tell their vast expanse apart
in light like this
in scintillating doubt like this.
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Cloud quilt covers
sleeping sky.
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Resolute gusts are brushing bridge pedestrians' hair
skywards around their faces into flaming halos.
The gushing tufts are licking open air,
tasting the scent of freedom everywhere,
like flaring prophecies that fly on
the distant flagpole of the Alps along the far horizon.
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Behind the crowd of clouds a gentle luster
of secret sun is jostling out only the worst of night.
With all the confidence and courage I can muster
I gaze into the gloom, trying to hope out day and light.
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The clouds are shaking their petticoats
to practice a waltz in the sky.
When their step on each other's toes
the clouds begin to cry.
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Today began with a library in Morse code:
all the stories I could wish for
washed into the backyard
simultaneously.
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A drizzle, almost too gentle to notice,
trickletickles each cobblestone’s curious face.
Their chuckling and giggling turns them all sticky
and glues all the light flooding down from the city
into their solid, cobbled embrace.
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The path is awake with shimmer
that the rain has washed down from the traffic lights.
It breathes soft luster, caresses the faces
and nudges them onwards, out of the yet-night.
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Rain as yet undecided.
Still hesitating
halfway between my thoughts and the ground.
Each hovering droplet meditating
on a target in life, a purpose in waiting;
floating, balancing and creating
warp threads of water all around.
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Scatterbrained and addlepated
weather roams through hills and plain:
shedding, sprinkling and forgetting
(without noticing and fretting)
puddlewise its wet disbatches
a whole quilt's worth full of patches
blotchful splotchful splashing skein
of delightful, frisking rain.
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Sudden song crashes down on my mind
as it weaves its path through the trees
as air foams and frothes
as everywhere washes
the tiny collisions
the tingling clashes
of raindrops and world
right into my ears.
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So much sudden soddening rain
splashes and crashes on this terrain:
roaming in oceans of foaming curtains
quenching the dust
overwhelming the breeze;
waterfalling and drenching the trees
so splashful in its everywhere lair
that it has washed
that it has flushed
in delightful deluge
even afternoon rainbows
out of the air.
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Soft night rain comes tickling,
the city starts giggling
through the windows straight into our dreams.
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Erase the rain for a while or two
while you try to understand puddles.
Forget all drops.
Force their trajectories out of the air.
Just watch: how silken sheets of glass
erupt into the briefest blossoms
jungles and mountain ranges as they
reach out and up
with wistful calls of silver.
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Round each street light rain is scratching
hatching lines into the air
as with each step I'm attaching
myself to a patch of There.
Places, paths and expectations
round my feet in waves unfold;
ripple through the splashing paving
merge me into an engraving
of a story yet untold.
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Just ignoring
all your roaring
wasn't easy, storm!
as you stammered
as you hammered
with raw force your swarm
of brute gusts against my pane,
romping, ravaging insane!
But I'm willing to forgive you
every scream & blow,
since you have withdrawn your forces
and left me with snow.
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Storm is storing
all its roaring
in the raging air,
that bursts with blaring
booming, forming
blustering yells of wrath, transforming
all the city's everywhere
into flaring dragon's lair.
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The moment of utmost wonder unfurled
once the fog waves had piled themselves so impossibly high
that the room vanished: walls, floor, and ceiling
and the nozzles stopped sizzling.
Silence fell like light snow
and joy rose in billows
as we floated in blind infinity.
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Fog is prancing
daring and chancing
to invite the town for a dance.
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Fog Sounds
In winter one stumbles
across icy crumbles
left in chilly mock
by one hungry fog.
If only you listen
with awe-stricken frisson
You'll hear how it munches
and crumbles and crunches.
It licks off the rooftops,
it swallows the light,
it nibbles the lampposts
and chews with delight.
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Snow night, so lush
so full of whispered light
that gloom and dark will find no room inside you.
The flakes in tiny manyness have caught each droplet of the shimmer
that gushes from each window, vestibule and door
and passed it on from here to there
one sibling to another, garden wall to rooftop, roof to floor.
The gleam glides in soft pingpongs,
bouncing through the backyards along white-rimmed scrawls
of wriggling branches, swelling with a myriad shiny echoes as it sprawls.
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The night has sown fresh stars and whispers.
Through the window I can hear them sprout and grow
until they blossom into a December morning, full of snow.
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— Back to the top of this page —
When the birches catch the light
and get the angle about right
up in their tops the emerald foam
of fluffy, bubbling mistletoes
turns into resting swarms and rows
of merry, swaying kakapos.
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Splashes of Spring
Cherry trees pop their dispatches
to my ears from right and left;
weave buds that burst like bubble wrap
across the lane, each splash a weft.
A drowsy burly bumblebee bumps straight into my face,
as petals all around unfurl
their wings with ease and grace.
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Cherry tree telegraphs branches
out through star-sprinkled sky:
rifts of ink
and faults of shadow
are pulsing quakes to navigate
the maze of passages enwrought
into the infinite archipelago
of islets sparkling prancing.
Trembles shake the starry dew
send Sirius spinning, dancing.
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Branches are brushes
that paint and part
the spaces beyond my window:
high, shining sky, all wide and bright;
calm walls holding houses and yards.
Across them all the branches brush
led by the breeze,
hachuring, hatching
idea eggs, catching
my eye, and putting my mind at ease.
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If I were an autumn breeze
I'd make a thousand wishes.
Not by breathing out a candle:
but by blowing
golden glowing
leaf flames off the trees.
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Maple Magma
Heat splashes my shoes
as I walk down the lane.
Red stabbing the darkness,
red piercing the rain.
Each leaf bubbling with lava
with danger and glow:
geysers of colour wherever I go.
Volcanic eruptions all over the path!
Magma footprints of dragons past
and present.
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— Back to the top of this page —
Pure sense takes the shape of a moment
that merges with souls brushing by.
It may pour itself into swirling swifts,
raindrops, whispering pebbles, and clouds full of sky.
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Swifts are always sudden
sweeping wonder
about air
in which one can fly like THIS
but forget already
with your next breath
what is possible in it
as you continue living underneath
and dwell in walls
instead of curving cruising soaring.
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Again the swifts are busy dashing paths
through the sash of my tiny horizon
that melts into the night with their vibrant yarning
their wild skirlstrings of shimmering, diligent darning
as they mend flimsy patches of sky in decay
and anchor the final loose threads of the day.
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No one has switched the swifts on yet
in all that sky above my quarter, which fits plenty.
So, as I study dispatches about their everywhere elsewhere arrivals,
I listen, long, and hope for swift returns
and calls that pierce the dusk like beacons.
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Mooring the sky requires swifts:
dozens of swirling anchors
aweigh, yet tying us to all the abysmal infinity above.
In breezing breathless spirals they are twisting
their dancing filaments of shadow into stubborn rodes
into the strongest rigging, still resisting
the traction of the rolling planet underneath our feet,
as sunbeam blasts fill the azure expanse of sailcloth
to push us out into the endless oceans:
far out, among the waves of stardust,
where we'll finally meet.
❧
Always the almost.
Always adrift.
Breath of a blackbird,
dash of a swift.
❧
Their voices reached me faint and pale, as if from memories
bubbling up from inside myself instead of oozing through the windowpanes.
When finally I recognized the glorious trombone calls of cranes,
their flock had crossed the crests of ocean sky above me
❧
I listen into the outside
and can hear
a whole oakful of crows
adream
acroak
minds brimming with wonder and joy.
❧
A somewhere robin, glow still hidden, starts Midwinter Day
spinning vibrating threads of wire fibres through the darkness
for me to put my feet on. Balance, swinging. Count my step by steps.
To sense the tremble of the abyss breathing from below.
To cross the depths of night towards the morning.
❧
Shrub erupts
on my right:
blast of sparrows
bursts into the light.
❧
Murmuration murmuraining
clouds of life across the skies:
murmurmaking, murmurfeigning
pulsing hearts and bodies, veining
moment creatures, murmurreigning
all my soul and all my eyes.
❧
Whip your tail
flash your wings
as you ply the open sky
as you pry for curious prey
as you swim the air and sway
magpie magpie
featherray.
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Magpie in flight❧
Crisscrossing the misty morning air
are all the books that have been flapping
their pages jollily enough
to unscramble their white and their printer's ink
until they've morphed into magpies.
❧
Like the blade of an arrowhead
a wedge of geese cuts
through the sheaths of my sleep.
So I have tumbled out
and found myself lying
gooseless dreamless.
But my skin still ripples
with echoes of their calls
in unseen flight
approaching through mists
from the distance within myself.
❧
Blackbird is experimenting
how to fill the yard with song.
Other blackbirds in the Elsewhere
just experiment along.
❧
A blackbird lit the dawn today,
as I lay listening and longing.
❧
Blackbirds are sighing question marks into the dawn.
❧
Summer evening cloth.
Warp of raindrop threads.
Weft of blackbird song.
Woven by mine ears alone.
❧
Research
All through the web of the park paths
I deepen my studies in chaffinchology
observe hypothesize and sample
question
listen analyze
as billowing tides of doubt and certainty erode the smooth surface of casual routines
and carve the contours of fresh knowledge:
All chaffinches are actually only one.
An avian mycelium.
A mass of interwoven joy and song.
❧
Nuthatch impact sends the feeder swinging
with the bird, tail skywards, clinging
to the metal cage.
Tiny black-masked rebel, full of secret rage,
lifts its head in sly reconnaissance
anchors it, despite the feeder's dance
still, intense and terse
deep in the centre of the universe.
❧
House martins tumbling
stuttering stumbling
as if swallowed by air
and spat out everywhere
in sprinkling curves of flickering flight
so my breath and steps stutter
with joy as my flutter-
ing thoughts join their swerve.
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— Back to the top of this page —
Flutterbuttersputterfly,
nip the muddy puddles dry,
splash your colours, spray them, play
in the bubbling air of May.
❧
Squirrel flame
all red ablaze
flaring through the morning haze.
❧
Scampering splodgelet, brown and vital,
joining all branches in the yard,
squirrel is pulsing through the trees
as their furry, beating heart.
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— Back to the top of this page —
Street lights are gliding through the gaps between expectant houses
like a procession of magicians, carrying mysteries in invisible palms.
Cloudlets of shimmer, loose waves of starry threads unfurl
as each of them now pulls apart their fingers to reveal their game:
as an entire alley tends cat's cradles
wafting with the tiniest of galaxies
born from the gentle seismic jolts
where spider silk and morning haze collide.
❧
Backlight guides the first daring spiders
to thread their silk into late air like silver flames
seaming, yarning
dancing, darning
gaping, spilling tears
ripped open
by footprints sharply edged
into freezing puddles
by mud blades now
bereft of snow
and growing dull with spring.
❧
Two layers of spider canvas
sail silk
hoisted in the fireladder rigging
bulge in the light
as breeze gleams pulse along their threads
as the house jerks gently
in their irresistible pull
longing to sail with the tide
luring me to cut its hawsers.
This is my nautical situation.
❧
Spiders: I know your work
celestial surveyors
cosmic cartographers.
You practice
constructing star charts of our neighbouring galaxies
in random shadow realms
between the balusters
of park bridges and railings
of basement stairs.
❧
Spiders navigate
not by rudder but by sail
not by compass, but encompassing
clumps of close air
since in them they sense
scents of distant realms
and so set course
by weaving their canvas
in the right direction
and waiting
❧
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Envoys, emissaries!
I send you out!
I dispatch you in silent play
without a single dancing chord
balancing on the courses of my larynx.
In smooth files I release you as
an unresistant floating caravan.
I summon you to leave
to travel on the hidden currents of the atmosphere
to finally dissolve, all riddles.
Breathful of bubbles,
breezeful of orbed hopes!
But first you draw your mesh of unmapped paths
in tangling tracks
in interweaving streams of rotund joy.
Now shine delight!
Now fly!
❧
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❧
January began with a promise
of joy and time together
of chalk labyrinths and invisibility paths through brushwood
of mud puddles and hugs and running
across sun-gushing fields
spoken by me and returned
as a handwarm pocket pebble
that you discovered for me on the path.
❧
January Water
The brook is pulsing underneath
a membrane floating halfway in between realities;
sturdily fragile, palpable
hide hidden in plain sight.
Skin of ice and light
that in its crackling calm
shelters gurgling song
guides and holds along
dance, like a guarding palm:
shimmering pools and notches
silver fidgeting splotches
dithering, thithering, hithering
unruly bubbles of air
pockets full of treasure pebbles
in a secret-brimming lair.
❧
Frost makes my window
sprout plumage of ice
so I listen for telltale sounds:
for the rustling and tingling
for the singing and jingling
that tell
how it's fluffing its feathers
spreading its wings
starts preening
and finally nestling down
with a song
in its home between day and night.
❧
January blackbird singing
seasonally jetlagged by mild morning air.
❧
Frost Amber
As the air freezes
it thickens to treacle:
syrup so viscous and rich
that it glues reality into space
that it sticks every moment in its due place
embeds souls in its amber
caulks with its pitch
the hull of our vessel, drenched with night
so that coated in frost molasses we might
set sail in this whispering atmosphere
out into the Now. Out into the Here.
❧
Frost air like sandpaper
to coarsen the starlight
and make Sirius sparkle.
❧
Jetlagged
by the lustrous light I lie
of this stubborn snowful night
as it's oozing through the curtain
as it's seeping through the blinds
dazzling all the darkest chasms of dream
from the well shaft of my mind
dances through its waters
flooding them with notions from which
I find it's impossible to hide.
❧
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February nights chink with crystal frost
that cuts rime rims and facets through space, air and time,
to magnify Sirius's sparkle.
Each ridge sprouts from the blade of cold as a crack of infinite clarity
replenishing this dense mass of darkness
with a free path of pristine chance
with an expanse of journey
tripping up my eyes
as all these crests of capillaries speed towards them
veins of infinity and scintillating scissures
pulsing with icy embers of pure starlight and the brightest futures.
❧
Hushing rain
rushing rain
gushing and flushing rain
shushing whispering silence into the air
as the meadow, prying,
keeps burbling, replying
with earth's crumb gabbling
with grass dribbling and babbling
upward trickles, snowdroplets
everywhere.
❧
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Each year, each day,
I realize my blindness
and ascertain how little I have seen,
as buds around me swell and burst with infinite kindness;
as green pours forth between the pickets and reminds us
that spring clings to each shrub and nudges us to glean,
to marvel at the unbeforeish wonders
that grove and meadow, heaven and earth deploy;
a tidal stream of nearby troves and yonders
that has me spiral into dizzy, fizzing joy.
❧
Spring gushes, sputters, bubbles, springs,
and nudges me to see new things.
❧
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Floating futures are drifting by
in the ripening morning sun.
I am sitting amidst the streaming light
spilling steady sense
sending out patience
in soft stubborn strings
that bind and weave
each twig and leaf
each brushstroke of cloud into one.
I sense and mean
every fluttering beam
each trembling breeze
in its and into its being.
As leave buds are pulsing along the branches:
trickling crumbles of green yet to sing
I fling myself open to avalanches
of world and spring
and everything.
❧
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— No English poems yet … —
❧
— Back to the top of this page —
Midsummer night is awash
with invisible light
as the raindrops nudge and nibble
whispering paths
through its loose gauze
and wait for listening weavers
to join their warp threads
with wefts of wonder.
❧
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— No English poems yet … —
❧
— Back to the top of this page —
The afternoon collapsed into molasses
that glued the sweltering to my skin:
each sticky second coating each inch of now numb, silent contact face
between world outside and within.
There I hung, entangling myself evermore in the air’s burden,
like fidgeting prey in a spider’s web.
❧
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Autumn is tingling in the trenches
between the ridges of my fingertips.
Evening fizzes with its itches
that burst out of their seeds
sprout through and force apart cracks of reality
and weave their tendrils
around each trace of summer's glow and gold:
the thundering momentum of
a sunflower stampede
ploughing towards my soul with heavy skulls
wingsful of scratchy crow crumbs
sown in the furrows of the stubble field
and a tiny nook of warped reality
here on my balcony
between the tender intersections
of mallow shadow rigging
and bulging spider webs.
❧
When the afternoon air ahead shifted
and danced sprightly
for an eyelid flutter‘s while
quite unmomentously
across my mind's strings and trails —
I noticed and failed
to recognize
was it leaf, stray dream, or butterfly
that had parted the breeze
and meant to mend its airy path back
into invisibility again.
❧
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Whirlpool swirlpool
jellykites
dancing in the breeze
air medusae
flaming light
tentacles with infinite ease.
❧
Adrift upon the waters of an autumn morning
amidst the surging fog with all its billowing foam
I listen through the storm of silence raging round me
I'm floating through the shadows towards gates unknown.
❧
In crouching wrinkles of the dark
the year is aging and crumbling apart.
Its heaps and piles of ashes grow:
remains of lost days. Yet down below
the heartdepths of fire still smolder and glow:
these are the ember months.
❧
There may be May.
Sometime. Some day.
But before light returns
and new life comes,
we dive deeper into the ember months.
❧
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Ease swirls up the air
as another year
gently dances towards its end;
as the trees fill their leaves
with so much love
that they morph into heavy gold
until their burden forces their trees
to release them
and watch them glide down
suddenly lightened
by the absurd pain of parting.
❧
Each November night
I acquire
an aquarium filled with ink
feel its pulse
its black waves throbbing
when my palm rests
on the pane
that separates us.
❧
Syrup sun, molasses light!
Weave and tangle through the branches
all your viscid strings of bright
all your dancing threads and fibres
plait them through my line of sight,
those sticky hawsers holding me,
streaming, flowing, gluing, glowing –
my anchors in reality.
❧
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Make Advent an adventure.
Venture to vent your life.
❧
Ten doors and counting. Advent
is a mathematical exercise regime.
Multiplies markets, treats, temptations:
so manifolds beyond my origami skills.
Subtracts that ordinary anyway
by sprinkling booths brimming with gingerbread, toys, artisanal ornaments, mulled wine,
candles and jewelry and knicknack over town hall squares.
Richly dividing cans and woulds: the adept foam of stagers
and then the silent yearners underneath.
And adding burdens, all that wasting love in darkness.
How can this equal anything.
❧
Night sludge is sliding from the sky in masses,
thudding on our roofs in heavy lumps.
Its goo cocoons the world: winter molasses
that turn the cities into darkness dumps.
Enshackled in these chains we yearn for love
and grind our yearning gazes on the endless starlessness above.
❧
The night snow knows no darkness
only quieter
more silent forms of light.
It offers them in lessons
for me to take to heart and soul
while balancing my bicycle ahead
through shards of frozen mud
as if along a dancing tightrope
as all around the narrow forest path
infinites itself.
❧
Sight written in white:
the wide pure light and my loving gaze
are glazing the hills
are filling the fields,
rift by rift, tear by tear,
till they spill across the horizon.
❧
Midwinter Midstream
Longest night of deepest darkness
gapes abysses round the stars:
swallows into infinite chasms plummeting sleepers full of scars.
Prayers tingle in the headwind
of the rolling carapace
to which we entrust our plunging
towards space's wide embrace,
as we, hopes so far astray,
drift into a new light's day.
❧
I'm sending out herold thoughts, messenger thoughts
into the thickets of dawn yet to come,
to gather and garner what has been wrought
deep inside the night and its velvety hum.
Glittering wishes and shards of crushed hopes
crackling under the steps of their soles;
marking the path
lining the way
into the dawning Christmas Day.
❧
Rime won't rhyme
with August days:
instead it purls its rugged refrain
into frosted December sunrays,
around each leaf stanza
still defending its green
against biting air.
Leaves with diamond teeth
bite back
frost-frightened
till I tame and rein them
with the warmth of my breath.
❧
This New Year's Eve
is determined
to enjoy herself
without waiting for
her New Year's Adam.
❧
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Distant church bells knocking on a new day
stir the sleepy night that yawns a splash of rains.
Streetcars hum as they collect their morning loads of people pollen,
while the bridge unfolds across a strand of trains.
Soles have been wriggling
along this path,
swimming traces
into white grainy ground,
trailing their trails among the souls:
snowy cemetery.
❧
These early mornings are bitter and soft
as clusters of dreams cling to my eyelids like grapes
while others still orbit
somewhere inside, like juggled worlds.
❧
Daylight still hesitates,
then gets in line
behind a swirl of clouds:
it’s first their turn to shine.
❧
A morning trickles into being with the gentle stubbornness of melting ice.
Birds’ voices surge into my chamber
melt the walls away
and merge the verge of dawn and dream with new horizons.
❧
My bed is my boat.
I set sail
for the day
and entrust myself to the carrying waves
and send myself drifting on whispers of rain
out into an ocean morning
out into the unexplored space of today.
❧
Budding sky
light still shy
rose petal pellicle
heralds angelical
blossoming day
swelling our way.
❧
Early.
So early that
reality has not entirely finished putting, pushing all required props and scenery into place.
The little station grocery store yet to be loaded with baked goods
from the bizarre red coral reefs of plastic trays on trolleys;
the streets with vehicles; the pavements with their cargo of pedestrians and cyclists;
the sky with light, my soul with glow beyond its now.
Furtively trespassing I sneak through interdicted territory,
reconnoiter
the backstage hold of an emerging day.
❧
Square by square the morning sun
sticks its post-it notes on my wall;
each a task to play
an errand to run
an adventure to plunge in,
splash about and have fun
a story emerging
a thread to be spun:
all the joy of a waiting day.
My call.
❧
Listen, listless listeners and listers:
list towards the luring luster of this morning.
Now get out and play!
❧
Swimming with Whales
Parting the glistening glass expanse of morning,
weaving their weft paths through its warping current streaks
the bulky house whales glide in pods of brick and mortar:
hovering through sun-lit ocean under mounting azure peaks
their roofs aloft
their windows drinking
in eager gulps the krill of light,
swallowing, swilling the bright swell
swigs of infinity streaming
through blind baleens
all-seeing, open wide.
❧
Sun, screwed into the horizon
like a giant orange light bulb.
❧
I remember the song of vibrating metal
as I watched the fine blade of the moon
slicing across the dusk
a few nights ago
until sky fell apart
and the stars kept and kept spilling
out from the slash
in infinite avalanches.
❧
Moon snail
pouring shell trail
shimmering path through stars and dark
as you roll, enormous marble
through the night sky's cloudy veil
your mysterious scribbled arc.
❧
Basking moon is swimming westwards,
feeding on the evening light:
gliding open-mouthed and leading
our eyes towards the bright.
❧
Cursormoon glides across sky.
Searches icon
Double click:
Night.
❧
I watch the shadows sprawling as they grow
so heavy, that the trees can’t hold them any longer.
I see them gliding off the leaves,
spilling in silent rivers
from rifts in rolling barks,
gathering in the wide bowl of the meadow
until they're brimming over,
spotting my fingers with their ink.
❧
Pluck your strings
my shadow puppet
dance across the cloth of gleaming street
ere evening's billow flushes you
down the horizon
from whence you will ride
back on morning's waves:
salt grains are pirouetting through our nostrils
to herald the huge roaring tidal bore's approach.
❧
Night
full to the brim
and foaming with stars.
❧
As the hours soften and melt
into pools of darkness and waiting
I lie and listen to the surf of moments swashing through my soul
in pulsing beats of rippling motions
disturbing, shifting granulets of notions
like saltwater that flushes streaks of beach
as they balance and hover between sea and land:
embedding our toes and soles
like sprawling roots in grains of sand.
So I sink deeper in the sediments of myself, into the ground;
hoping for someone sounding
as I'm waiting to be found.
❧
Infinite ink of night
splashing through my mind
flushing dark foam over
fermenting dreams.
❧
Full of song sounds the night
full of airs the air:
plucking chords
playing arpeggios on the rain harp
that it keeps stringing
thousands and millions of times
every moment
imperfection
in perfect tune.
❧
A lump of orange glow is hovering in mid-night
like a hot air balloon, suspended in a pocket deep between the hours,
a drop of fire floating in a husk of saffron hue.
As one by one the fingers of my senses furl around it
I know and do not want to know
and therefore wrap that knowing in abundant layers of imagination
to turn this lonely lamp up in a room beyond the surging abyss of the street
into a beacon, travelling
towards all sleepers navigating oceans of despair
tonight
towards the morning.
❧
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❧
An elsewhere is always a spell’s where,
a well’s where:
abounding in paths and other ways round.
A shell’s where, just hatching,
a parallelswhere:
waiting to be discovered and found.
❧
4 AM.
Another row of hours
barely enough to fill a shelf:
Just little more than six
since I made it home
through my door
through ice and snow
after a swirling snow globe of a day in the distance.
Now again about to leave.
What might sleep feel like
unbroken depths
like the black ice on the path yesterday?
❧
The backyard shifts and sorts itself
into sediment layers of reality
as I guide my roving gaze through mazes
of darkening barken line paths
amid odd outbreaks of
volcanic wilderness:
Splotches of lichen burst towards me
infinitely gentle.
as trunks all murmur in the background
raw treasure chests brimming with bristling secrets.
Nudged by the raindrops
leaves whisper songs with voices
like the fluttering creases
of blossoming origami cranes
silently determined.
Scene morphs
black branch strokes melt and vanish
into backgrounds
until only the golden blots of song leaves
remain
suspended in mid-air
occasionally interrupted
by random finches
rolling themselves
into balls of colour, down
towards my window
accelerating.
❧
Droplets of sun
dribble down the tree
step by step
leaf by leaf
first sporadically straying
then gushing together
until they flood the backyard
and drown each pebble
in billows of light.
❧
Chunks of amber
honey cubes
flash into the sea of night:
awaking windows
one by one
lighthouse signals to ignite.
❧
Stroll for Two
The invitation was way too kind to decline it,
so we had to allow
each Christmas mud puddle
in the middle of the path
to bog us down
all the way up to our ankles
as fresh raindrops jumped
into our open faces
to bless them with blisses
of drippy kisses.
Bark, never dark, but gleaming
with lingering lightfields of lichen
danced continents into our fingertips:
ridges rich of and canyons coated with mossy softness;
tiny sprawling explosions of green,
gentle and slow enough
to fill each glen, crevasse and valley in our skins
with gentle moss and meaning.
So we walked on, just listening to the beats of our steps,
as the stream along our path kept weaving
like a basket maker teasing, plying osier stakes
into one wicker layer of gurgling song
around the pulses of our soles
and another of cavorting waves
to line its own bed.
So plied into its fabric, suppliant us
pushed open
the heavy panels of the guardian doors
into the silent dark inside the river church.
There were no candles left for us to light:
just stumps of tired wax still crouching
deep in the craters of a bowl of sand,
asleep already.
Only a single candle on the altar stood still singing,
pouring its voice into the dusky calm:
a quiet bell, triumphant in its ringing,
a flood of heartening and soothing balm
as we sat resting
on the curving rough stone
of the parapet
wrapped in each other,
the niece and I.
❧
Dragonflies are dashing across Nymphenburg’s canal
with oddly unpredictable zigzaggitude: each a cursor,
controlled by an invisibly distant user in another universe,
overing around above a confusing image,
undecided where to click to solve the CAPTCHA.
❧
"Sea," prompts my soul,
as the horizon opens
to spill a streamer's length of dark-blue silk into the sky
towards which a red chain of eager train is carrying me
tiny human
pressed against a window pane.
I am all eye, am peering, reconnoitring,
spy
cerulean puffs of billows, bulging far beyond
the gently dancing surge of hills
that I see ever rippling round the mass of Ingolstadt,
a city plunged into a surf of land.
I sense the tremors of reality.
I know there is no sea —
I see there is an ocean
bracing sky,
embracing me.
❧
— Back to the top of this page —
❧
You call it sprinkles.
I call it rainbow dandruff.
Strangerous times.
In nights like this, I leave the blinds open: I want to see. The snow gently fills the night outside with a soft gleam, since the white cover carries any trace of light everywhere, even into the abyss of darkness. It seeps into the shadows, floating and delicate like an infinite stream of shimmering bubbles. My window has vanished — a painting is unfurling its petals in its stead, a masterpiece brimming with magical magnetism, irresistibly coaxing the dreams I need deep into my room and my soul.
There are archipelagos hiding in my sock drawer. Probably Narnian or more. I’m not entirely certain.
The woodland pours its ragged-edged shadow into the field — like broad inky brushstrokes, still hesitating.
I'm generally suspicious of general condemnations.
I'm wondering whether my thoughts might be migrating at night.
Just like birds.
Only inside my mind.
I appreciate people practicing music. I would prefer them using a real piano, however, instead of the doorbell panel of my apartment block.
I really, really have no talent for buying light bulbs.
Apologies: With a virgin layer of snow on the path, I simply must ride sinuous glyphs & turn around sometimes to decipher my bikewriting.
"Keep it, in case something's wrong", says the teller and hands me my receipt. I know about many things that are wrong. How would a receipt help?
I'm not very good at being myself today.
Things that confused me when I first came to the US: So when I don't need more food, then "I'm good", but when I do, then I'm evil?!
What do you mean, "absent-minded"? My mind is as present as can be. Just not in the place where you might expect it to show up.
Either that guy on the 4th floor across the street is a secret agent sending morse signals or he has serious problems with his light bulbs.
A ponytail is the only hairstyle option providing female singers in full choral camouflage with at least some storage capacity for pencils.
A pile of books just avalanched onto my keyboard. The resulting string of letters made more sense than anything else I've typed today.
10 seconds of little finger keyboard disorientation were enough to have me age 1000 years, 1 month and 1 day.
Not all my thoughts make it into my fingers. And many of them remain inside my tingling fingertips without ever reaching a piece of paper.
You can tell that I'm in a hurry when the person right before me in the library's "return" queue carries the contents of an entire bookcase.
Could I get a pedicure for my footnotes, please?
If you have tons of time and moles of space, you ought to recalibrate your SI units.
Making me carry a score while singing Bach's Matthäuspassion is like forcing me to read a pulmonary instruction manual while breathing.
My thoughts are soap bubbles. Iridescent, shimmering, volatile. When my pen hits them they burst, leaving nothing but splashes on my cheeks.
I was sorely tempted to congratulate my feet on their ever inventive cleverness of coming up with new ideas for blister production sites.
My laptop is humming mantras while it is slowly meditating updates onto its hard drive.
You cannot force reality to rearrange itself around you. You can only pretend. Which already means rearranging yourself around reality.
Competence mostly serves to compensate for other people’s lack thereof.
All those things that we don't have proper words for, like our three middle toes.
If I had hands as wide as this sky, I'd pick just one small star, wrap my fingers around it & feel its sparkling breath while I fell asleep.
Depending on my frame of reference I've either taken the elevator upstairs or made this house slide 20m down around me by pressing a button.
Dear Raindrops: this has turned into more than a mere bonding attempt. What you've just done borders on meteorological harassment.
Billows of night air are surging into the room. On their crests a turmoil of raindrops rushes in as well and gently starts caressing my face.
My eyes are beginning to fold themselves up — like a silicone accordion colander or a bird nuzzling its beak into its own down feathers.
The rising September full moon was so surreally huge and honey-colored that I caught myself looking for the thread it was suspended from.
Random rehearsal thought: If I could make the walls of St. Peter invisible, there would be an organ hovering right next to Marienplatz.
It's the kind of fatigue that scrambles around on me like a little monkey, pulls down my eyelids one second, but tickles my nose the next.
"I know I put my Angels into my Messiah yesterday. Now I've forgotten where I've put my Messiah." Thoughts of a disoriented chorister.
Rain: I've just poured a Saint Bernard out of my shoes and wrung two dozen kittens out of my shirt and pants
If I didn't know better, I'd say what inspired Homer to compose his Odyssey was a traumatic experience with a phone company hotline.
After crossing a barren bibliographical wasteland I have now reached the impenetrable jungle regions of Footnoteistan. Please send machetes.
There's only one possible explanation: A paper vulcano with a gigantic magma chamber discharges its contents right into our filing shelves.
How much cutlery does our cafeteria lose due to absentminded scholars who let all the leftovers on their plates glide into the trash cans?
Both my pedial pageturning skills & my method of determining the ideal moment for applying hand lotion while reading still need refinement.
I'm sitting at the bottom of a gigantic hourglass filled with water. Every raindrop passing my window washes away another wasted moment.
Definitely no hail to thee, hail.
Smashing a text to pieces feels liberating at first. Until your thoughts touch its sharp shards and hurt and start bleeding.
My mind is full of jigsaw pieces. I hear them clatter when I move my head. But they all belong to different puzzles. Just bits & fragments.
Have you ever stood in an open door, unnoticed, just smiling & watching someone? That's how gently this rain has tiptoed into my evening.
I've knotted a net of trampolin thoughts all across my city, so I can catapult myself through the clouds wherever I want to.
They fancy themselves the epitome of masculinity, but chopper riders actually look as if they were sitting in gynecological exam chairs.
Should a quirky deity teleport me to the Sahara right now, the amount of water stored in my clothes will suffice to reach the next oasis.
Purchasing a diary for the approaching next year means sailing a violent jibe around the Cape of Summer. Uncharted waters ahead.
There probably aren't many people in this world who can claim to have bruised a toe by running against a volume of early modern broadsheets.
Mom and Dad have endowed me with a name that can be anagrammed into "semilunar resin ocean", "musical eraser in neon" and "no unrealism increase".
The streaming mass of light erupting from the horizon has lightened. With the weight of this heavy evening magma off its shoulders, the air expands and blossoms. The final bronze remains of this day condense and merge into millions of keys that unlock the magic of the meadow.
The sky is so absurdly azure and postcard-smooth that none of the occasional doodling aeroplanes manages to make its chalk lines stick up there. They all glide off the blue expanse and melt into their surrounding ocean, crests of scribbled sea foam atop adventurous wavelets.
"What are you doing?"
I'm drawing.
"Oh, a portrait?"
No, just conclusions.
Don't turn into a deadline marionette,
all entangled in their snarls and pulls.
Rather twine your lifeline.
Reign your reins.
Sunrays are gently gliding past my window through the afternoon light ocean that is our backyard.
Post boxes are covered in the foam of countless alternate reality bubbles. A new one pops up every time the edge of an envelope glides across your fingertips and out of reach down the throat of the post box — and your letter turns into one of Schrödinger's kittens
Between any a- and bemusement, there will always be asharp- and beflatmusement.
Let's imagine a confrontation
between a wizard and an apiarist:
both with profound misconceptions
of the term "spelling bee".
Cry, sis:
It's a crisis.
Hold a pebble like a moment.
My tweets: bottled carrier pigeons. I hurl them out into the ether & hope they'll wash ashore somewhere & bring back a reply. #catachresis
— Back to the top of this page —
❧