Die Kirchenglocken haben eine Weile geläutet. Jetzt nicht mehr. Die Leute essen zu Mittag hinter geschlossenen Türen, jeder für sich oder in ganz kleinem Kreis, kein Gesang hörbar. Über die Auen und Felder, die Einsamkeit schwebt wie eine Nebelwolke, saugt alle Gedanken auf. Allein ein Vogel durchsticht das Grau, wie ein Friedenslicht leuchtend.
Tag Archives: lockdown
Heal, heal, heal
It’s that time of year again, time to crawl under my blanket and set out on pilgrimages of forgetfulness. North of here is the tomb of simple goodness – vandalized. South of here is the mausoleum of easygoing fun – in a pile of rubble. I mourn them both with a solemn bow, angry visitors pass me by with their bows and their arrows, pointed, pushing. Their eyes overcast, not a drop of kindness trickling down, just a grey drizzle of me, me, me… Maybe we simply mourn in different ways, I tell myself and I turn on an old Romanian Christmas folk ballad. It fills me with sorrow. It fills me with loss. It is like listening in on paradise past. When was the last time we sang to each other and felt like living matter that needs to be kept warm and fed – fed as in nourished?... Nothing but machines, now, between us nothing but machines between us and everything coldly feeding us to their anger. I close my eyelids and let the tears roll, roll on down, until I’m drained and the pillow is soaked I drift into visions of the vanished, I forage through conjured-up hereafters I dream things of glory I sleep, sleep, sleep…
Inarticulate
So little left to express.
Spleen? Acedia?
The signifiers have lost their signifieds and are straying.
Ideas, heavy as rock, sink to the bottom of rivers
waiting to be swept away by a sudden flood of effervescence
or settle, with the mud, along the banks of dam lakes
and rot.
Occasionally, some debris resurfaces – a severed head still smiling,
an arm, the fuselage of last year’s vacation… (or was it the year before last?!)
only to be whirled away with the rest of the waste.
March. Sleet.
Pout. Plans.
Hope.
Nothing.
Emptied of meaning, the words denote nothing.
Imponderable, impalpable, floating.
The slightest gale will whisk them up to the barren sky
like balloons (escaped? released?) out of the hands of children.
Never to return.
I don’t really miss them.
There is so little left to express.
Torpor.