dreamers go around openly now
with dreams out on their skin

with the lustre of membranes
and entrails spread over

their bodies like old-fashioned
maps; the specific

contours of the moment show
the future’s embryo

as a contagious stand of fossils
and the earth’s surface cracks like

peeling canvas; the stuff
of dreams and everything else a human

being was made of flutters
in the air, a few classic

strips of veil and gauze
around the glassclear thoughts

while drops of sorrow break out
on a forehead washed clean;

as when ships with windblown
dead leave the sinking

water and put in through the town
in the creeping sun they always

gather on a summer-grey evening
with violence and decency

bound to fragile flesh like
particles of soot bound to soap;

anyone at all is a hostage
somewhere in the jungle of consciousness

and builds on a church of snow
anyone at all raves on about

the gods’ punishment about chaos
that reaches its boiling point far

too soon and anyone at all
curries favour unseen

with the patrols of an unyielding
order where they hand over life as collateral;

only the poor live on in fear
of dying before the rich give

orders at last for
anything at all;

and as clocks run races over
the planet and hearts are filled with

stone after stone that never will
fall as machines devise

other machines as if it were
possible to conceal that the future

conceals nothing today as
nothing happens as I sit

somewhere in my apartment almost
apathetic alone at any rate with

thirty pounds of white paper today
as August eleventh slowly

but surely vanishes as
the full moon closes its eyes

against the dazzling sun today
a woman returns to

the village sees if there is
water in the charred

well grubs a bit in the ground
with a stick hut picks up

nothing and sits down and
waits thinks she can hear

a dog in the distance from
the forest that’s still smoking

and that keeps on smoking
when the night chill comes

thinks she can hear the stars’
flames when the stars come out

right where the house with
the fence and garden used to be

thinks she’ll rest
a bit and dies

a bird flies off a bit of dust
eddies up a drop of water falls

on a leaf on a branch on a tree
on an earth and the rain starts

to cry noted somewhere in the
distance as rain on the computer

screen a bit of infrared radiation
from the forest that’s still smoking

is irrelevant and radiation
from moving animals does not show up

a group of children seeks shelter in a cave
mutely observed only by a hare

as if they were children in childhood‘s
fairy-tales they hear the wind tell

of the burned-off fields
but they are no children

no one carries them any more