Annemarie Estor

Side by side

I Still Don\'t Know Where I Live

Someone, anyone, everyone - hello?
I can't hear any breathing, can't hear any chairs.
I don't hear any footsteps in the hall, is there anybody there?
Can someone in God's name please tell me where I am?

I turn circles in a double-walled tube,
a junk-mail cardboard kaleidoscope,
kaleidoscope not even spelled right but full of abstract patterns,
projections, splinters, swimming shards of colour,
I want to catch them up and drink them, but I can't,
it's nothing but light in the palm of my hand,
I grasp and the emptiness flows away between my fingers
in this cinema full of delusions, ideas,
hormone levels and magnified emotions,
and discoveries,
a light well

That is, at the same time, a waste disposal chute
for all the rubbish I've ever produced.

And your rubbish is there, too, your fly-tipping,
your dog-ends, your turds that I love, your plughole hairs,
all your dusty wine bottles
and your condoms covered in slime from girls I don't know.
And my mistrust,
my self-concocted suspicions directed at you.

And then the sliding panels,
tableaux, Jugendstil and Art Nouveau designs
and cafés full of labia trails and garlands of lanterns
and warty dick heads and field mice that escape from apps
and two-star mobile phone screens
that no longer listen to our fingers
but we've got impeccable pedigrees
and heavily smoked-filled curtains from previous marriages
and crazy owls on the edge of the armchair
singing dirty ditties from under their wings
and the owls begin restlessly to call, to scratch,
their voices swelling in my Eustachian tube
and the vacuum cleaner starts up again of its own accord,
kestrels join in and buzzards!

Those flying idiots can't sing,
and I still don't know where I live,
tell me where I live, I live
in a world of sirens and ambulances
and the ambulance crews get beaten up,
but the sirens wail too slowly,
the Doppler shift races through darkling kitchen cupboards,
there aren't enough nurses for all the exes!

The sirens get overtaken by dividend tax,
dividend tax gets overtaken by Brexit,
Brexit gets overtaken by talent contests
with little girls singing Pie Jesu,
and mothers hide behind their facelifts,
welcome to deportation dot com, to the passport lottery, the status sweatshop,
we all make daily deals with human labour capital,
and censored journalists, too, are only brainwashed children –

And yet: all our severed vocal chords
begin to murmur, rasp, grate, croak,
and the pain, the pain is as palpable as a dagger thrust of words,
the pain of the white hippies who would have liked to have been brown,
but a suppressed uprising goes unheard,
and our rappers machete their way
through the target-harried concert hall,
where Vivaldi is sung
by cocks with blades on their spurs
and Bach is indentured to the great success
that must be achieved,
that must be achieved!

For we shall achieve,
that is the progress pact and, from afar, comes
the military unit and the militia with truncheons
and St Matthew's Passion, stuffed into yellow vests,
jostles its way through the disposable speakers
in my kaleidoscopic dwelling

The thunder starts to roll,
a dingy leviathan enters like a bomb
pounds pulverises the red velvet and the plush seats:
a dust-clouding stampede of thousands of tatanka! tatanka!
has risen from Dances with Butchers
come here in a herd to say SOMETHING
finally say SOMETHING!

And I wait
to see what they have to say.
But they just stand there blowing and sweating
and, at the decisive moment, say nothing.

Only the warm eyes of the slaughtered female
open up, I see how gently her retina detaches
and I see a tear welling up in her eye.
It's a tear for me.
She doesn't want me to be sad
and alone.
I stroke her
and I ask her,
"Where am I?
Where are you?"

And, in the distance, the sirens are still wailing slowly,
and, somewhere, the poet censors his tear.