Detox

In the big white forest 
we catch poisoned gnomes
cold so cold

I search for your hand but
you're standing at the other end of the bell jar
your nose pressed against the glass
I withdraw my hand

whisper softly something about love
but I'm afraid to talk out loud because 
the forest scares so easy these days
and the trees are almost bare, leafs
fall on your tormented head

(your slosh-head, where the murky water
stood still in your tilted head for days, where fish
swam diagonal, looking at me like they wanted out)

It's hard to keep my hands off you
everything demands something nice
there are entities in between

let's sleep, free the fish
catch the gnomes, sleep
and for ever 
wake up.

Everything from a distance

this way we're almost sitting in a living room,
our benches on the pier and the sea like 
a coffee table between the both of us,
only glasses with straws are missing
to suck life through.

there's is nothing that makes me reach for your hand,
nothing that makes me put my trembling fingers on your lips
or go through your hair.

the reason is in suitcases
at my feet, heavy and clumsy.
I struggle with them, but 
I wouldn't want to be somewhere else right now.

you know nothing about the living room 
and the suitcases full of objections, 
it's the wind 
that touches your hand and lips and
messes up your hair.

still you move your lips
to say:
'hey, that's enough'. 

Concerning the beginning

Every beginning is a destruction.
Every perspective on far away mountains, valleys
kills it, records it in attractive yet
clumsy positions.

Nowhere, that is nice, nowhere imposes itself as 
the inevitable alternative.

Solely is, but quickly forgotten,
away with the envelop still unopened, the wrapping paper intact,
the child before it learns what is laid out for him,

the look, the sad look, the unspeakable
happiness that bursts off from the beginning
like flakes of marble from  a statue,
masterpiece or not.

Ode to joy

Love, when there's no hope: 
only that is love. 
 
Launch a new radio probe, 
when ten have crashed,  
take two hundred rabbits 
when a hundred have died. 
only that is science. 
 
You ask for the secret. 
It only has one name: 
again. 
 
Like a caryatid 
with arms above our heads 
we bear the granite time 
 
and defeated  
we will always win. 

Unruly

think of me as a piece of paper
that you've put thoughtlessly in your coat pocket
after you wrote something on it. I leave open 

what, although I hope: let it be one line, one
for in a verse saved for later and that stays on 
your mind, long after you put me away.

you know the line gradually by heart. It loops
in your head like a mantra. Still you never find
the right context for it: a good poem that places
the line, frames it, and above all tames it.

then after a while you take me out of your pocket,
caress me and sigh: what to do with you?

Dead end


No track runs past its terminus,
if you think that you're crazy.

And if you at the end find
nothing but a last impression,
then you didn't miss anything.

But I only saw this:
how you looked up from your empty gaze
how you looked around,
confounded about what you lost,
how your eyes looked for mine
how they after the silence
slipped into memory.

Harvesting

Time goes by faster when you move a plant now and then 
in the winter I need a motive
nothing is predestined here
but everything goes gradually

this is me in the dead of night
and I must warn you, I fall in love easily 

I recognize you before you recognize yourself
(you will match nicely with my wallpaper)
there are homes where you will thrive better

I smoke holes into the couch
but if you're still here when I turn around

you will never leave again