Here is an excerpt from the opening of The Initiate, available on Amazon.

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                                                                                                        (1.)

 

Berlin in Spring, and the roar of underground trains, lilac buildings under radiant purple clouds, Italian madrigals spilling through half-open windows, avenues of lime trees, advertisements in neon, shisha bars, the Fernsehturm, graffiti of dragons.

     Light fails and the rain falls.

     The city slashed away by glares diamonds cathedral spires half-veiled outcries, the quivering semblances of the people. They pass through me in a heave of mists, dark sultry shapes floating on rhythms of whispering white echoes. They pass through me like blackbirds in a mulberry forest at dusk, carrying with them whistling air brakes and the throne of Saturn, a nausea of soaked flowers.

     Walking along in the silvery-blue drizzle, from streetlight to streetlight and palace to Platz, slender pitches of fog lifting along the vanishing alleyways, a quartz clock glowing in a window drinking up shadow. Kafka’s immaculate laughter groping through hallways of Portuguese marble.

     And the people pass through me.

     Glancing spirits like the last refrains of some dissolving orchestra, their eyes lips adrenal glands kidneys trachea bones eaten by imaginary water-maggots and gone up into syllables of diaphanous cloud.

     Walking in a blur of whirling color, past second-hand shops and the Seer from Erbil, a gambling parlor with shuttered windows and the front door open, odor of honey baklava from a Turkish bakery, old men in a dim lit Kneipe telling cock-and-bull stories, doom palpitating, erotic gardens dimly glowing and now the hour comes down.

     Merlin tunes his instruments.

Enchanted skewers of bloody light glitter off the hood of a Ford Capri Turbo. Egyptian cobras and golden zucchini singing in the Chamber of Amazia.

     And the people they pass through me.

 

                                                                                                      (2.)

 

It was a Tuesday night, my third night in the city, and the poetry reading was at a little bar in Mitte. The event had been organized by a British poet and software engineer who went by the sobriquet The Charles Bukowski of Berlin. His real name was Nigel Slocock, and when I arrived at the bar, he was standing at the door looking smug and fisting a wad of euros.

   “Are you The Charles Bukowski of Berlin?” I asked.

   A big grin lit up his face. “I’ve been called that,” he said. “I didn’t come up with the name myself. It came from an article someone wrote about me.”

   “Ah,” I said. Then I told him I’d read on the website where it said Open Stagers Welcome… Register on the Night. “Is there still room for me?”

   “Yeah, we still have a few slots open. We're choosing names at random. Not sure exactly when you'll go on. I’ll let you know. It’s €3.”

   “To read?”

   “No, that’s the admission fee. Everyone pays it. It’s €3.”

     I paid, wandered inside.

     The bar was empty. I ordered a beer in German. I said Bier. Then I sat in the corner and felt a shiver of terror run through me. I’d never read poetry to a live audience before. Poetry to me had always been a solitary pursuit, something between me and my computer and the occasional publisher. It was never something I’d considered trotting out to a roomful of drunks. But a lot had changed in the last three days. I had especially changed. And who knew what any given night in Berlin could bring? The city was magical, the possibilities seemed infinite.

     I dug into my backpack and plucked out Nightseamusic, the poetry collection I’d just self-published and was hoping to sell to someone, anyone. Just one reader, I said to myself. That’s all it’ll take. One good and discerning reader… 

     I read a few lines from the poem I was planning to read. It all seemed so easy there, at the bar, but what about on stage? What if my hands start shaking? What if I burst into a noxious sweat? What if I freak the fuck out? I kept reminding myself that I was a nobody, that I didn’t know anyone in the whole city, or country, or continent for that matter. No one would care one way or the other. But saying it only slightly helped. I took a pull of my beer, kept reading in horror.

   Meanwhile, the room started filling up with people. All the ragged-ass sofas around the stage were now occupied, leaden tobacco smoke hung in the air, and downtempo house music played over the speakers. On stage, two technicians were fumbling with a mechanical dove inside a glass case. The dove looked dead. Was it supposed to be? No, there it goes. It’s flapping its wings, rising to the top on a little string. Happy about that, the technicians then exited the stage, the lights dimmed, a purple curtain parted, and here came old Nigel Slocock, round-shouldered, swaggering onto the stage.

   “Willkommen meine Damen und Herren!” he said, and grinned. He then he hauled off into a monologue that seemed to go on forever. In it, he talked about himself. Then he talked about himself talking about himself. Then finally, he talked about the show. “We have a very spectacular evening planned for you tonight, ladies and gentlemen. It’s not just going to be poetry. We also have a folk-singing duo from Vienna, a juggler, a pantomimist, a ukuleleist from Wales and a young woman from Oakland who will be performing… well, you’ll see for yourself. It’s gonna be great, hevorragend even – I love that word. But first, here’s Katerina R. (I let out a sigh of relief), a native Berliner who has written something for us in German about life in the East before the wall came down.”

     He sidled off the stage and Katerina appeared in the back of the room, her leonine mane shining, her low-cut polka dot dress brushing people as she weaved around the sofas. She stepped onto the stage, took the mic. “Hallo,” she said, and gave a shy little smile that quickly vanished. She then mumbled something under her breath, pulled a sheet of paper out of her front pocket, unfolded it, and began reading in German. I didn’t understand a word of it. My German skills were limited to the most rudimentary phrases. But there was something about the strange intensity in her eyes, and the way those words floated with the moody background music that had me mesmerized. I was also slightly terrified. It seemed like she’d rehearsed the whole thing beforehand. Had all the poets rehearsed beforehand? Were they all going to be reading to background music? Was I the only one who would read unrehearsed, in silence?

I drained my beer, ordered another, and sat there dying inside as Katerina’s performance played out.

Luckily, I wasn’t called after her. The ukuleleist from Wales came up next and was followed by an Australian poetess in gypsy caravan garb who played guitar and sang of “dismantling the patriarchy.”

After her came the headliner of the night, a short-haired brunette from Oakland who went around the room passing out pens and scraps of paper. Our assignment was to write down the meanest thing we’d ever heard anyone say to a woman and drop it into the bowler hat she was carrying. She then took the hat into the back room, and about ten minutes later, she came out naked but for a pair of strappy high heels. Her expression was glum. She was holding a bag of flour in one hand and a tube of lipstick in the other. She stepped onto the stage, stood there under a hot beam of red lights, beautiful but sad-eyed, staring out at the audacious audience. The mechanical dove then lit up in neon and flapped its wings, rising on the string. Organ music played ominously as she tore open her flour sack, lifted it over her head and dumped the contents all over her, rubbing it around her breasts and thighs and belly. She then placed the empty sack on the floor and applied the cranberry-red lipstick to her lips and her chest where she scrawled angrily the words FUCK ME. Then she meandered through the crowd with the bowler hat, stopping here and there for someone to pluck a scrap from the hat and read to her what had been written. It was usually something about her being overweight or ugly (she was neither), and after she’d absorbed the insult, she would gaze down at the floor as if defeated and move on to the next.