Fragment

I ride the S-Bahn out to Wedding
and don’t go to class, again.
At the salon there, I dye my hair
chestnut brown like Sophie Calle.
Or Maria Schneider in The Passenger.
Then, I leave my clothes and everything
I own. It is death, and its needle,
I am thinking of. Bachmann, or Franza,
in Egypt, and her escape
from her husband, his fascism,
and the sanitarium he forced her into.
My father, when I was fifteen, was sent
into the desert. He went missing
and I didn't think
I would ever see him again.
When he came back, he was not
the same man. Changing,
the poems are becoming
letters or songs.
Making them is all I do.
That, and the endless photographs.
And I am trying not to want
to be someone else, or myself,
but better, which is, in a sense,
a kind of death
drive, a death wish.
The body and language
and their eventual collision
is what I am banking on.
The children here,
in Berlin, where I am,
their eyes are wild
and when they run,
their bodies are young
and not yet owned
by anyone.