October 2000:
Zoo Station
imposes itself upon me in steel, dust
and neon concrete roar;
this slipstream city
chaotic with import and motion.
Cranes glowering: gigantic metal vampires
bent over architectural prey -
in/flux and
constructs.
Maps are mere suggestions.
This city will not be where I found it yesterday.

I walk.
Blistered hours are choked quicksilent
inside library wings
desired;
Bach's hand-inked concertos
emanate genius waves from their glasshouse
far away/
so close.

Outside, shift:
dusk in sepia softgravelgrowl
another train; I'm where? again
another crane
and in cafe caverns
I see this magnus opium
dance
through a shutterspeed strobelit
frame-
by-
frame
reflection of progress
:erratic:erotic:elastic:exotic:
and the sun sets like mirrors
of the gallery on the Wall -
red
read
and dusty.
Checkpoint at sundown
Take some shards of graffiti-scarred history home:
it's wrapped in plastic.
Little plastic bags of Wall.
It's all for sale.

Walk.
Breathing Unter den Linden in darkness,
seductive streetlamp eyes
spotlight pathways to the past;
I'm passed
into futures again; the Reichstag
illuminescent, iridescent
in glass ceiling concentricities
born/e overside its father edifice,
distended with histories.
It watches, whispers through subsussurant trees
("i have seen more than
and more than...")
and directs me to a famous neighbour,
wrapped in plastic.
The Reichstag breathes in stone: it is a proud beast.
("Christo wrapped me,
when I was wrapped. It was Very Important.")
I know nothing.

The Brandenburg Gate
is wrapped in plastic:
in/flux and
constructs.
There is a picture, fictitious life-sized and superimposed,
of the Brandenburg Gate
on the Brandenburg Gate
as plastic.
My photograph wraps it in plastic again
and the cranes bow their heads
in satisfaction.
This is their creation; this surrogate reality,
this slipstream city
with its heaviness of history,
always and never, never: forever.

In this endless everyaged place,
I've been lost for daze.
I have been taken
but have not truly taken
Berlin.

-----