1. Rennecke

Veronika arrived in a metropolis, labelled the metropolis, which was how she knew it was time to burn future maps. some part-docile, part-elongated animals snoozed in doorwayed shadows. Joe could not make up his mind: were there intensities of goldenrod & mechanised butterflies in 0.75 of novellas of the 1850s, or was the toyshop a front organisation for terroristic translated texts of the new empiricism? just as she was about to lose them, Joe found Veronika’s beautiful pearl shoes. no one loved the taste of potato soup more than Otto. it was Susan’s job to document graffito-ised bus shelters. "Stop fluttering about" Rennecke is telling me. Her mouth is full of pins. I like it when her mouth is full of pins. I like her implications of moth like behavior on my part because this is theater and moths are the first ladies of theater. And everything is dry here, years of water spilled and dried up leaving that smell that tells you once there was water and after that cigarette smoke. And the costumes smell like this and also like ghost, like traces of ghost sweat. Step out in ghost sweat and flutter against lights that slow time. then of course it all comes back

16 magpies in a tree

miles and miles of graveyard

the misty country lane

random cumulus clouds

talk old oaks

and as morning paints its lips

you promise me you will keep safe

in the summer when the swallows never came

I see you looking out of the window

near the railway station

I wonder what you see

by the red post box

by the chemists

over the humped back bridge

it isn’t straight forward

there are no warnings

and the pregnant woman sits in the cafe

then we are gone

like taxis, I’ve just told Rennecke: “I’ve never been to Düsseldorf.” she always believes a word I say, but now she certainly trusts me. there’s something horrifying about the light dripping down from the Düsseldorf sky this middle morning; it’s so speculatively usual, amnesia of all revolutionary discourse. & my left arm hurts. I don’t think it will ever recover, it’s been like this for so long. I can’t stop wondering if Otto shoplifts potatoes – I’ve eaten some toast, but that’s not the answer. a dead bird floats through the un-pearly sky reciting an alphabet and it’s night again, kind of. Soon I will be there and it will be limited space and I will walk to the dotted edge of that space. I will know in an instant when I’ve gone beyond and I will hesitate in a real hesitation. Not a fake hesitation, not the kind that is meant to demonstrate a change of thought. A real misreading of the internal compass and they will see it and know it. And I will think, this morning I was eating toast and it was just as awkard. I don't know what they see or what they don't. Otto looks on me with love. What for? He will be there third row or so.

We came here and stayed.

But nothing more is known or remembered.

Glazed ceramic. Polished table top. Ash tray.

Then in the dream you cry out so I stroke your back.

Soon it will be morning and we can drive to the ferry and leave.

We played chess beneath the deafening seagulls blown in from the coast.

And in your eyes a hint of the irish potato famine. Grey stone walls. Suitcase.

In the hotel the room was full of perfume.

When the rain came and we wept and walked through the gardens

under the cypress tree

full of hungers.