By Ann Cotten.
Defensive Talk
They’re sputtering like motors with no clue,
the oil wants to get out and spits
words only to lose them
like dead good mousers.
The mousers’ paws lie, stiff, beside the well,
gathering gravel to the small wet heart.
What made it stick so closely to the ground?
No man’s innocent motors.
Self-esteem
The Oil must leak.
The tongue must toil.
Man must use
both tongue and oil.
The man licks the donor,
the tongue licks the oil.
The oil invents
a concept of honor.
Strange Fugue (Panic)
And the people came and looked on, holding their rings in their fingers.
How they talked! “Where would the lie be, then?” and again,
“Where would be the lie?” For unwittingly the songs
had found the subjunctive, a present milder
than the times allowed.
More gallant
and more false were the words of the culture men.1
They are used to mastering everything with grace, covering
abominable gaps with pretty lids, adding banisters
and standing on it all, even though it slants.
And they talk then, inconspicuously, so all can see
how easy it could be.
But one is not everyone, no!
Exceptions, wildly defended, look best on those
who know how to avoid quelques choses.
They will always be the knob and not the hand.
Shareholders fanned the wounds with their light clothing.
They claim to understand things that come like giant cranes.
So we used them as gods, irregular gods
to play along the hems of the customers.
The latter, clouds in pants, sleeping hustlers,
wanked around in swarms, gushing like animals, spitting
fire when it tipped and threw them off. They mixed
fondness and fear, their love was horrible; ironic
observers observed large stains spreading over the land.
The observers tried to show something with curious saltations.
But the people just twisted their rings and twisted and twisted them.
They did not want to take that step, for as it was, they knew
their problems safely separated from their solutions,
which scared them.
And thus they lived long with heartburn and nausea,
saw the foe in their bedrooms and ignored him.
- Gottfried Benn coined the dichotomy Kulturtraeger and Kunsttraeger, carriers of culture rsp of art. Whereas the former take care of a functioning society, the latter are a- and anti-social thinkers and feelers; society sometimes has a place for them; even this place they cannot accept fully, a home is a thing impossible. For example: For a carrier of culture, beauty would be a supplement to the world, a special treat that enriches our lives and can be enjoyed and cultivated. For a carrier of art, beauty is more dangerous; she cannot stop at sensible use of things but must think them into the absolute; she will have to follow this beauty no matter where this takes her; she cannot enjoy it disconnected from her day job, so sometimes she gives up her day job to follow the beauty and sometimes she is unhappy because she daren’t do that. For such reasons the carriers of culture often have the role of playing parent to the carriers of art.
Chinese Market Of Dings
Rise up, swell illusions, cutoff cables,
tragic flowers, uneven equals. Oh you kiss,
you smouldering blooming kiss of bad
craftsmanship, and oh you human eyes.
You staring stars, return to kiss.
You deep abyss, return to kiss.
And underneath, the universe is blown.
Is cut! TechnÑ – unmastered love,
stopping for money. Little joys, TechnÑ!
Hard feelings, psycho coverage for love –
O Fiberglass, hard mantle of love –
forbidden love – TechnÑ!
Comb your your hair with molding scrap,
my dove, feed your line into your sprue.
half dead, paint some cute eyelashes on it,
paint them happy, now you can.
In the Museum of Misanthropy
Pots!
At eye level – Shards!
All these dippers and ideals,
imagination healers, bigwigs of the world,
dried, ground, decorated protection,
sieved kernels, beloved fruit, used pelts,
anguish, anguish, anguish, beauty through cruelty,
exceedingly small fake windows.
Basics over basics.
And rotten, evil ancestors,
jealous pitch-black turds.
Recurring patterns on pots.
Important questions that are not new.
Several prominent personalities up to their knees in plural.
Pearls. Divides. Vessels for delicate swine,
mixed, confused, covering their faeces
with delicacy, with giggles, with one another.
Howling of chickens.
Dust, little dust, and fresh information boards.
Where our alphabet comes from! Someone
has fooled the pedagogue with ridiculous scribbles:
Is comes from of a butterfli in Japan!
Where our alphabet comes from! From mistrust
never overcome. It was holes in rocks, became dust.
((Hair and nails are in my way
while I write this. They are sent by the gods.))
Yurts. Buckets. Rugs. Bowls and scarves.
Snow goggles. Jackal deities, venom, three shrunken heads.
Fibers from a hula skirt. A claw from the natural death
of a cockatoo. All that helps and all that does not help at all,
one thousand museums. Idiotic traditions.
Alongside traditions allowing survival under conditions
that maim almost everyone. Blinkered square patterns.
Survival is degeneration. The eternally human is the eternally unpleasant.
If you no longer would like to exist, you may bite the dust.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ann Cotten was born in Iowa in 1982 and moved to Austria, with her parents, at the age of five. Her poetry books include the acclaimed Fremdwörterbuchsonnette (Suhrkamp, 2007), for which she won the Reinhard Priessnitz and the Clemens Brentano Prizes, and this year’s Florida-Räume (Suhrkamp). She currently lives in Berlin.
