M.P. Powers
Graveyard Perambulations
It’s the witching hour in Berlin, hour of pink
moons and migrating shadows, when the trains
are sleeping, when the kebab shops
are closed, when the only way home
is through the backend of a sex toy
shop and a blighted Bulgarian graveyard.
Wandering among crumbled tombstones
under fetal thickening clouds, my shoes eaten
by goat-shaped shadows and muffling
the laughter of the dead.
The dead are laughing because they are dead
and they know. A whole village of knowing
witching hour Bulgarians
laughing quietly and dead as the roots
of the grass argue with the worms
and the worms berate the church and the church
castigates a crow and the crow shouting
at the sun that sticks its purple fingers
through the trees and touches
me between the shoulderblades,
reminding me why the dead are laughing.
Love Unmaking
I know every part of her body now
and I know what not to touch.
Her shoulders are off limits.
And she doesn't necessarily like her breasts or nipples
being touched.
I never touch her when she's sleeping
as she is right now. We made love earlier
tonight, but I'm not supposed to call it that.
I'm supposed to say we had sex or we fucked.
Those are the acceptable terms.
There was nothing loving about it.
But I love the love in lovemaking,
I can't help it.
Love for me is the soul in sex and the truth beneath
the feeling and right now
I can hear her breathing
in the heavy animal darkness. She moves
her leg under the soft covers so her toes touch mine.
She runs them up and down the topside
of my foot. She must be dreaming.
This is as intimate as it gets.
Ouroboros
South
I never can be alone
on this train this train
hurling this train southward
pouring through an eyebrows
of fog and space and shadows
like dragon’s tongues
This train I can never
never never be alone on
but tonight in spirit I am
alone with the severed
moonbeam on my lap
and you and you
West
Light crumbles.
A cathedral vanishes.
Pink mist clings
to an electric billboard.
The cabin is dreaming.
The air is fat
with disembodied voices
The train is an enormous Egyptian
scarab trundling
through the city,
its frightened
eyes glowing like TV screens,
the night roaring in its wake
North
Trying to get back to you
but unable to escape
this maddening Teufelskreis.
All I do
is go round, the moonbeam
on my lap becoming
a dogeared copy
of The Divine Comedy, the song
in my ear our song
whose words I can’t
remember. I can’t even
remember when I boarded
nor who I was when
I did. I only know my heart.
I only know as it leans upon your ghost
East
The eastern light trots
out on feeble legs.
The sky has a diamond luster.
A woman is soaked
in twilight.
The train isn’t even stopping
at the stations anymore.
The train is mad-eyed.
The Ringbahn is a snake locking
its jaw around its tail.
I wait for a miracle.
We pass under dragon’s tongues.
I lean upon your ghost
CW: Toes
at the poetry
reading the poets
fashionably dressed with their fashionable
opinions and faces as soft and pink as a baby’s butt
prefaced their poems
with trigger warnings about bodily fluids
self-harm death even insects
the poets warned the audience about and after
the poetry reading I walked to the U-Bahn
station and there I saw a beggar from war-torn
Syria sitting on the concrete floor
his knees up in his chest his bare feet resting
on an old pair of shoes his feet were filthy
they had no toes
they were squared off at the ends like blocks
and when I walked
past him with my feet that had all their toes
I tried not to look down (I didn’t have any
change for him) and got on the up
escalator thinking about all the trigger warnings
he never got
never asked for even the word
pedicure could’ve been one
but he wasn't a poet
as far as I could tell.
German Punctuality
I was the last one on what I thought was the right bus.
I asked the driver to make sure. He said something
that in English sounded like "crossing." The only problem
was he was speaking German,
and I’d just taken up the language. I asked him again.
He scratched his forehead just above his nose.
He repeated himself angrily. I still didn't understand.
I tried to simplify. "Sooo, Leipzig?"
“Ja, ja…” he said.
"Danke schön ..."
I sat down a few seats behind him.
I kept an eye on him in the rearview mirror.
Above his head there was a digital clock with red numbers.
It was 6:03. At 6:05 the bus was scheduled to depart.
At 6:04 he grabbed the top of the steering wheel
with both hands
and peered at the door with his sharp vulture’s eye.
At 6:04 and about 30 seconds he began pummeling
the gum that was in his mouth,
his jaw working more furiously than ever.
6:05. BANG! He slammed the door shut, pumped the gas,
went tearing around the bend.
I looked out the window. There was a guy running
alongside the bus, his necktie streaming
over his left shoulder, a briefcase banging against his leg,
one arm frantically waving.
He kept a pretty good pace with us all the way
to the end of the parking lot,
but then we took a sharp left onto the main road.
Fuck him.
He was a couple seconds late.
The Obscure
I’m not interested in hearing the latest gossip
about the Queen of Furs or some Hawaiian-born
health-obsessed halleluiah-peddling
voice actor. I don’t want to hear any small talk,
no trivial factoids, no gridiron scores nor political opinions,
nothing to do with money, empire, big data,
the proliferation of mobile devices in Tanzania or commercial
spaceflight. I want to hear about Heraclites, the unshaven,
mad-eyed hermit, descending from his mountain retreat
in 485 BC and leaving the people four simple
words to chew on for eternity: lightning drives all things.
(Everything else is a dream).
the cynic from sinope
​
diogenes
who plato called socrates
gone mad knew nothing of muscle
cars neckties e-cigarettes
facebook 3D printing
he lived in a tub
in the streets of athens sans mortgage
wife vanity shame
scoffing at fools and wars roaming
the city with a lamp
in search of the honest man
he knew he’d never find
if I had to be anyone else
it should be diogenes, said alexander
the great
cynic minimalist rogue
comedian
my favorite story about diogenes
was when he went to a rich man’s home
and after noticing all the elaborate
furnishings the egyptian cotton
camel’s hair carpets the immaculate
gleaming floors
spit in that man’s face
because he had to spit
and his face
was the dirtiest place
in the house
Lange Nacht der Museen
Is the one night
of the year
the museums in Berlin are free to the public
and open
all night. That alone should've been
warning to stay away, but we went anyway,
starting off at the Samurai
Museum, gazing at those strange
little outfits those violent little men
would put on
like sunlight.
After that, it was the Museum of Musical
Instruments. Violins
like hanged men in glass houses,
viola da gambas,
flutes from the collection
of Frederick
the Great, Ben Franklin’s glass
harmonica.
It was better than the Espionage Museum
that was so crowded
it was like fighting your way through
a hot and stinking factory
farm for cows.
At the Unterwelt Museum,
the line of people started
outside the U-Bahn station and snaked
across a long marble floor,
slithering down a long marble flight of stairs
around a bend halfway down another flight
and into a door.
We abandoned that one,
bypassed the Planetary Museum
that had an even longer
line, and ventured yonder to the Spy Museum
where we sat alone on beach chairs in the drizzling rain,
a warped surveillance film from 1989
playing on the big screen.
We watched quite a few dull
scenes on that – it was mostly drunken punk rockers being
surveilled - then met our friends
for the tour, traveling in our damp clothes
through stale GDR rooms
with stale GDR furniture
under stale GDR
light. You could almost feel yourself sterilizing
as you paced
those gloomy wood-paneled halls.
Luckily, the tour was short
the rain
let up and we got an Uber
to some random bar, a brightly lit East Berlin
Kneipe with a balding,
taxidermized fox standing
in the window, autographed
guitars on the walls,
photos of Joe Strummer, and bellied up
to the bar
punks
ancient ones cigar store Indian
punks punks
who’d been
punks
since Helmut Schmidt was chancellor.
We watched them sway under the hot lights,
laughing,
smoking, quaffing up foamy Czech beer
as some crazy drunken
German with hair so thin
she only had three wispy dreadlocks
on the back of her head
scurried into the bathroom
and
began howling for her mother.
Finally,
a museum
worth
going to.
The Oldest
​
From a distance, it could be anything
from an overgrown mausoleum
to a blue elephant raging in a garden.
This is the oldest apartment building on the street.
This building was here before flush toilets.
It remembers the First World War,
the forced labor camps down the street,
when that madman
with the funny mustache turned its radios into earthquakes.
This building remembers the families
that were torn from her belly
and dragged off to Siberia,
never to be heard from again.
Cryptic bloodlettings, narcs with ears of schnauzers,
snub-nosed revolvers
hidden under fruit bowls
the papered walls trembling with intrigue
and shotty electricity.
This building doesn’t forget; it remembers
even the nothing years
the sunlight swept under the rug,
the old woman in classy old woman's clothes
stepping out onto a windy balcony.
This building's balconies are always
windier on the north side
where delivery trucks rumble into the blood-mist
of the dying day and drunks with pushcarts
piss in blue shadow.
Flamingo
She’d just sat down to breakfast when she noticed her ex hanging
in the grapefruit tree in her backyard.
Three days later, the tree was gone – all evidence of it –
eradicated, raked up and sodded over.
Now all that stands in the spot is a plastic flamingo,
its beady little eye glaring straight in her kitchen.
Fear and Loathing
although I don’t
or can’t
or won’t
I’ve come so close
to letting everything go
I feel like a day-old
newspaper
with a crow standing on it
to keep
the wind
from
carrying it away.
The Transient
The empty ocean, the buried moon,
your hand in my hair.
Love’s early light breaking through the window.
I know all this has less substance
than air, but so does every Bachian concerto
and the three blue
Chinese mountains.
All is shadow and shadow feeding on light,
the Tree of Life, the leaves
of each generation flourishing
for their brief seasons and letting go,
replaced in Spring.
Listen to the speech
of the birds. Watch the way the moon
joins its horns
and night comes down.
It’s the same tale
told time and again, in parables and metaphor,
ritual magic.
All is shadow and shadow
feeding on light,
the light disguised as rain, as love.
This moment that’s somehow enough.
Empty Night Monologue
It’s not even that warm in here
but I am roasting
I can’t sleep I can't keep
my limbs in one place
I tear the sheets off me
my pores
have eyes
my mind is broken
etruscan pottery
something has climbed
into me some demon
some long
dead cockroach
ancestor a minister
a murderer
my great-great-grandfather
gus wheeler
maybe it's him maybe
it's that woodcutter he killed
or a family
curse
I am beginning to see
oblivion as though it were
a palpable
thing like toenail clippers
or a papaya tree
or a robotic vacuum
cleaner
hey maybe
I won’t sleep
at all tonight
I can’t turn off my mind
I am melting I tell you
maybe I will cry
I might even dance
or fill the room with raw
unearthly
screams
I would
but my wife she’s sleeping
I can hear
the air whistling through her
nostrils
I want to tell her
how I am suffering I want to
tell her about love
about gus wheeler
about how my brain won’t shut off
but I better
not she is dreaming
I think I’ll just lie here roasting
in this
wretched
humanity
my toes wiggling.
Dispatch from a Friend’s Sofa
Nothing.
Not the Sangria or Four Roses,
not the mass of Peruvian cotton,
not the funeral air nor sea
of crickets devouring me.
Nothing
could bring me under
that night until the moon - which could
just as easily have been a cross
or Picasso’s face –
rolled down a roof
and hung on a branch outside the window,
filling my skull
with dreams.
A Dryness Hollering Out for Death
Men that I have known
who once had the strength of the mighty
Pacific in them, with backbones
made of molten organ pipes, and minds in torrid
wakefulness;
to see them now reduced
to the echo of an empty conch shell,
to husks of long departed
insects, thinning, dried-up,
cracked.
Men that I have known
who once were brimming with wild
stories and undiscovered ferocities,
washed-up now,
longing for long-gone
days, subsisting off songs
the world has long since drawn
the spirit out of and left for dead.
Maybe you’ve seen one
standing in line at the supermarket,
mowing his lawn, or driving in the car next to you,
this angry, decomposing,
pot-scraping infertility,
a dryness hollering out for death,
a stone-gray shadow.
With nothing left to say.
With nothing left to be.
With nothing left to give.
(The worse tragedy of them all.)
The men I have known.
Miami-Seattle
Two a.m., and we’re flying over the Rockies
when the old man across the aisle turns
on his overhead light. It brightens softly
his tired profile and the crisp cuffs
of his starched shirt. He takes a pen
from his coatpocket, places a yellow notebook
on his tray table and hunches over it,
writes something
down. I can barely read the word: “SALES.”
And a little under that: “CAN I
DO IT?” 30,000 feet above rock
and gorge, the small ghost towns of nowhere.
30,000 feet in a plane of sleeping
people, coughing, people snoring and an old man
awake
under his overhead light, his gray hands
trembling, his leather shoes with little brown tassels
on them, shoes of an older
generation, shoes of a man asking for rebirth:
“CAN I DO IT?” The plane lurches.
He looks up.
A sign? The light glimmers off his toes.
Cafe Kotti
It’s best here in the early mornings
on an overcast autumn day.
Sitting on the plush orange sofa, in the semi-light.
Warmed by Turkish tea, smoking rolled cigarettes.
There’s only three of us here,
and the barmaid clattering dishes in the back.
An old French song tiptoes about the room.
It’s best here when outside the weather’s grim.
When there’s just a few yellow leaves left trembling on the trees.
Sitting in this dim, uncertain light.
Sitting under a sign that says Beware of Pickpockets.
Smoke curling from my ashtray. Mumbling as I write this.
It’s best here before the crowd comes,
when it’s gloomy and cold outside, the windowpanes
speckled with raindrops. A jar of sugar and a vase
of flowers on every coffee table.
And the barmaid who smiles every time I order a tea.
The Smallest Brewery in Germany
I have just bought
a large brown
beer from the smallest brewery in Germany
and am now sitting at one
of their outside tables
across from a currywurst
trailer.
I get out my sketchbook.
I get out a pencil.
I scribble an outline
of the two old ladies sitting to the left of me.
They are eating sausages,
fat ones,
dipping them lengthwise into little sunlit pools
of mustard.
Dipping and chewing and talking with their mouths full.
I start in on their hairdos, but my view is suddenly
obscured by an old man on a bicycle.
He squeezes his airhorn to announce his arrival,
takes off his helmet,
starts chaining his bicycle to the pole.
Then he picks up his phone
and talks to someone.
This lasts for quite some time,
and when he is finished, the two old ladies
are getting up to leave.
I look around for someone else to draw.
Four dour, deranged, alcoholic faces - a parody
of Mt. Rushmore -
leer at me
from the table against the wall.
A middle-aged waitress
floats by.
An elderly man appears in the doorway of the little brewery.
He is wearing khaki trousers that are soaked
about the crotch
and down the insides of both legs.
He has pissed himself,
it would appear.
But it’s nothing that seems to matter.
He carries his beer toward
the currywurst trailer
sits at a little table over there.
Next to the trailer, on a little plastic chair,
the proprietor is sitting,
his belly resting on his lap like a medicine ball
someone has placed there.
He looks exhausted.
He looks like he’s eaten too much of his product,
all those sausages
roiling around in his guts.
I dig my eraser
from my backpack,
get rid of the old ladies,
and start where the sunlight licks the side
of the proprietor’s fleshy
jowl. Then I get in that massive maw,
the two little outspread legs.
I am almost finished
with the outline when
this beautiful young woman
(the first shot of beauty and youth I’ve seen all afternoon)
rouses him from his plastic
chair. He stands up, lumbers lugubriously
into his trailer which sinks a little
when he steps into it.
He then deals her a sausage,
a large, pale one.
And now others come, more customers,
one after another,
a long line of Germans
anxious to be fed and I’m left
there with my partly finished
outline and my dark
brown beer.
I take a sip and forget
about the drawing.
I write this poem instead.
Sunrise over Montmartre Cemetery
I am wearing the murdered clothing
of last night, my hands are cold, my feet
sore and I’m standing over
the mossy tomb of monsieur
somebody
nobody knows. apparently, he was
a field general in some lofty battle.
apparently, he had affairs, countless
insidious nights on the boulevard rochechouart,
a peculiar way of tapping his cane
to make the pigeons scatter.
monsieur somebody
means nothing
to me, but as I stand over his grave
in the murdered clothes of last night,
the rivulet of sunlight pouring into
my shirt
reminds me I am.
the cemetery in my hometown
broken little stones poking
out of the lawn
no flowers
for friends
no trees in the place
the tombs here are gorgon's teeth
their epitaphs
rubbed clean
long yellow weeds chafing their sides
the landscapers
here don't bother cutting the weeds
with weedwhackers
if they can't reach them
with their riding mowers fuck it
why bother
it’s not like the dead care
they’re dead
even mud
is more animate than them
besides no
visitors ever come
to visit them anymore
they’ve been lying with the chinch bugs
in the mud
so long no one remembers
no one gives a damn
the world has moved on
from whatever
they were whatever they left
what were they anyway
but shadows cast by some moonlit vine
the wind chasing its tail
all of us
everyone
the same at last.