Emerging from lambent coffees at Goethe's Thuringian feet,
zoo station
imposed itself upon me in steel, dust
and neon concrete roar;
this slipstream city greyfaced,
chaotic with its own import,
ex(s)pectacular
and T-a-L-L.
Cranes glowering: gigantic metal vampires
bent over architectural prey,
lecherous,
creaking,
omnipotent...
reaching through thick autumnal misthazy days
to those places between the shadows
where transFormations lie
bringing eschelons of Escher's labyrinths to life:
in/flux and
constructs.
Maps are mere suggestions.
This city will not be where I found it yesterday.
It's all so far away.
It's All: so far, a way.

- .slip.
.stream. -

I walk:
just another small Zoo animal in the menagerie
down stairs
stairs
stairs, through
stares and up
stairs
stairs
heavy with history...
I'm lost again,
and again...(here)...

searching for the words
and
my blistered hours are choked quicksilent now,
inside library wings
desired,
in corners where celluloid angels stood:
Cassiel's ghost at the bannister
and my body all the less real for it.
Bach's hand-inked concertos encased
emanate genius waves from their glasshouse:
far away/
so close.

- .slip.
.stream. -

Walk
outside and shift:
dusk turns the glow to sepia softgravelgrowl
(another train; I'm where? again)
:another crane:
and in nicotine-laced cafe caverns
with a boho-ho and a bottle of numb
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.

- .slip.
.stream. -

Walk.
Breathing Unter den Linden in darkness,
mistchilled fog tendrils crawling languidsoft
around seductive streetlamp eyes,
spotlighting pathways to the past;
I'm passed
into futures again; the Reichstag
now 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, nodding motionless, 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.

- .slip.
.stream. -

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 morphic heads to the mirror
in solemn 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 never did take Manhattan
and I do not believe
I have taken Berlin.

-----

:for bakkhus: