Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: poet

  • the blooming grime

    Though I live in one of the grimiest areas of Berlin, and that’s pretty grimy, right now and for a few short blessed weeks I can walk – from my house – clear down to the UBahn station – under an alleyway of pink cherry blossom.

    It’s like a fairytale. All I have to do is cross to the middle of a major road and then walk down the raised dividing strip, which now after months of litter and dirt is transformed into dense grass and litter, and then I walk, as if entranced, among the flowering trees, burying my face in their lowest-hanging blooms.

    Traffic roars on either side but I don’t care, I am in wonderland, and I walk this almost every day. Yesterday there was a hailstorm – Spring! – so I was able to gather handsful of the foaming blossom that had been stripped off the trees by sparks of hail the size of unbroken buds.

  • writing hardily

    Today I was writing in a cafe and when I pulled out my laptop to transcribe out of a messy notebook the woman next to me got up and slid between our tables, saying something over her shoulder under her breath. “I’ve just come from the office…” I was wondering why she would feel so insecure that she would need to explain her movements to a stranger when it sank in – as she sank in, to the bench seat opposite – what it was that she had said: “Ich komme gerade vom Büro, I’ve just come out of the office and I don’t want people doing their office work around me.” The funny thing was she was clutching her mobile phone like it was a huge reefer she was about to lift on the ball of the hand to her lips, and the flickering of her screen had caught my eye and momentarily bothered me, before I caught myself and realised how insane it was to resent someone for poring over their screen while I pored over mine. She was staring at me across the room, I raised my shoulders and spread my hands. “Was, denn?” She called the waitress over and repeated her complaint in the exact same words: “I’ve just come out of the office and I don’t want people doing their office work around me.” Around the flower arrangement she pointed me out. The waitress shrugged helplessly, her face relapsing from an attempt at sympathy into a foolish smirk. What could she say? I let go the sward of ideas I had built in the air as they demolished themselves and dissolved in the face of such tiny, such concerted ill-will, and took out my notebook again and tried to let my gaze fall into the precise point of the middle distance where happiness and contemplation and, it sometimes seems, poetry lie thick on the chilly air like leaves on the ice. I told myself this place – a “literary cafe” attached to a bookshop – would not exist if not for writers like me and took up my pen again and foraged on.

  • up in the smoke

    Something annoying I remember from the endless days of smoking and working is how ganja made me very prone to toppling off the painstaking and yet somehow effortless vertical tower of rope bridge that is composition and new invention. I so easily got sidetracked into nitty-gritty nothingry. Looking back it was as if my mind, stoned, could not readily distinguish between these two states: thus I’d be sailing along with a belly full of sailing wind, writing some glorious new tale that had never in the history of Man been told before, and my mind would go: hang on a minute, is that really how you spell epiphany? Or I would look up hours later to find I’d been bogged down somehow in the endless researches or adminiaturism, a smaller and narrower form, a kind of thinking that is usually available to any poet when they’re not stoned, when they are bored, or when they can’t actually come up with a new poem to write. It was frustrating and I’m glad not to inflict it on myself no more.

  • dancing friend

    I can’t stop crying. A friend of mine, a musician from Berlin, just wrote to say, do I just use your online postage calculator to pay for a poetry book? I’d like to pre-order. The books themselves are sitting tidily by me as I write, in four perfect cartons, we picked them up a few hours ago from the specialist binder who opened one volume to riffle through, saying, “This paper! It’s lovely, it was lovely to bind.” I am rather surprised how many poems have found their way into the collection, it is a lovely square-edged, strong-shouldered, upright beautiful book containing all the good work I have done in verse form since round about Y2K – when the world was intact, computers were optional: way back then. My friend wrote, I have been reading your story about how the printing got done. He said he liked it, “just as I immensely appreciate every post you make.” I hadn’t realised he was reading me, it feels like a sweet subtle connecting of our souls over all the cold lonely dark miles of sea and air. He wrote, “Time to pay back – literally.” Then my partner, another Berliner, gasped from the other room. He was fixing something on the site he built for me: this one. I ran in to see. My friend had bought every book I’ve ever published plus a download of my album. He bought the lot. He paid about forty-five dollars in postage. I sat down and put my hands over my face and cried and cried. After a few minutes my lover came closer and touched my hair tenderly. “Are you sad?” he wanted to know. “Oder freust du dich, or are you rejoicing?” I nodded, could not speak. “All die Jahre der Dürre,” he said, gently: all the years of drought.

  • the godfather underground

    Riding on the train underground I feel like a caterpillar carving through the belly of the city. The hungry metallic smell of the train’s breath is become familiar as I jog down the steps to Underworld. Sitting and writing and sitting and writing. I glanced up and caught the eye of an elder gentleman standing with his son against the glass doors, watching benignly. He said, across the carriage, “Schoene Schrift!” Lovely handwriting. Oh! I said. Thank you. And he nodded and nodded. I went back to my page. Filled it and turned to another and smoothed it down. Finished what it was I was saying and capped my pen and slipped the book into my bag. The doors opened onto the platform and this man and his son, my age, were standing beside me. He stepped back to let me past. “Alles schoen aufgeschrieben,” everything nicely written up, he said, with great satisfaction. Unintrusive and approving, like a kind of fairy godfather.