Leaving Berlin / Strange Instruments by M.P. Powers

Leaving Berlin

When I come back to this place
the biergartens will be hibernating,
the trees in their anorexia
will stand nude and quivering
against the buildings, the gloomy skies of November
will ring with church bells and the sighs
of concrete angels.

When I come back here,
it’ll be as if to another city
in another hemisphere, the dark northern light
having driven the laughter
from the streets, having replaced it with moaning
afternoon sirens, with people with faces grim
as mildewed clouds in the rain, melancholy Monday
morning faces shriveled in the collars
of an Edward Munch painting.

When I come back to this place,
it’ll be as if these soft September evenings,
the blue grasses, the Dionysian ivy
climbing up the building sides,
the guitars floating from the dusky willows -
all of it was a dream, and the essence
of the city was never anything
but the nebulous dark mists of beautiful
inward gazing
November.




Strange Instruments

Holed up in this pre-WW1
apartment building,
curtains open to the cool green
shade of the garden,
swivel chair like an old man
groaning under him,
bright white screen gaping at him,
the cursor blinking.
He sits hunched in the glow of it,
feels a fissure like a rattlesnake’s jaws
clamped to his back, his legs cramp.
He stretches them under
his desk. He has been here all day,
gone into it, lost in himself,
departed from humanity, fighting
against light and shadow
and age and words that won’t come.
Isn’t there something else
he could’ve done with his life
than be a writer of words.
He thinks about all people
he’s drifted away from, the impossible
distances, the years piled
on each other, the hours spent
bent-backed in the maddening
orchards of literature, his dreams
bound up in the harvest,
his heart like a tiger
roaming the plains, oblivious to the wind, the rain,
the seasons, the moon.
Only knowing the strange
instruments in its head,
only listening to them.

M.P. Powers is the author of Fortuna Berlin and Hallucinogenic Dragonfly Intermezzo. He was recently featured on the Goethe Institute’s podcast The Big Ponder. Recent publications include the Columbia Review, Black Stone/White Stone, Glitchwords, Mayday Magazine, and others. His artwork can be found on Twitter and Instagram @mppowers1132