Walter Ruhlmann

Heat was barely bearable
even here that summer
it was out of the question
to put ice-cubes in the glasses.
Unfathomable, how the south
had chased us, surely we
had not been cautious enough
and hadn’t seen it at our heels.

My bottle of Jack handy,
clean glasses in the cupboard
but no ice-cubes in the freezer
since none would survive anyway
long enough to dive into liquid,
rough diamonds melting fast;
sublimation can be quick
when dog-days hit hard.

For roughly two and a half hours
life stops somehow, put in stand by,
the existence between brackets –
a necessary pause to confront
all misery erupting like giant snakes
from the flat, shimmering rectangles.

Black frames enhance the contrast,
yet like death announcement cards
they warn us nothing good will emerge,
they throw heavy objects with sharp angles,
spit acid venom in our faces, vomit peroxide,
drop cluster bombs, sow anger seeds.

Soon greyish stems sprout like twisting worms.
It won’t be long before dark, fanged flowers bloom,
each foraged by electric bumblebees
spreading the anxiety disease at light speed.
So earphones plugged in, lying under soft and warm
blankets of living cat skin, eyes closed, we nap.

A Mercedes registered in Sweden
driven by a Russian oligarch;
Olga high on coke and booze
snoozes on the passenger seat.

A violent Catalan separatist
trysts with a Franco-nostalgic
in a Barcelona tapas bar
car-bombed last year.

A forty-year-old French bankster,
former merchant bank wheeler-
dealer, propelled high up, elected
select president, liberal dictator.

A dingy life-boat maroons
on a lonely Grecian island,
landlords expel the castaways
way too brown to be housed.

A German shepherdess blesses
austere Lutheran rags,
drags dark omens,
menaces her bewildered sheep.

A drove of faces, as many
twenty-first-century aliases
outnumber the page space,
pace the continent’s surface.

The view this room offers is an inescapable landscape,
mountains covered with snow, walls at insurmountable height,
icy peaks and green trees gently powdered with cotton dust,
coating of icing sugar, specks of cocaine, flour ash, flower pollens;
the green trees are our friends.

Soon we will cut off these tall pines and pin them in our homes,
dress them up, make them up, fastened them in fancies –
hustling tart Tannenbäume.
Golden garlands, silver stars, chemical snow sprays,
glittering metallic shapes, figures of angels, Santas, and Virgins,
all copulating in the coniferous scent, as dizzying
as the many spruce forests enclosed in bathroom fragrance aerosols.

Overheated, they will soon lose their million needles on the floor,
some will even keep stuck in the carpet;
no vacuum can ever get rid of them,
even trying to pick them up with thumb and finger will remain infeasible,
most of them will hide deep and become invisible.
Eventually thrown in the street, the pavement will be their cemetery, million corpses,
miles of tombs, aisles of disfigured majesties, torn trees, emaciated limbs, and naked branches.

If death comes earlier than expected,
you’re sure you could easily handle it.
You think this would free yourself from burden,
you reckon extinction is the new thing.
It will come soon enough so please don’t beg
for it to come this way as relieving as it seems.

Her breasts prick the sight of the saints,
her breath is stale, it smells rot and decay,
her legs are hairier than a palm-tree trunk,
the tool she carries around with her slices
heads, limbs, torsos, anything goes.
Her unforeseeable eyes pierce through the dark.

She does see you quiver in your corner,
she laughs, she trembles with ecstasy,
she leaves the place softly, she leaves
you quizzical. She leaves permanent
stains behind, tumours in fat brains,
her restless rumours never wane.

His obsessions could drive you mad,
they make you feel useful and strong
in the mid-November, warm, low sun,
ants, flies, mosquitoes thrive.

Your obsessions are heavy loads
things you believe to be the truth –
absolute, implacable, unavoidable –
while he keeps on mooning all day.

He feels useless, hollow and cold,
except when he decorated her flat:
pinning your father’s aquarelles
on the abhorrent clinical white walls.

Dizziness as you walked back home,
guts out, sickness, disgust, your eye blinked;
sharp glass debris, broken plastic,
as obsessive as the western wind.

Monsters versus machines
and horny atoms
cities of straw blown off
by the tempests of the serious
and charcoaled hours.

Sulphur drunk
from the neck
of the metal
bottles
and hell
hunting us down

while the factories
regurgitate the torture
contrivances
and the infernal
machines.

I dropped the /, borrowed the you.
The / was loud, straight-forward.
Its thinness, its lack of depth put me off.
I felt dizzy, I feared its height,
besides I can curl up inside the you,
sit on its y, burrow through its o, curl up on its u.

I dropped an eye inside my head,
the mess scared me, I must confess.
I didn’t recognize the / I was before,
it must have been changed into that other self
I wrote about on other shores,
when he showed up six years ago.

Pardon my didacticism, my prosaicness.
I have never claimed to be full of prowess.
You may be better at words craft
you will become my dead drop, my new hide,
like a snake sheds its skin, I swap pronouns.
/ drops the ball, you takes it all.

This could somewhat be fun if only
you wore a white sheet over your head.
Hollow and pale, mute too, dim, dumb, numb,
you keep transparent, spectral does not even define
what you have been since the gigantic blow hit you hard.

Dry in the southern wind you breathe no more,
eerie standing behind the ironing table, an aching back,
your eyes reflect nothing but the content of the medicine cabinet
or the high-speed trains rushing by, darting fast across the land of our dreams.
These lands have become hell, the dreams nightmares; they now give us goosebumps.

You were told this morning
this house has become too wide,
too large for a phantasmagorical thing
haunting a place that has become its jail,
a trap where dreadful thoughts billow in endlessly.

You’ve finally wasted
all the lives won in this game.
You won’t make it to the end of the world.
Doubtlessly, winter will be your shroud, buds and blossoms
will have to do without your usual care and fascination next spring.

The sun strikes the sand, the skins – all unveiled, tanned.
A black cap on an iridescent towel appears from the dune
at the back of the beach, a yard or so from the shore, a head
rests underneath, not buried in the sand – it also bears shades.

Behind those smoked glasses the eyes perceive sepia colours,
beach things: striped parasols, rainbow towels,
waves calmly licking the steep descent to the sea,
sails slowly moving on the far horizon, on the azure.

Moist and sticky from sweat and sun lotion, the bodies lie
bare naked on the sandy beach like inflated balloons
or dreamed models from a wet dream, an erotic film
played at dusk in the dark of a room, a solitary fresco.

Laughters disturb the peace, children fooling around,
a gull maybe, or a girl whose shriek erupts from nowhere
and lacerate the ears, the sun-dried dreams from half sleeps.
Other heads raise, groans are heard, bodies turn over,

ready for a second round of toasting in the blazing light
of August. All ages gather there, all shapes admitted.
Breasts and penises visible for anyone’s masked eyes,
pretending to sleep, to read, or ostensibly glazing, shamelessly.