Deutsche Grammatik on a Friday Afternoon
die Frau mit dem roten Haar
(the women with red hair)
das Foto eines alten Pferd
(the photo of an old horse)
der Geschmack selbstgebackenen Brot
(the taste of home-made bread)
die Blatter des grossen alten Baumes
(the leaves of the big old tree)
das dunkleste Zimmer von allen
(the darkest room of all)
und die Errinerung an Etwas trauriges
(and the memory of something sad)
das sind die Kinder des alten Mannes
(those are the old man’s children)
Here
Down roads
where children’s footprints mark,
trail slime like garden snails,
broken glass form bottles, smashed wi’ stones,
lines up like, on the end wall,
None of the kids can talk about anything but
they smoke tabs and dress up tartish, the girls
wear strawberry ice lipstick on lips’n’cheeks’n’
eyelids taste like strawberries, they’ve
no fashion sense and the effect is crude
raw and immediately seductive.
Like god, are there any children left?
Dressed in sex from t.v. ads and glossy mags
that say, “look this way
LOOK THIS WAY look THIS way”
There are valleys and pinnacles
but these kids have no conception
of where they are, it’s like
you want to write it in 6ft
blood-red letters
YOU ARE HERE YOU ARE HERE
and maybe they count for something.