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Madness  Aug 2014
Bruchteile
Madness Aug 2014
Sie fragten, weshalb ich schreibe.*

Ich habe lange mit meinen Gedanken herumgespielt,
aber meine Mutter hat mich all die Jahre liebevoll gelehrt,
dass man nicht mit sinnlosen Gedanken spielen darf.
Ich habe nachgedacht, bin durch Straßen gerannt,
bin auf Füßen von anderen herumgetrampelt, und
weitergerannt, umgedreht, und ehrlich entschuldigt.
Habe an meinem Stift gekauft – vermummt von Wor-
ten und habe Bruchteile von Radiergummifussel ver-
streut. Habe überall gesucht, in den Strömen des Re-
gens, in den alten Adern der Blätter am Straßenrand,
nicht mal im Bröckeln der Asphaltrillen habe ich ent-
denkt.  

Es hatte mich Nächte gekostet, einen Punkt für das
Fragezeichen zu finden;
aber, oh Gott, ich habe den Punkt gefunden, denn
der Punkt liegt in meinem Herzen, ich trage Worte
in meinem Herzen – lauter als mein und dein Herz-
schlag zusammen;
und nun hat mein Herz Ringe unter den Augen.
Mateuš Conrad Sep 2016
today was the second time i became a spontaneous ****** - only the second time that a couple ****** in suburbia, without window-blinds and not beneath the sheets - she was on top... just walking past with a beer, headphones on; and indeed my development bypassed teenage hormone harmonisation: to need the opposite - an advanced curiosity aged 8 - prior to actual ***** production - King Onan - which meant that my hormonal chaos atypical of teenagers never set it... i never appreciated a sense of hormonal binding to strive for relationships of this kind of bonding - it's not a complexity that i'd below out from the mountains, more from the gutters... once upon a time i could have taken interest in women in the hormonal crescendo - some tried to state they too were adept at premature findings of the genitals and the bone ***** of the hand imitating **** ***: well, better the **** in your hand, than your, ahem, in the blessed muscular ease of the prostate - or some dare believe.

a crude beginning - but necessary -
however many theories they throw at me,
i feel in limbo of dissatisfaction -
only today i learned that i wasn't born
an entertainer: i should have written
two or three major poems and stood up
and bellowed out a cry of mercy and
rebellion - i don't believe Mozart hummed
any of his pieces after writing something:
if he was a violinist he probably would
have written two pieces, and rambled about
Austria with those two pieces:
writing very little after. i figured: what have
i got to lose, if i end up a dwarf miner,
and keep mining? the mix of seeing stand-up
comedy, and then seeing the opera Werther:
the last scene, where Werther is dying...
i don't know how the opera singer did it -
he shot himself and lay on the stage: singing...
that must have been hard, singing opera while
lying down...
                         but something dawned to me
in the morning today, i woke up and opened up
a book in the price range of £25 - £35...
only a preview, but that's sometimes enough
(the most i ever spent on a book? in Barnados
Edinburgh, £30) - Hölderlin's hymns "germania"
   and "the rhine", by m. heidegger -
and lying on my back, i started reciting Germania,
    
nicht sie, die seeligen, die erschienen sind,
     die götterbilder in dem alten lande,
     sie darf ich ja nicht rufen mehr, wenn aber
     ihr heimatlichen wasser! jezt mit euch
     des herzens liebe klagt, was will es anders
     das heiligtrauernde?
                      the oddity of writing poetry but not
necessarily thinking about voicing it -
    on top of mountains, atop large crowds -
    like a serpent in Eden, i guess, being the more
    appropriate consideration -
     *not those, the blessed ones who once appeared,
      divine images in the land of old,
      those, indeed, i may call no longer, yet if
     you waters of the homeland! now with you
     the heart's love has plaint, was else does it want,
     the holy mourning ones?

perhaps poetry as an aversion toward modern philosophy,
unchallenged systematisation, imagine dropping
a Platonic dialogue into these gargantuan volumes -
half of them would turn into cf. of encyclopedic entries,
or how dialectics turned out to be: dialectic solipsism -
a natural aversion toward prose -
         the rigidity of narrator's curiosity or disposal
of understudies of the narrator: characters with pithy
one liners - or sometimes truly rebelling against
the puppeteering: akin to Ivan and the Inquisitor
in the Brothers Karamazov - perhaps poetry is all
but a rebellion against all literary movements -
but the point being: for the first time i lay in bed
and recited poetry, smoking cigarettes and drinking
has really changed my voice, for the first time
i noticed the orating voice i have, conversations aside,
a warm-up in German, i don't know, i have a fetish
for German and Jewish mysticism -
i'm taking English back into Saxony - no au pairs
and airs and colonial ******* on the natives,
back to the roots - if ever on stage, i don't know,
i might decide that the gamble paid off,
that i decided to create more material than write two
poems and shout them at the world to listen
and pay attention... i'd lie down... yep... i'd lie down
on the stage: to place rhythm and open up my stomach,
as i did in bed today... start warming up in German,
and then launch into English - and sometimes swaying
in Latin, Polish and the odd Greek -
             if they can have stand-up comedy,
             i'm sure they can have lay-down poetry -
cigarette rasp and the water-hole echo drum:
                 paraphrase with a way to antidote modern
society and the constant: purpose-built negation of
autobiographical facts of other people - Sartre's bad faith
association - i don't understand why people have
this inherent need to deny someone their autobiography -
oh right, not glamorous enough, not enough cocktail
parties, not enough Marlin Monroes -
it's not a good enough autobiography without any
thespians, apparently -
                                            and after years at it,
                           you turn into turtle skinned observer -
god forbid shouting this to the world...
          perhaps an innovation is needed - well, i might
find out when i go to Cheltenham - there's a free
even: pub crawling and talking literature,
    and there i'll be, with a freshly printed copy of my
verse... someone gives me a mic, i go onto the stage,
lie down, and recite a poem... who knows?
          after 9 years at it, 11,740 and so many deleted,
i might grow a pair of ***** about that time and, for
the first time, hear whether what i write is any good.
Max Neumann  Nov 2019
Folk Music
Max Neumann Nov 2019
a daughter
named seble
seven years old

being in a coma

she couldn't hear her
daddy's words

she couldn't see him
fog in front of her eyes
covering differences of
sleep and wakefulness

oneday seble's father
who was desparate
put headphones
on seble's ears

lyrics from two tall germans
they are called the
"wildecker herzbuben"

"herz" means heart and a
"bube" is a boy

seble
closed eyes
slowly breathing

seble's father is called
brhane
rapidly breathing

brhane was pressing play
and after seconds
among lurid lights

seble
harvest
moved her head
seble closed eyes smiled
as the wildecker herzbuben sang:

"Ein letztes Glas'l mit alten Freunden
die geh'n allein nach Haus.
In den Straßen
in den Gassen
geh'n langsam die Lichter aus."

a last drink with my buddies
who go home alone
in the streets
in the alleys
the lights are vanishing

seble moved her head
no windows but
her daddy was there

sebles mother is not alive
anymore
brhane prayed
holding his daughter's hand

seble opened one eye
looking at brhane

seble came back to reality when
brhan had finished his talk to
god

the end of seble's and brhane's
story is wordless