Disposed Of

By Nicolas Born
Translated by Sam Langer.

So the unending terror slowly morphs into

normal life

Bystanders blink in the courtyard

in the light of noon

Small town, hard scar brick-red

pub, curtains waving

and now at the desk the personal 

death isn't worth much

I can't say how the panic of matter

works, how I in my panic

which isn't personal, only come up with

the wrong words.

I miss the caring beautiful in krypton and

iodine-129. The future’s future is missing

I miss it.

I already miss my children’s children

Memory of the worlds

I miss results, long summers on the water

hard winters, wool and work

Here come results harsh words

that are lifeless, the vicious bastards

feel nothing, they tighten the cartels

no sense of what they're putting into the earth

no sense, only science

what they’re putting into the earth into the air and water

forever

no feeling for “forever”. For death

they reserve special treatment like a pest

good death poisoned like dear old need.

What you defile my children's children's graves

what are you plundering the dream of matter,

the dream of images, of tissue, of books

bones.

Grief is now helpless

rage without syllable, all the masked liveliness

all the choking confidence

grass falls, the gardens fall, no-one

in money armour feels the wound

in being disposed of by one's own self.

Not a poem, at best the end of that.

Human incidences

caught in a vicious reason that

knows nothing of knowledge.

Not a step left free, no breath

no water not delisted, commercial traces of summer

the skin of the earth – photo prints

the soul concreted over, prefabricated moans

that then stop taking place

when the voice breaks off.

Tiny process-invoices in the hand's hollow

bring the earth to life, all-knowing mutants

thus utter protection from experience.

Extras in life, graduates. On the system's

drip.

Tipped meadow, angels, unknowns,

warm human bodies and understandings

gardens broadened out, benches under boughs . . .

. . . Shadows . . . Leaf. . . spoken in the wind

. . . . . . . . . Seed

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