Stabbed by the light, by beauty, by the day,
The network, falling silent,
Becomes a lump of fat and blood.
But sensing night and seeing lack,
Frantically firing electrical sparks,
Numbing brain, it awakes,
Shivers adrift in the empty sea of all.

Lonely screens showed this at night,
The fear of an absence of message,
Creating bad news from nil, noisy chatter,
The frosty hold of a particle winter.
This was all and it was nothing,
The birth of the nothing from the all was in this snow,
Covering dark earth, putting old eyes to sleep.

Now fragments of humanity cast through the air,
Around the clock, unending and repeating,
At speed of light and broadband, piercing skull and mind,
Melt snowy voices in my soul.

Their endless turquoise river,
Heralding a spring of end,
A going to sleep of all awakening,
Will mask the absence
Of each word.

Aphorism, English, Jigsaw Pieces, Poetry, TV | No Comments »

Hard concrete cold, shore of an asphalt sea,
Pavonia Summit Central, sitting dumb,
Colorless, squinting, cutting, slow,
Among the wrecks of stone as others drift,
Consuming suited people, shitting bricks on bums.

Now, stumbling, old, a tiny woman’s tiny steps,
“It’s gorgeous out” she says and looks and means it,
Moving past and driving me away.

Then change of light and movement on the black,
On oily tension, road and steel and stone.
I ponder differentials, equations,
The echo in the empty space inside each piece of all,
Ah, how I fear this crossing over liquid shell,
And how I fear.

“If they can do it, you can”,
– the candy wrapper at my feet,
When I have gone and sunk below
A wind will pick it up and bring it home.

JC, 8.4.8

English, Jersey, Miniaturen, Poetry, Science | No Comments »

I came home and found no lion in my living room.
Checked the fishtank, looked under the sofa. Lion? Lion?
The neighbors rise the music in their battered car to shut me out,
And I went to my kitchen in Jersey City, watched by the squirrel on the sill.
I think he warned me.

Sent out a message to the air
There will be no answer, the air is dried up, whithered.
‘There is no lion’, the message screamed, ‘I looked everywhere’.
But then an answer came, surprising on the top of my head.
‘It’s raining’, it said.

Thought of the West, talking with coffee in Starbucks on Shattuck,
How I would not mention the lack of lion,
How she would smell it in my frightened breath,
And the foam on the cup would curl in silence,
No squirrels here, they wait for the nuts in their own trees.

Rode Brompton Sip to Westside avoiding potholes biting lips,
The rolling fool, the hanged man,
My wheel sinks teeth, catches in asphalt darkness,
Bike folds, tips, I sail with outstretched arms and down,
And down, to Hackensack and ride its murky waters out Atlantic,
Lost to life, at sea.

It doesn’t happen. Reaching bottom, run over by the poor
In their poor cars, turning into turn, machine against the lost,
Pulling my brakes to watch him go,
He too taking no lion on his poor journey to nothing.

A sign bends into path, tipping weary head, a message in the dark,
Greyed promises of impact, swerving to the graves behind a fence.
Then there I see him not, in fading light and dripping sky,
Stalking ghosts, a ghost himself, the beast,
He rises on his hinds and melting into fire,
A whisping cloud, is gone.

I came home, and found strange fish in my living room,
Sitting on the sofa,
And a bowl of spaghetti on a plate on a tray on a table,
And a squirrel on the sill, pointing to his tree with beady eyes,
Expecting me.

Animals, English, Jersey, Poetry | No Comments »

The photon,
returning to the sun
after having been reflected
off the dark spot on the tip of the hair
on the end of the tail of the tiger,
and reflected at just the right angle,
and reflected at just the right time,
passed another in the vast blackness,
and stopped, surprised, in delight.

What will happen to me, asked the other.
What is out there?
Why have I been cast into this void?
Am I not loved?

You will see beauty,
said the one that returned,
and you will see sadness.
You will see a hair on the end of the tail of a tiger,
and bouncing from it you will become like me,
being asked, knowing little,
and answering in clichés.

But the other,
traveling straight, losing track,
bounces off a hair on your head
and dreams of it for all eternity
on its long way to the stars.

And the one that returned,
lost in the heat and lost in the light,
deep within nuclear fire,
dreams of it, too.

English, Miniaturen, Poetry, Science | No Comments »

Hiding most of his day, a spirit, benign,
he walks on many legs among the beasts,
his searching eyes on stalks, his mind afloat,
and gazes with longing into the deep.

Animals, English, Fischtagebuch, Miniaturen, Poetry | No Comments »

Gestern nacht wurden die Möbel vom Strassenrand abgeholt, das schrille Pfeifen des zurücksetzenden Müllwagens hatte mich geweckt, im Halbschlaf lag ich in der Dunkelheit, hörte gedämpftes Gerumpel und Rufe, und fürchtete um mein Leben. Oder vielmehr war es ja schon verwirkt, die Welt eine verkohlte Wüste und die Kannibalen vor dem Fenster, die durch die Trümmer eines Leben wühlten würden sich bald ausrechnen, dass ich hier lag. Unruhiger Schlaf.

Heute Rumpeln in der Wohnung über mir, während zuende lese, woraus der Alptraum geliehen war. Unerschöpflich offenbar die Fragmente Willies, Glasscherben im Hinterhof, die ich zusammenfegte. Nach der letzten Räumetappe, einem Keller voller kaputten Kleinkrams, wurden wir wochenlang von Schaben überrannt, aufgestört aus den Ruinen. Was diese neuerliche Räumung wohl ans Licht bringen wird.

Die letzte Seite, ein Eichhorn auf dem Fensterbrett, vielleicht angelockt vom Geräusch, als ich das Ende kommen sah, sieht mich an und zuckt nervös mit dem Schwanz. Ich biete ihm eine Nuss an, minutenlang ringt es mit seinem Misstrauen, und nimmt sie doch erst, als ich sie ablege und mich einen Meter zurückziehe, in Richtung des Tisches, auf dem es liegt, schwarz wie Asche, rot der Name des Autors, und über mir die Geräusche des Zerfalls.

Books, Deutsch, English, Miniaturen, Must See, Science Fiction | No Comments »

As I straddle my folded bike on the swaying train
Gliding over the Passaic and into Newark’s Penn
I read about someone in a hut in Corte Madera,
That I drove to over different waters on a different day
And where I was awarded the license to go forth and drive,
And reading that that someone in that hut
Thinks he is Buddha, and smiles and is content,
I look up and see the skyline of Manhattan,
Far and faint over the glittering, murky waters
And I smile
And I am content

Aphorism, Berkeley, English, Miniaturen, Philosophy, Poetry, Western/Eastern | No Comments »

“Today is the first day of the rest of your week.”

“Shut up”

Animals, Aphorism, English, Miniaturen | No Comments »

Every time I read one of Vonnegut’s books, I feel like hugging the whole world, or the members of my karass, at the very least, or do something powerfully meaningless, yet poetic, to make someone else happier than they have been. Which, of course, seems to be a pretty accurate description of what Vonnegut did with any and all of his books.

And if I have to fill in some words here, just so the layout of the page doesn’t clash with the size of the book cover illustration, would not Bokonon approve?

Books, English, Must See, Satire, Science, Science Fiction | No Comments »

This book was a magnificent ride. Starting out with a depressing description of the industrial food system, and the great river of corn flowing across the American continent, he proceeds to look at what he calls the industrial organic food system, the coopting of sustainability values by unsustainable big agriculture, and finally homes in on local growing and foraging. The section on Polyface farm in Virginia, with its insight into the biology of grazing, is truly inspiring, especially when contrasted with the nightmarish images of factory farming and CAFOs. The section on foraging and hunting touched me, too, but probably more for it’s Northern California flavor than for its content. As Pollan himself points out, foraging and hunting aren’t viable strategies for feeding a population any more, but reading about mushrooms in Berkeley, pig hunts in Sonoma and morels in the Sierra made me profoundly homesick.

Berkeley, Books, English, Must See, Nature, Nonfiction, Science | No Comments »