When I was ten
I was told to pack up and go
And wherever I went
I was not welcome
They could hear that I was not a native
I did not speak like them
Even if I tried to learn the local lingo

I am a
Riff you gee
Not an
Eh me gray
Or an
Eeh me grant
Or a
My Grant
Whatever

They say:
I am the En nee mee

I know about forced removals
And ethnic cleansing
I do not move from point to point
I do not want to arrive
I have forgotten where I started
I am underway
In this manicured garbage dump
Through the vomit of our civilisation
And I see something which you do not see
And it is not the blue sky
I am a passer-by
And everybody is somebody else

Those
Who have roots
Must not be surprised
When one day
Somebody comes with an axe
And a saw
And cuts them down

So much for roots

2

They stood my grandfather against a wall
They told my grandmother not to worry
They took whatever they liked at the border
The tanks were shooting in the darkness
The river was flowing fast and furious
My father nearly drowned
And after we escaped they put us in a camp
And I forgot I was human
While I and me screamed abuse at each other.
But the furies will come and teach us gentleness
One day

3

Escaped, on a coal tender,
covered in black smoke from a locomotive
I was countrified in knickerbockers
And searched for erudition in limestones
Jurassic ammonites and the elusive archaeopteryx.
I learned to leave things behind
And found that every soil is alien
And thus Teplice was extinguished
In a Bavarian village

4

I know that those who sit on a throne
Still sit on their own arse
But it is much more exciting to sit on thrones
Than to sit on a dilapidated chair with three legs
In a dump among stunted plastic greenery and dusty midwives
Looking up to neurotic Christian businessmen
And their indestructible horsewomen

5

I saw people crawling in the sludge of a swamp
Naked, their faces distorted by rage
Hitting each other with their fists
Stamping with their feet on each others heads
Tearing flesh from flesh with their teeth
Barking furiously without understanding
Chewing mud and blood and intestines
And some were drifting below the black water
And none of them could talk anymore
They had eaten their fill and were silent
Weighty consumers of rotting flesh

But in every deep a deeper deep is opening

6

A hundred million already
Soon there will be a billion
Afterthoughts of our annual wars and genocides
Refugees, migrants, displaced persons
Habitually uninhabited in public spaces
They move through our garbage dumps
They simply want to eat better
They demand numinous digestion
They want to move, dance, sing, dress
In the empty spaces between banks,
Corporations, real-estate conglomerates,
Talk shows, comic books, and panel discussions
In the combat zones of institutionalized global democracy
And regimented environmental decay
Where Cape Town is an impartial franchise of OPEC
And every chill evensong a co-opted American tableau.

7

I mingle with the intransigent
And the obdurate rebels
Who exist between the old and the new
Homeless like me, vagrants with no national pride
Unassimilated wanderers beyond the horizons
Who don’t walk on the smooth and sacred highways
But on a wavering line, deviating from the straight path
Disappointed clay, yet always in motion

The dark falls on me as it falls on you
As we pass all boundary lines
Fingerprinted and archived
Everywhere on this globe
But no one is one thing
Our passport photos
Change from minute to minute
Faster than our faces

8

As I am passing by
I pay tribute to the local gods
Men and women long dead
Mere images now in the brains of believers
Bawdy gladiators against the eternal void
Waddling now through the coda of unbelieving centuries
Newtonian chicken singing like Figaro
Repeating their bravura performances ad nauseam
Their dogmatic steps shaking the indestructible earth
Throwing hailstones and hurling lightning
In their thunderous rages

For I cannot know myself.
I am neither Christian, nor Jew,
nor Parsee, nor Muslim.
I am neither from the East,
nor the West,
neither from the land, nor the sea.

9

I’m not interested in equinoctial dromedaries
My birth star now is a comet.
These wandering stars, red and fiery,
change the fate of many countries
mass migrations of modern Vandals and Huns
beach combers and garbage collectors
popish families, mohajirs and Buddhist non-believers
the mundane aging in vats of bordeaux
footmen tending their gastrointestinal forest
adoptive grocers, ursulines and
nobel prize winners dreaming of Danzig
and the Kaschubei: of grandmothers
and the Baltic Sea.

10

How, in the name of Descartes and antipasto, can
housebroken felicity hiding from
affirmative cloud drizzle
behind the family grand piano erupt in a
sudden convulsive arpeggio?

I wrap myself in radio
and drive everywhere
and I don’t actually watch the world
but hang my poem on a clothesline to dry

But by what miracle
Can black marks on a white sheet
Become meaning?

11

This heap, these stones,
each stone with a story,
departure and destination,
each stone a path into the unknown.

The way in which refugees slink along the walls
shamelessly while we skirt the boundary of the night
which belongs to him
from pillar to pillar
charged with the power of the god
but not invisible enough
always threatened by xenophobic natives
fearful of the magic powers of the nomad

Shining like gold the Invisible
follows me wherever I go
dropping a stone on the pile
the luck-bringer
overflowing with babble
singing frog songs
skilled in words
in the cave where strangers talk to each other
and their hearts burn within them

12

In February the witches descend from the hills
the Black Forest still covered in snow
hiding their faces in wooden masks
they come riding down on wooden spoons
as spoons are faster than broomsticks
and can carry fifteen witches at a time

In front of the Rathaus they assembled to choose
the fools’ king to reign for a fortnight
behind them the monk who invented
the black powder which explodes and drives the bullets
and they declared a general peace and interstitial madness
for the length of the Fasnacht.

The spirits of the Feldberg
who had seen many people pass through the Valley of the Hell
accepted me as just another of many a passing wave
as long as I donned the mask
which made me a local
no more boundaries between inside and outside
nothing is real and nothing imaginary,
definitions dissolve: metamorphosis.

13

The scapegoat is a foreign body
who can’t make head or tail of his fear
and the witches could hear me speaking a foreign dialect
and the witches decided to burn me at the stake.

I was saved by the one who descends
brilliant and shining from the snow-covered mountains
the spellbinder who is stronger even than witches
who can guide you through dreams
which are neither sensible nor intelligible
who can interpret the most exotic languages
celebrating gaps, silences, raptures.

Since then I am not someone who sings,
but someone who screams.

Goodbye, Descartes!

14

All poems are in a foreign language,
which nobody can understand,
even if the words are English or French or Russian,
screams of exiles and refugees,
disoriented in the world of Newton and Kant.

What are poems but fragments gathered?
And when the fragments become one
the interpreters fragment the fragments again.
stitching together these fragments
and binding them into a sheaf of images
the fragments become a book
and the book is my burning heart.

Website developed by Lynn Danzig