Pergamon museum. These Babylon gates
Must have clearly only led to chaos.
I watched people frantically circling
Around ornaments and rocks,
Taking pictures of misplaced walls.
I felt misplaced. Like these long lost treasures,
No details in the history, only labels now,
Brief, uninformative, deceiving,
Just like these long lost treasures
Trapped inside concrete walls.
Still, there’s incredible structure in chaos,
The undefinable beauty of not knowing
(Yet living anyway),
Of not knowing where you belong.
Kreuzberg. We searched for ‘edge’.
The punks, the artists, the bohemian heroes
One can only find in books and songs,
These elegies to the rebellious spirit
That seems to stay
underground, subdued and lost,
we only found ourselves
Lost.
We drank tea and ate hummus instead.
Because when we can’t find what we’re looking for,
We consume, because in the absence of meaning – don’t we all –
We tend to consume
To forget.
Mauer park. I felt at peace, spending the day alone,
Amongst piles of old stuff.
I contemplated, what is it that makes us feel
So comfortable amongst things we don’t need,
these mountains of useless information,
Overused mugs, pictures of unknown faces from the ’50s, the ’60s (and – really – I ain’t quite
sure about that), old cameras turned lamps,
Obscure badges, boxes, handmade fridge magnets,
Patchy, messy artwork, sketchbooks and misused dreams.
I had time to contemplate for once.
Soak in the melancholy of this wide grey sky
That casts its shadow above us all,
The buskers, the artists, the lawyers,
The street cleaners, the bankers,
The poets of this world.
Don’t we all end up in places we’d never thought
We belonged, don’t we all wear suits, masks
We don’t fit in,
Aren’t we all just someone else’s memoirs
Now carelessly transferred to foreign cities
In a box.
The Berlin Wall. The distance between us.
The death strip is the distance between two
Ideologies, the measure of ignorance
Keeping two otherwise sharp minds apart.
The time it takes for a kind gesture
To travel the distance left by
Thoughts when they have become corrupted.
The death strip is the danger zone
Of frozen silence,
The distance between our egos
When they stand so tall, above us all,
When they stand so tall,
they have built themselves (and us) into a wall.
Rational Artist 