paul klee: schoolgirls, outdoors, 1939
by Gerald Locklin

children should not smoke cigars.
children should not be cigars.
children should not become cigars.
these are metaphysical givens.

some children have two heads.
some children are tow-heads.
some children have one head,
but four eyes. some children
have three eyes apportioned
over one-and-a-half heads.
some children have stovepipes
for heads. some children's heads
are violet, while other children
gradually become indistinguishable
from the background coloration
(like chameleons, but irreversible).
some children are the color of ether:
these are known as "ethereal."
thus, some children remain part of
a cosmic consciousness (which is
monochrome), while others become
adults, individuals, separated by
broad brushstrokes and a color of
their own, one different from that
of the world and those of their fellow
adults. they are then allowed to smoke
cigars. this is a pataphysical certainty.

it was a good year for schoolgirls
to go back indoors,
but they didn't.

MOZART'S BIRTHDAY
by B.Z. Niditch

January 27, 1943

Night remains seven leap years before mid-century. Somewhere in mid-Europa. I wish I could run out of this resealed damp room and find someone with faith, even faith in me that I will survive to give an account to heaven's blue and black accountability for proof that I am living.

I know only God can give an account, even to the fascists and mystics who chose the wrong gods to define as less than human. I am in definition a laughing stock of the nations. By whose authority. My God!

To write is to make a recreation. Already creation is to accept my persona as poet or the poet as himself. The wall is dirty, the linen more dirty, my face has no mirror to spy on from a creator's point of view. Therefore I write with deliberation awaiting liberation each day.

But who are the Allies? Not surely the truth seekers, now hemmed in by the German chamber music, and today is Mozart's birthday.

I have no family now, nothing, not even familiar. Only this partition of a Christian's mirror between me, bread and death. Sometimes bread itself tastes like death. I wish a poppy seed manna would rescue me. Dreaming about a swan last night.

January 28

Day resonates. I have a recital in my mind of a quartet. I imagined a chicken came through the feather duster of the bed. Wind where the Messiah's children in swaddling clothes await the manger of God.

Has Christmas passed us by? Like the stubble on my face. Sister is gone. I heard her train with beautiful voices, the train of the nations heading nonstop to their final judgment of a hissing sound.

The windows are painted church white. I can see them. Really I can.

Sex is indomitable, a Vienna professor said, before he and his books were mowed down.

In the way God became man, man found his lover, woman found her love.

Beneath the nails is my skin. Skin has surplus value.

Society ladies must be helped off trains by young males who politely will go to war and be for their leader.

Psalms.

I know Gerhard does not want entertainment, but how does he expect to evade the draft.

They are here at the door already. Mozart records are broken and Gerhard is taken away.

We had an agreement that I would have a cyanide tablet rather than be exposed.

The soloist played so beautifully that evening that members of the German General Staff wept.

All the intelligentsia was wrong as usual. Mozartian arias flood the room. He died like Schubert in a pauper's pit.

Only the conductors are perpetually on time.

Out of his childhood debut, or our first love or the first movie we see or the first book we write.

Street angels and house devils see through the spermatozoa of progress.

Red meat, please. But cannibalism can never be outlawed.

A husband expects to be treated well, a wife to be treated well. Well-treated marriages are never miserable, only treatable.

Why do Russians talk slowly and Germans eat fast, Gerhard asked me.

Russians want to be poets and Germans wish to be abundant.

Photosynthesis articles intrigue Gerhard. He is in a German mood and we put on German dances.

Do Hitler and his gang have lookalikes?

I played a sonata in A.

What is the relation of Assyrian and Allemagne?

Coffee, please. It goes with respect. Be respectable, especially after the war, and continue your hiring of French tailors to do your best cuts of cloth. Forget the gabardines of the Jews.

Peace, Freedom, Democracy on placards translated in Russian and German as interpreted by the gangster bureaucrats of our century.

The four humours of a new middle ages. Newsreels of the dog-lover Hitler.

If today I survive, who will want to hear me tomorrow when the clothes have to be cleaned.

When the presses run out of newsprint the government will invent other ways of dissemination of half-truths.

They say we are not basic; why were more Iron Crosses issued to us percentage-wise than to so-called pure Germans?

The Posthorn Serenade and some white wine and we have it made.

Silent films may want to speak here.

We are kept for future libraries.

German ingenuity and natural superfluity.

You are not an unperson looking forward to an asexual life and an uncontaminated death.

That melody in the Turkish Concerto. What if suddenly the German government decreed all left-handed, brown-eyed people were subhuman.

The stars have never been more incomprehensible.

The unusual becomes commonplace for those who know the inevitability of death, so we go to bed with spouse or lover to have the pleasure of an hour.

Usurers, hagglers, black marketeers, capitalists, communists, traitors, chosen people!

But at the same time there is a price on the head of Freud and Einstein. Physics is suspect and psychology cannot compete with Valhalla.

Imagine Tolstoy watching the carts of the Jews, or St. John of the Cross.

The only real friends of Weimar, of democracy, were the Jews and the decent people. Now the indecent are comfortable, even in war of brute beasts. Stalin trusts only Hitler.

I heard a British broadcast. They can be believed, at least their accents are believable; though I like to read Shakespeare in German.

I saw Gerhard had a hard-on today. He played the Jupiter for me, a bit scratchy, but worth every note.

Are there tantrums of the crazy nations?

Without centuries of theological Christ killing would such suffering be possible, and who am I to speak, being protected by kindness or need.

He is tired of women; I can always tell.

Memories are blushing.

The Resistance is combed with the disloyal -- but it is for bread, drink, sadism.

False martyrdom has its own Masonic Funeral Music.

The Twenty Second Concerto is with me. Dame Hess plays.

The Bourse hit a new low perhaps. L'humanite has none.

Fascist cartoonists compare genius to baboons and say conscience is a Hebraic invention.

During the Occupation people talk about the new clothes, furniture and furs the Jews left behind.

There are new births at concentration camps and circumcision for the sons of Zion. For the daughters of Zion only stillbirths. I was reading Jeremiah, then I read a Yiddish joke in German. Gerhard said anti-Semitic fraternity jokes in the university will turn out to have the biggest joke on those humanitarians who think the world is becoming a brighter place for the Jews, with their perennial optimism, and for a few Christians with their assurance of only long-suffering.

Live a few years, drink schnapps and be happy. Read, study, and learn to be a good child.

The bunkers of war are nearby. Though they cannot find me. Gerhard said he would use bribery to save me. I'm his conscience if nothing else.

I've translated Hamsen, though I can never again read him; why deprive others of naturalism.

I see Gerhard in a blue stocking cap. Winter landscapes, the dirtiest of lyrics. If anyone is on a clean bed he must be thankful for a petty bourgeois existence.

Dreamed in an American accent as in the movies.

Gerhard says everyone is a war criminal but after the war they will again be judges, civil servants, doctors, Jungians, Rotarians, churchmen.

An old order of socialism will ultimately be a police state, he prophesies after eating boar.

Orange peels are just what the herr doctor ordered. German medical science, there is nothing like it. Will I ever get out of thoughts which are hampered by the fascism I demonstrated against?

I've taken to smoking. Writing poetry and translating -- always the voice which cannot survive dictatorship. But what of the voices in Bonn, of Goethe's statue whose eye is marble.

Gerhard has had many women and a few men before he confessed. He has a lot of experiences but am I just a kept man, a whore who cannot even back pay his payback? I guess I am resentful to this man. I suspect there is a woman -- sometimes at night I suppose so.

All the nations have chosen National Socialism -- what an irony of Karl Marx, says my friend. All men are fascists, he says.

I wonder if Gerhard is top heavy with wisdom and bottom light in sex.

Modern life is becoming androgyny.

Gerhard was the only son of a wealthy father who was determined to educate him. Gerhard's mother died early in the marriage. His father had many lands but Gerhard wanted to be socialized and urbanized. He even thought of the religious life. Certainly he talked to God.

It was the day before the Annexation. The convenient Anschluss when I met Gerhard. The day was similar to many as I was at the university studying Descartes.

I brushed my teeth, found a hole in my sock and walked into the library. Gerhard was looking for Pascal. We smiled and he took me in. He was happy we met the day after his father died. I wished to be a son or have a brother. My greatest dream as a boy was to have a theatre company in Berlin. I know it sounds ridiculous but it is my own sustaining fantasy after liberation.

Gerhard had one friend who was his roommate, Kurt. Kurt was a baby-faced nationalist but he was murdered by a disgruntled S.S. who thought he reminded him of a promiscuous S.A. Kurt's photograph was placed near Gerhard's and I was asked not to speak of it by his silence.

I must be the only victim loved. But I am told I am not a victim and don't need to be loved. At last I choose not to be victimized and loved for any other reason than for being me.

There must be a fish in an aquarium who does not wish his fins. The name of the fish is flirting with me.

Men are marching. Poland, Holland, France, Norway; I say these countries to fall asleep by.

One child lost, two of my children, sister is saying.

To write maxims is to maximize thought but to minimize reality. My reality is death. Death defies reality and romanticism is my upbringing. Two centuries of it. My family lived in mid-Europe for more than six centuries.

I saw a Roman forum meeting. They were discussing the occupation. Some Greek scholars called out to me, "Dunk in my pool." Gerhard yells out, "Hellenism leads to Hell." A stupid daily nightmare, yet I want to swim in the pool. Though circumcised there are physicians who can make us feel as them.

Marxism is the new demonism, Gerhard says, even for my people. It's messianism and universalism is an excuse for no identity. Maybe Marx's self-hatred continues in his disciples. Gerhard says Karl joined the Satanists because he hated his ugly face or his own people. But Gerhard has a peasant's anonymity.

I do not know why he loves. There is no reason for it. We met in a Vienna library, drank French wine in a bar, he returned to bury his father and hid me. Being religious is no excuse to save me. Loving me is another story.

Some of my friends expect nations to help us but they too will betray us. Betrayal is the history of the nations. His story book romance begins in our faith in goodness. I hated those who hated goodness. Look where I am. Like Joseph looking up from the pit to the rosy sky full of bean-filled clouds. Then Sunday. Excavations of what is digging in the time of mass murder. People in a generation will forget me. I write a note on the wall that I have a name and even my brother's helper has a name. His name is not anonymous. It is Gerhard. Mine is Amnon. Who likes to be called Am or even Ami.

I have had no friends except for Gerhard. He tells me this will be over. He tells me prayers reach skies.

If only I could just put my ears outside.

Mozart goes through me. Perhaps in the Salzburg concert halls they will admit Mozart did not love the city.

WISHES ON THE WAY TO TOMORROW
by Nick R. Zamaiduk

Man sits on a curb, thinking, a thousand cars
an hour throwing whatever is left after
what passes for rain dries, in his face,
about what might be, how he really got here.
Not the bus, the thumb, but THE journey
from Jiminy Cricket and nights full of stars
to wish on, to dumpster lunches; from Ozzie
and Harriet to Michigan Ave., downtown
Detroit; 2001 in Cinerama to porn flicks
in a glitter palace circa nineteen twenty-eight.

Thinks about the yard sale with the lamp
that burned oil and how he was two bucks shy
of warm hands, or maybe a wish for a spit shine.
King perhaps, President, same thing he decides.
Considers the burden of money, complications
of asking for too much, trading one problem
for another, finding out he can't buy respect,
philosophical shit like that. Now, it's just
getting enough to get off the curb, away,
into the space between buildings, claim
a spot nobody else wants, defend it, sleep
the sleep of the innocent, gather wool,
a few papers, maybe scrounge the back lot
at the Fox, find a suit an actor chucked
knowing 'the call' was never going to come.
Clean up in a low spot, create an illusion
of respectability from a hat the world knows
has nothing in it, like a magician with forever
sleeves, go to a buffet where you don't pay
up front. Conjure a wall of pictures hanging
in a corridor somewhere between the family
room and master bedroom, give names
to the kids stepping up, a photo at a time
into independence, grandkids, the gold watch,
twilight, sunset.

Check out the suits passing by, soft black
coats, designer umbrellas on arms too lucky
to get wet, powdered women not recognizing
downwind sweat.

As usual, decisions are made for him, cop
rousts him off, 'got an image to protect
don't need bums.' He thinks cops are blind,
city's rubble, subsidizes what traffic there is.
He'll push when it's cold, take a hit for a ride,
a meal, a warm floor on Beaubian, maybe
catch a pimp on the way talkin' trash to his skirt,
on a full-moon night, stars shining like the last forty years
never happened, back to when wishes seemed possible,
the big ones, before he'd settle for what he could get,
crawling through Greektown on his way to tomorrow,
wierdos the moon encourages, up and stiffing tourists,
the smell of money, and baklava, yeah, a little baklava
sounds good, looks up, makes a wish.