Bringing In The Harvest by Serge Gurkski (short books for teens txt) 📕

Poetics

A dance begins within my heart,
and to my muse’s murmured tune
both of my encephalospheres
adjust their halting steps to please
each other’s choreographies


Bar Flying High

I get world’s wisdom through my nose
and I’m too cool to snap my fingers.
I wear gloves, actually, because
my velvet-skinned hands are holy.
Here and there I’m forced to kiss
wet lips; the ladies approve.
They buy me drinks and show the goods.

Eventually, between two fixes, I might sit down
and play some sexy piano Jazz.

The truth, of course, is, that I’m nowhere near desire
when I come with fingers spread out on the keys.
I still need the warmth of your breasts and a downer
to make it into the night.
And you want me to keep the gloves on.


After You've Gone

Prolegomenon

Police showed me the photos:
a swollen head on
the blood-soiled pillow,
the tongue leaving a gray
smudge on it,
limbs distorted
in rigor mortis.

Your beautiful, but now fish-like
eyes gaze into the heart
of another galaxy.

You write, that you
want me to go on.
Thank you for the pain!

I cleaned your last domicile,
then sat down on your bed.
I had told you
about that girl in Berlin,
sending herself to eternal
sleep with 80 pills of X.

Una nox dormienda!
How to live now?

I To inhumate your scent

I have to leave to puke, and
then I can’t stop breathing in
the scent you left on the linen.

Your body had disappeared,
warm landscape of desire:

They tell me, they
filled up an urn with your ashes
and buried it in wet mud.

I cannot close my eyes because
your scent numbs me;
I cannot stay awake,
because nothing can numb
this throbbing agony of loss.

II Golden Brown

Golden brown: amber on the beach at dawn,
your hair in late spring,
the fluid I inject into my vein, whiskey ,
the color of my lover’s eyes, which,
when she comes, explodes
in streaks of yellow and red and
turns into a soothing greenish-brown,
when her eruptions boil down and I hold her.

The light was golden brown on that August
afternoon when I first visited your grave nestled
against a slender birch, that swayed like a young giraffe
in an upcoming summer tempest.

I stared at the wrong date of death engraved
in your tombstone, had to grin because
you would have, too. Mom never got it right.
And you never knew it, but she loved you.

It’s become hard to handle everyday affairs,
the golden brown keeps me going, mom
swallows pills.


Bateau Caraïbe

It is so cold outside,
even the flakes
are reluctant to fall.

But through the secret
passage of my ears
my mind trips
to the humid,
rhythmically crooked
Jazz of a Caribbean coast.

To avoid clichés,
the vista will be all gray.
So watch us smoking in the mud.
Wait: that’s a reverse cliché!
Imagine the WHY of BEING
being drummed into mind’s
most intimate core.

You crave an image for
This sweet drunken piano discord?
Hang …on … it… is:
A festive cruise ship
red –nosed, yelling: Cheers
before it drowns
in a sea of booze...


Abuse Me As An appetizer


When she tries to kiss me
I turn my head away,
as I promised you.

I’m building up
a wall of silence
between her and me,
subtly, not to hurt her
more than necessary,
as I promised myself.

Somehow
I’m not in love
with anyone
but you
anymore.

It’s only fair
to abuse me
as an appetizer
for your dreaming,
to pay me back
in my own coin,
in the sweetest way.


Cold

It‘s cold outside: I almost pull my t-shirt down.
Sometimes when I rest I picture myself as big-toothed reptile.
As if in Kafka’s Verwandlung.
I can wait. Long. In the sun.
Absorb perfumes behind perfumes.
But women are for later. I just observe
it all right now, in clear daylight, getting baked.

What did you think: I sit in a park at a fountain.
I’m your usual unshaven stinking hobo. My advantage:
I know you, sweet, but you don’t yet know me.
“since I recently,” I say to no one but maybe
sparrows resting in safe distance, “ I feel like
maybe,I” , and I touch or clutch my heart,
“step back a bit or down?” I say to Jim,
but Jim is dead. Strange, I saw him just a second ago.

You know, if I ever should see a doc
I’d tell them I’m an entertainment junkie:
I really need to watch them all, those
Normalpeoplewhoworkfortheirlivinggoodbreadwinnersyouknow

My square and star-like alligator’s eyes blink
in poisoned gold-like yellow whenever one passes
here at the river side. I might get hungry in the dusk.


Dance So Good


Just before the day I’ll be dying more than a little let me show you some of those cozy niches I discovered wandering bravely along my private paths of madness. One of these hides up on a slope at the backside of an ancient castle. Back from the taxidermist you can put my padded body next to you on the low stone bench garlanded by bushes of lilac and inhale the panorama of the river delta far down below with all its seven shades of green and three shades of brown and the azure of the sky being messed up by the gray billowing clouds of sad memories.
Until then I’ll keep hovering above my nest of stones that talk of neighbors. I am unkempt and sweating, nude except for the shadow covering my genitals, sipping from a small glass of cuba
libre, with my lungs feasting on the biting smoke of my cigarette. I open my mind like a begging hand expecting metaphors like hummingbirds to settle down on it and disturb the perfect symmetry of the boredom of being.
At that flickering instance of the night, when sleep catches your breath, you tell the ruins of my mind to dance so good.


Faun At The Foot Of The Fountain

I wish i was a marble
faun at the foot of the fountain
in the heart of the market of the town,
where life swarms.

Instead I sit on the steps of that fountain,
squinting at the antsy rustling around me,
grabbing my bottle tighter.

I have since recently fallen in love with that
marginally overweight businessman
gulping from his pocket flask
while waiting for his tram,
because I love the expression of fear
in his face that I know so well.

And I love even more the posh secretary
smoking nervously, stomping her stilettos
on the sidewalk, because she
leaves her package of cigarettes
on the bench for me every single
day of her working week.

The rest I majestically ignore.
The same straying dog meets me at eight
with a mouth full of hedonistic laughter
and throws his meager body against mine
to get the night shiver out of our bones.


Desperate Gardens


I’m so used to getting up early,
that even when dead drunk
I cannot fall asleep at 6 a.m.

Not that I can do anything substantial.
I just lie awake watching the sun rise
and close my eyes and step down
into my brilliant mind and recite
my most beloved Roethke poem:
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade …

Eventually I’ll throw one blinking eye out
my bedroom window into my desperate gardens
and watch an old huffy crow
sit on a skeleton tree
observing ostentatiously
a shrieking flock of greed-bitten sea-gulls
passing by.
And then I almost wish to fade away.


Easter


Easter, say mid – nineties, my love:
Let me cite Poe to tell you just how much …
You are so pretty and your soul is so fragile
I just cannot show you yet
the pain that is tearing my heart into pieces.
Hurry on, you say, my parents are waiting,
Out of breath I take a deep look at you.
Oh, what a piercing pain right through my heart!
I do not love you anymore.
I’m falling out of love with you
right now.
And later at your parents,
surrounded by heaps of easter-eggs
I drink a lot
to forget
what I never said.


Black Ram (kara koyunlu)


High Society-ish we lie around:
There is a smoke a-wandering,
oil of opium, hashish and spices
palatalizing it.

One of the impressively
bearded Kurds in the lounge
of the hotel Kara Koyunlu,
has brought up the conversion topic again:
“Don’t you think
now that you’re bearded
and all” (was unshaved actually),
“that it could be heaven …”
”above,” I say and “later, maybe … “

Of all the women attracting me sexually
there was in Ankara only one*. A belly dancer
in that discotheque, where we had
lobster and well, I give you
that we had what you can’t pay for.

And all was good
until the psychopath
I had broken my bread with
all of a something sudden
tried to blackmail me and
in front of my hotel, never so
dear near to me before, I lured him
out of that vicious cab.
So he vanished like all good
bad ghosts do
eventually,

leaving me behind,
mixing my Raki with water
from the sink;

I left Ankara diarrhoeing
the poison out
for only once.
Our otobus cutting through
fertile poppy fields of Afyon.


In The Drizzle


Finally outside! There is drizzle, rushing pedestrians, faster heartbeats and I’m close to tears.

I don’t want

There’s a soft breeze and skinny schoolgirls in front of the barber shop and elderly working women clutching their purses and the eventual scream.

I don’t want this

Two flocks of dope fiends dance around park benches in the distance. The