Time machine

By Nicolas Born
Translated by Marty Hiatt. 

Without it really ever having begun

I’m in a big group of people

contemporaries

they seem to think my body is the homeland

so too the dear departed old acquaintances

the oft-mentioned

the disappeared those rolling along on rollers

severed from time embalmed to the bones

mocked by history

                                                I have the distinct impression

that everyone is here

            the bushes part the skies flicker

stars light up animals rouse themselves

and the clouds run back and forth

            We encounter a travelling theatre troupe

a young man with death in his eyes

introduces himself: W. Shakespeare

            as he writes and breathes

Oh yeah we all know him

            “Why do you write” asks one of us

who’d maintained his interest

            Shake turns away in disgust

and gets to work on the costumes

            “Why so much death on so many stages?”

Somehow that doesn’t really seem to matter here.

One of the ladies whose difficulties

            are technical difficulties says

“There’ll be no getting around the historical distance.”

            She is known for reacting to crises

with hysteria

                                    We move through time

like a pencil

            “It seems to me” I exclaim “as though we’re running on the spot”

“Maybe so” a brawny guy grumbles

            We appear at once as bright dots

in the age of technology

in a giant hashish cloud filled with

sniggering industrialists

“Hilarious Hilarious”

            Berlin 10:30am Good morning take your seats please!

It concerns a man from the Centre for Adult Education

who shoves me aside and cries “I have always stood

            for the separation of the author and the work”

Right away I tell him a story

            from my mother’s childhood

a striking proof of my wholeness

            and his silence is truly ambiguous.

He emerges out of this eternity in brown

            corduroy “Do you know Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s

renditions of César Vallejo?”

            Presumably he knows everyone will love him

for that He prances about He needs to go

            “If you don’t get out of here quick” I boast

“I’ll turn you into verse”

            But he insists on a quotation

“. . . had I never been born, some other sorry wretch

would drink this coffee!”

Click here to listen to Nicolas Born reading this poem in German on Lyrikline.org.