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

cherry liqueur is a smooth burn in my scorched throat. I dare to toss over bored gazes a couple a minute.

I don’t want this to happen

This place is for doves and bums and us. A bald head aged around 50 parades in front of the drugstore. I fix my dentures. There’s a hole for dope in my upper gums and my tongue tastes sweet blood.

I don’t want this to happen again

It”s raining but i keep seated. My smile is benevolent. Guess I’m drunk. From far the emptied bottles clank. I delirize Hopkinsish: How the rain as a heavenly force helps the municipal authorities to clear off the city parks washing them clean. I overhear morphinist chatter as I leave.

Then I run.


Left-hand Weakness

I have a left hand weakness.
My bass sucks.
Can’t keep the rhythm.
My right hand, though
is a funky bird
jumping easily between
5th, 7th and 9th
So I tell Max:
Play the bass line
and there we roll:

My right watermelons
over the keys
extensively while I
check out the chicks.
They always fall for the
solo-man, though.
Max’ fingers beat out
the syncopated rhythm
on the lower keys
octave-wise.

I could have one
[girl]
if I hadn’t had too many
[drinks]

So when we meet
in the lounge next morning
I have some taste of
Old Scotch ‘round my tongue
while Max chews on
some blond pussy-hair.


Rains Of March


Love, too, withers.
I feel best as a stone
in the sunlight
that screams: procreate!

Stranger, do you mind
if my eyes spit
tears of loss
into your grin?

Pain wants me to hate you.
But you’re just standing there,
first accident, then incident,
and I don’t have a reason.

And your name is?
We rest on a warm rock.
Suddenly you stretch out your hand:
Dolphins, mating! See?


Nature Makes Music


It’s funny and a phenomenon to dendrologists
how as late as in May the firs would silhouette
in a light green and beige mix against the
whitish-bluish sky to finally demonstrate
they’re still alive. Not yet blooming,
but birds, insects, bugs, spiders may already settle down
and all the other small flesh that lives
from the nourishing flesh of the bark.

That music the firs make in the night
needs fine ears to hear: subdued swooshing
and creaking and rustling and an unexpected sigh
when the wind bends the twigs too roughly
but they refuse to break.


On A Dream Lost


„Ich sah bunten Vögeln nach“
I watched the birds in colored splendor pass
[Zarah Leander, Der Wind hat mir ein Lied erzählt.]

I The addiction industry

(Setting: a candle-lit room in downtown Munich. About 20 addicts have assembled.
The Book makes its round: short incantations, mostly mumbled, are heard.)

There is Sara talking now,so fucking sexy it almost
kills me I can’t look up. She’s too hot to face.
But she’s is talking to me because I’m the chair
here tonight I want to run into the dark
and commit a crime to be shot by the police:
She is too hot.
She rides me and I yell:” we’re done!
Let me out!” – I need the sky to see
diamonds sparkling in deep blue.

We’re high on coke and do it all night.
In the morning she tells me:” baby,
you can stay”, and I run away and hide.
In rushs of desire we get out to get
it again and again.
Someone lit a purple fire she must dance to.
“Honey, I am supposed to
be sober and clean and good for the night.”
But you burn your breast with a cigarette
to show me, in order to force me to stay.

I stay. I die now, we die and I lullaby
into the sky of your face, a monster sweet.
then we sit there, sinners ashamed in a park.
We are back at the meeting, and you are mute,
only your breasts are speaking to my lust
and I go out and say: I need a cig.
After you left, my best friend
corners me in the darkest
corner of the candle-lit room
and “was it good?”, calls the police
to get me carried away
as I delirize.

II Ruhig

Mein Herz, es schlägt so leise in der Nacht.
My heart at nights, it beats so calm.

I am coughing, my lungs are angry with
me. I hardly sleep anymore: too
many dances of the mind hurt
me in the night.

The night rolls out on shivering silver.
We have passed out and in.
In times of war I raise my voice Walt-
Whitman-ish, and
we get strong in troubled times
or otherwise we die.

III chanson

We sing loud at the tavern :

Nous sommes Francais et Russes,
Some are Polonais.
Nous chantons: Je suis mort,
pour célébrer la vie si belle.

Le vodka et mon seul plaisir.
My love has died and I with her.
I cannot sing again.

I bit my tongue off in your
hot mouth, my song:
l’amour, une terre brûlée,
is dead.


Moon Man

I’m a moon man. My moon face waxes,
rolling out the hidden hours of dog days.

I house ghosts, bad-mouthing me. I mouth
apotropaic spells, wrap myself in serenity.

My dark side spits out fear in angry spasms.
My eyes have walked a mile of ice too far.

I‘m a moon man and now my moon face wanes,
rolling into the first light of late.


Pro Fairies


I need tough stimulants these days:
Jinns out of bottles of booze,
to help me invoke the spirits
of rainbows and waterfalls,
to recreate my private wondrous realm
of almost death-like peace
against the stomping gray of now,
to keep up my constructivist approach,
that modern form of optimism,
that always borders on despair.


Recovery


There are only fully-orchestrated
crash-downs, where I come from,
and where I will lie down to enjoy
some crooked priest’s Amens,
and a nice&noisy all-after-party,
with some real funksters aboard.
No Schweinebraten nor Yorkshire puddings,
just hard booze and alkaloids, that make
your endorphins dance out loud.

It may be a sunny day, with this wonderful fucking
blue sky, smiling at you, left-over mortals;
it might rain, and an all-to-well-known Himalaya-high
ceiling of gray will upgrade
your daily depression: Never mind, because my
omniscient pharmacist will take care of that.

In heaven, I assume, the Endlösung might
await me, or some even more effective
treatment to force me let loose my
poisoned, antisocial mind. Who knows?
Or up there, they will finally allow me to
blow my brains out, using the same
gun Hemingway used on earth,
let’s say: with diamonds nailed into gray matter?

When we die, nothing makes sense anymore,
or everything does. The difference is – cosmologically
speaking – minuscule. Family&relatives, of course,
might, on well-founded reasons, disagree.

The strangest moment, I’m now glad I have
managed to survive, was when I had to tell
the gardener, what dedication to leave on
the funeral wreath of my dead lover,
because my Dad was watching and he could
not understand, how to just speak out
those words, could cause me any trouble.

No, it was even stranger, to walk up half
a mile to her relatives, in a dark purple suit,
complete with gray tie, while they
were waiting in front of the morgue.


Rita Again


I resist the urge to hide,
take off my sunglasses,
wave a smile to Rita,
who stops her bike,
approaches me and
leans into my embrace.

“So glad, you’re not dead yet!”
She fires four lines of thought
at me simultaneously.
I answer to the fifth,
that sums them up:
Why are you still alive?
Afterwards we just let
our words make love to
each other, while our bodies
negotiate the facts.

I take down her number
in order to call her
not.


Stanzas Like Birds


When I’m hiding my head inside myself
Stanzas like birds from time to time
Infest my mind. It is hard to catch them.
They look beautiful flying away.


Tipsy Cakewalk


I think I am dressed sexily,
but in the darkness
the snow blinds my vision.
As we pass each other
you’re talking frantically to your lover
to pretend you don’t see me
stumbling into the grocery,
where I nervously grab
two bottles of rosé
and something cherry
and cream sherry.
I suddenly feel weak
and a tachycardic vertigo
grabs my brains and feet.

But of course I remember you,
long-necked girl,
with your appetizing
handfuls of breasts,
who so often rests
on a seat vis-à-vis to mine,
when I am drowsing along
in the metro downtown
as I head
South of the border
for work.


The Beguine


s'embéguiner ( to flirt)

I whisper in your ear while I bite your lobe:
Begin the Beguine, dance with me.
I am in a Swing rush on coke.
We finally dance into deep space out.
I bend you over backwards
Artie's instrument of pleasure sounds.
"So, it is really cancer of the lungs?" you ask.
and: "how long?" I say: "anytime",
and we dance and I sweat my fears away.
“How is it, baby?“ - „Dreadful, if not stoned to the brim.“,
“You don't seem to be“, she replies, and I:
“do you want my clarinet?“
She:“ anytime, as long as time is for you.“
and we kiss on the dance floor. It
glitters


A Hitchcockery

The guy from Sheffield took another desperate gulp
from the last bottle of my stolen whiskey supply.
It was a hot August night but he shivered heavily.
The sweat soaking his t-shirt was due to withdrawal.
He was a sympathetic junk of flotsam: George in need.
While I rolled him a cigarette I threw a skeptical
glance at him: would he be able to drive?

He was a truck driver, had run out of money
and gas on his return from the Balkans, because
a Turkish street pharmacist had gypped him in
Thessaloníki. We finally managed to mount the
tractor unit; he did not remember where