Poems about Berlin

Right in the eye
Of history
I walk
Among the crowds
That taste
The absence of confinement

An unfamiliar space

Between the band stands
On the avenues
Where people
Test a freedom
Newly won
Still strange
As yet in need
Of daily reassurance

Crossing and recrossing
The big gate
And the bridges
That for generations
Connected nothing
Marked divisions kept
By guns and barbed wires
And well-lit empty spaces
Between walls
Watched from towers

The new reunion
Brings happy smiles for most
Quiet tears for some
New doubts for many
Who are uncertain
Now
About their lives together
After decades
Of separation

Right in the eye
Of history I walk

Just now and then
A little bit afraid
That she might
Rub her eye

Just now

Berlin, today you look so sad
It's sunday, isn't it?
I think of you
Like I think of some joke
That one reads out loud during the week
And on the last day
Is thrown away
Because it isn't funny anymore.
Seriously Berlin,
There's no more laughter
On sundays.

Berlin, your asphalt has acne
Just look in the mirror
You can't go out like this
You re just plain ugly
Not as sexy anymore.
Put up some make up
Dress up like some real city
Don't play that card again,
Seriously Berlin,
There's no more trick
For you to play.

Maybe I need you;
The most suicidal sentiment
A chamber my heart and mind dared to open
My chest, open, red and live as after birth

Maybe I just need something;
Something to live by
Something to pick at, and master like inhale, exhale
Give me purpose, give me religion, give me sense

Berlin no longer has walls
A war is for those who can see it
A one way ticket from poisoned routine
A single cigarette, chain smoked

Materials become only threads on my back
Pull apart the fibres, till I am bare
Year zero, cotton picking
You'll be my one drink in the dessert

Poets, artists, free-thinkers,
Those who are mad and young and crazy and magic
Who sprinkle glitter under their eyes
And run about the night city streets
And flit about in a dazzling, burning light
Who are enchanted by the very world in front of their
Long criss-crossed lashes.

But very few wear those round rose-coloured glasses
In which I view the world through

Who, Like some dreaming Tom Thumb
Will happily sew patches
Embroidered in free-footed ecstasy

What if
When you leave
You don't come back
When you travel
The rest of the world
With your backpack
I am sad
That you are leaving
For quite some time
I will be alone
And stuck
But i'll say "i'm fine"
When i am actually not
When i am missing you
At 2 a. m.
When i am wrought
With stress and fear
When you are there and i am here
You say nothing will change
But how do you know?
How can you be sure
Our love won't go?
How can you be sure
That our love won't travel
Like you will
For those four months?
How will i know
On your journey
Of self-discovery
That you will discover
Not only who you are
But that
You don't need my love anymore?

There was an Old Person of Berlin,
Whose form was uncommonly thin;
Till he once, by mistake,
Was mixed up in a cake,
So they baked that Old Man of Berlin.

June 12, 1987
ВЂњTear down this wall! ”
-Reagan

If only he meant other walls
As well.

We've got sweat-slicked brows, tuffs of loose, knotted hair
Our limbs dumbly droop and we stand on the roof

Of a three story flat up in Prenzlauerberg
Near five a. m. when the night's at its end

When we shuffle our shoes and sometimes tip the booze
From the bottles that we've all left scattered around

Then the beer trickles down and it spreads on the ground
And turns the rooftop tar a shimmering black

I feel through my shirt the thick summer heat
The hairs on my arm, the trees in the street

Are bathing alike in a warm morning dew
And the cigarette smoke we let slip from our throats

Catches the first red rays as the sun shows its face
Through the chemical haze out in east Lichtenberg

We face the source of the light as it floods through Berlin
Not the city we know in this tangerine glow

In this rich warming shine that is washing our eyes
Black industrial pipes start to wiggle and writhe

And their steam hits the scaffolds, whose
Metal fingers grow limber as they stretch through the street

To shake the red trees from their lumbering sleep
Then the leaves that they drop start to flee and get caught

In the stares of facades in the communist bloc
With the refusal of death on their hot, heaving breath

The parks are all built out of paper and gold
With fountains that spew streams of molten stone

Our apartment stands firm in the boiling sea
Of the scars of old days which swell, throbbing like waves

It's the city lain out, moving, alive, and just like that
A light, filmy rain sprays a sheet on the town

We try to claw it away, but the curtain stays down
Then we stir, soaked in the sun and the rain

It's the start of the day
And we can go home to sleep and dream of sunlit Berlin