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michael herrschel:
splintered flashes

1

chronos

Chronos the crippled old archer,
fetching back his arrows and arrows and arrows,
hungrily eating his words, because
all times are rolling backwards:
look: he’s the world’s most violent mystery!
a shrinking body, smoothing,
licking off scars of experience,
reconstructing errors and errors and errors,
ruthlessly skinning his childhood.

2

medusa’s reflection

Ah no! alas, no! I don’t believe in flashing back!
No wondrous deeds will heal my hacked body! Ugh! I hate
those heroes dissing me: “Hey! Medusa! What’s up
with you?” – Shut up! – “Hahahaha! Want to regain
your decollated head?” – Aargh! Be quiet! – “Hahahaha!
Your mislaid mouth? Your giant lousy pate, losing
strands of hair: looking like baby serpents, holing up under
your scalp?” – Hey! Hold your tongue! – “Hahahaha! Look
in the mirror!” – No! Smash the mirror! Smash it, smash it!

3

simultaneous passengers

Lights flitting by and by, strings of eye-shaped pearls
running towards each other, speeding past each other
moving from A to B from B to A ’cause A is behind and B is
ahead ’cause B is back and A is up front ’cause A is aloft and
B is below ’cause B is down and A is on top: oh, puzzling!
dizzying! choose your perception, pick it, cull it: there’s no
central point, no regulation, no priority. Just accept perfect
freedom, just imagine sheer impossibility of standing still:
’cause everything’s in motion, always, everywhere!

4

the big top

Now that’s a sky beyond compare! My childish eyes
will swim out into black infinity, seeing lots of metal rods,
where all the universe’s gods and goddesses are climbing,
jumping, oho! Immortal aerialists, rejoicing: “Let’s create
new worlds!” Oh, laughing with faces, voices like yours
and ours, but bigger than those of any human beings:
“Let’s create from the beginning…” Bang! the music-band
plays a flourish! Hey: hey presto: Where are now the
sacred persons? Upsy-daisy: They’re missing, they’re lost!

5

core of rigid matter

More than a meteorite, heavier than all thinkable worlds
together, centre of the unborn cosmos, just called:
Boulder! Adamant boulder! Erratic hovering clump, yeah:
Drifting cryptic block! Originating out of nowhere,
now forever scudding falling racing into nothingness.
Oh lithic brain! Opaque. Oh silent, utterly quiet thing:
Oh voiceless all-embracive compact memory of anything
before and after. Lo and behold! In your impervious core,
the twinkling of an eye drives towards explosion.

6

frazzled identities

At night in bed. What next? Peculiar thoughts are haunting
sleepless minds. Listen to the scrunch of broken instruments,
to sizzling hissing swishing shocking gossip sounds:
“Ah, whoosh! This moment…” – Pardon, what? – “…can be
your very last one !” – My last one? Well, who am I? –
“Somebody with great prospects: turning fast into dispersing
shreds and scraps, particle showers, outspreading into
cosmic space, becoming interdimensional junk!” –
Yay! What a nice mess! Brrr! Let’s take a breathe and –

7

terpsichorean entropy

Freeze! The falling apple pauses, the dancers make a stop:
suspended in mid-air, denying all those tales of gravity.
Now, oh wonder! Any present being seems to be unmoved,
weightless, inert – : An icy wintry clinking still life,
brief and fragile. Myriads of objects shivering in cold wind,
squillions of numbed thoughts, beside one another:
future and bygone, both hold by rimy threads, quivering
like harp strings, touched and played and beaten by the
stiffened fingers of Aeolus, producing mortal noises.

8

take off shoes

“Tragedy was a perfect misunderstanding !” – Pardon ? –
“A gathering of stolen lives, a kindhearted illusion…” –
So what ? – “…of bawling out heart and soul !”– Heyday!
Let’s sham to be persons! – “Frantic animals…” – Hotototoi!
“…leaping , capering , raging…” – Yeah ! – “…beweaponed with
masks and vestments!” – And most proud of our thick-soled
boots! – “Take them off! It’s time…” – No more time! –
“…to feel the holey vastness of absolute zero…” – No! We’re
stamping far beyond… – “zero…” – beyond… – “zero…”

9

most flimsy skin

There are no lips nor teeth, there is no mouth.
Nothing visible nor perceptible. Nothing but an eternity
of air, inflating bloating expanding a small balloon:
spitting spewing vomiting countless numbers of orbs, of
disgorged bright galaxies into a flexible hollow body: pfff…
How many attempts is that now? At first , it’s easy…
then getting harder… at last easier again…: Decreasing
resistance of material causes either a splattering blast,
or a pause… a leeway for endless aimless dilution…

copyright by michael herrschel (gema-nr. 704152)

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