The Lost Happiness Café
after the painting by George Grosz
The charcoal blur of evening beckons you.
Dark streets grade into pre-Bauhaus buildings.
Prosperous rats have been left out for effect.
A lone red globe pieces the gloom together,
overhanging the false brightness illuminating
the childish cursive on the window:
“Restaurant & Café Verlorenes Glück”
A solitary graces the steps, hunched.
He may or may not allow you to pass,
but you’ve lost the urge anyway.
There are further alleys and other
sadnesses to discover.
Like you, Berlin is restless. You
both look forward (sort of) to the
blue morning when the old men
carry their pails to work, trudging.
On Disease Recently Contracted
As I was slobbering drunk on my red leather jacket,
the train bound for my Roman honeymoon,
I stood already in front of Botticelli,
leering foolishly, a stain on my collar.
I foresaw not the brilliance of speckled shades
but my own futility.
There, in the polyrhythmic foliage of spring,
In the coral stroking of Venusian fire,
was birthed my urge to plunder.
How daringly I would fling at the world
second-hand sunsets, prefabricated twilight!
Long-dead phrases lifted from infested tomes
That must endure the insult of air conditioning
and harsh light.
What landscape exists which has not yet
been sliced from Chateaubriand,
pilfered from Proust?
Some cracked stone hymnal I would beget,
Resurrected from beyond,
Sad, le mot juste.
I am devastated by the constancy of rainbows, whose pallor cannot change.
What is left to say of the sea would I barter dearly;
the effulgence of multicolored clouds like that song
you can’t escape, blaring from every available station.
“Dappled sunlight”: a smoker’s hack.
“Waterlilies”: a desert of fumes, a car coasting
on ether.
There is a row of scissors waiting under lamplight,
prepared to zig-zag jagged violence and
snip the taut ribbon of collage.
Consubstantial
I, the axiomatic clumsy I,
coppered coprolite, cerulean winks
gauged by your incontrovertible eye
je est . . . just me; jest me (Oh, please do, Tsai!)
Yes, please do sigh. Your unrestful eye blinks,
then restful, incontestable: yo soy.
This pristine prism of ocular links
in revealing nothing reveals no chinks:
buoys and sinks: frissons of the fake toy
flail before you, fallen; flung to the sky.
Dilemma: buoyant man or man-in-boy.
Irrepressible elegant decoy.
Tsai, why must one always teeter on brinks?
I am other and none other, one thinks.
***
Micah Stack
