Read Ashes for Breakfast Online
Authors: Durs Grünbein
Being a dog is having to when you don't want to, wanting to
When you can't, and always somebody watching.
Being a dog?
                        It's the bad smell attaching to your words.
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2
“Get out of the light,” you say, talking to the demon
In the glass gone blind with looking,
Giving you the glad eye these many years.
Its harsh glance pierces your face
Like a spy from the clan of the X-ray spirits.
When you turn your back, your fear of
Going rigid turns with you.
Till something's certain â¦
                                               behind the grins.
Even in your phantom image, the brain scan
Picks you out. If only partially.
An alien among aliens, you stand out
As they stand out in you.
                                        With walled up frontal bone
Every refuge is left behind you. Will it be too late
By the time the autopsy sheds its bit of light?
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3
⦠umpteen years of service with a view of barbed wire fence,
Trotting back and forth upcountry and down, only a dog could endure,
Captivated by his lead, trained to behave from infancy.
Even asleep, the tiny gap in the wire
Shrinks to the size of a bullet hole behind his ear.
A smacking of the lips proves even dogs have dreams.
The thing that sets his juices flowing is the idea
That parallel lines meet somewhere.
Where Pavlov stands for the residue of spirit
(instinct mobilized, a zigzag compass)
Dialectics is nothing but ⦠dumb loyalty;
An ear for the feeling in his master's voice.
The moment of clarity is the lightening before death,
At the end of the trial.
                                        “
Like a dog
.”
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4
You look old, young hound. Atom age old.
Curious in the mornings, heavy with leftover scraps
Of vivid dreams, you amble into your day,
Penned in by the traffic streaming by, the lingo
Printed on flattened wood pulp, the mush
It takes plenty of cunning not to gag on.
Because what you are supposed to be, your phenotype
The fetish, broadcasts to everyone: a German.
White ⦠male ⦠medium build ⦠brown hair.
                                                                     It might do
For seventy years of existential struggle.
At best, patience might hold back the drool.
But the greatest threat, even to you,
Is from stupidity,
                                the buzz of brain activity,
Of which it's said, it creates itself.
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5
From the junked buzz of the early years,
Led out on to the black ice of shy objectivity,
You go rigid at zero with an excess of signifiers.
The roar of empty promises,
Vacuuming out words, gestures, expressions.
The garish dreams lighten in the laundry,
Chemically bleached, printed with some nonsense or other.
Resistance at the century's end retreats
Blatantly into the brain.
The only thing to keep you up, simpleton, is laughter
At an animal caught in its own toils.
It's the only thing you could begin to take seriously.
Asked what I've spent night and day thinking about,
I sometimes have the presence of mind to reply: “
Nothing
.”
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6
Homo sap., the animal with letters after its name,
The only one to lie, to obey the logic
Of appearance and deception. As you'll see
If you cast your eye once over a newspaper.
Twice ⦠careful now ⦠and you're caught.
What good is your skepticism when so much is taken on trust.
When you breathe (like nitrogen) illusions
That are rumored to be the stuff of dreams.
Bit player, with your head in the fog,
Think of Socrates.
                            When he swore, “By my dog!”
A world of opinions smashed to smithereens.
As any child will tell you, the very first word
Paradoxically produces a misunderstanding
That it takes repetition to clear.
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7
I was happy in a sandy no-man's-land, I didn't do verbals,
I was a dog, wanting for nothing or not much.
The faith I needed to live by came down from on high.
God was an airplane, camouflaged like a cloud
By the enemy, remote-controlled, to lull me to sleep.
But I remained stoical, eyeing my terrain.
When I stood to attention on all fours,
With my dynamited pelt, the ground earthed me.
In the West, so they said, the dog precedes
His master.
               In the East, he trails himâat a distance.
As for me, I was my own dog,
In the suicide strip, equidistant from East and West.
It was only here that I sometimes performed
My
salto mortale
in the gloaming between dog and wolf.
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8
Reason, as Joe says, this two-bit hell
Is this place where the self whistles up a storm;
Where fear and curiosity strike a balance.
Fear: lest it suddenly disappear
Without trace on the path of curiosity.
Curiosity: what it might be like, to live without fear.
It produces a little drama
Along the border marked by reason
Through perpetually new straying.
I am not here, it says.
                                           I am not there.
And its games of hide and go seek confirm:
I is none other than this border dog
Keeping a watchful eye on itself.
Who will guarantee that it won't leap on you
If you quietly remove yourself from circulation?
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9
Now listen to this: in the obituary they wrote about me
In my lifetime, they said I was so sweet-natured
That they wanted to keep me as a pet.
It makes me ill to hear them drooling
About my loyalty, my affection, my trustworthiness around children.
Tripe! There's a term for everything alien.
Looks as though time has caught up with me,
And my voice is swimming in the confession:
“I was half zombie,
half
enfant perdu
⦔
Perhaps eventually space gulped me down
Where the horizon closes up.
My double can look after me from here on in.
My orneriness is puked out, plus the question:
Do pets have lighter brains?
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10
Just as well you can't read my thoughts,
The film I've got running in my imagination.
“My life in reverse⦔ or how I blindly
Patrolled the minefields in no-man's-land,
Myself just a cipher in a simultaneous equation.
No longer simultaneous, and I'm free.
The landscape sinks back, a new brownfield site.
Ever since I got out of here, no one knows me anymore.
The sand blots.
                            Guard towers are forgetful
As eyes, relieved by sockets.
The two or three names for the place of separation
Are already gone.
                               Now nothing is left to recall the trick
By which a strip of land became a hole in time.
Just as well you can't read my thoughts.
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And you? Have you forgotten where you're from?
Is it starting to dawn on you how much damage was done
By so many years of humiliation and slapstick?
What a country, where a word on something topical
Provokes more than the unsayable
Remaining unsaid!
                                                Whose voice
Is swallowed during the attempt to chew your gubbins?
To cotton on right away to what's happening, and what isn't
Can be sophistication.
                                                In this instance, it was lethargy
That prompted you to stand to attention brain-dead with exhaustion.
What is life anyway? Everything's replaceable
Where hypnosis rules and
my duty right or wrong.
Don't kid yourself, in the paradise of dogs
Piss on a tree trunk is the stuff of dreams.
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12
Dog among dogs awake at night in the firing zone:
       How was it again, your stomach growled? What at?
       At the biscuits they tossed you in Prussia?
What was it that kicked you in the back,
Was it the cerebral cortex that said, “I know”?
       Was it the supply of fresh blood?
What a dog's life, and at what a price.
       No underdog-victim twaddle, please.
It takes ethnographers, with their coconspirators' look,
       To understand fear. Animals often appear as humans
       In their works. As far as I'm concerned,
I was embarked on a long sleep. I was a machine
That liked it when my buttons were pushed.
       So and so many strikes per minute. I struck. They struck.
For the apprehensive, the quickest way from A to B
       (and back again) is the ellipse.
Break a leg ⦠Artificial intelligence
       Has planned ahead in the event of a breakdown.
       The only question remaining is
Who will fix you if your machinery breaks.
As an
homme machine,
you enjoy La Mettrie's
       Protection, and don't need an alibi.
You function, that's enough.
       And good old Hobbes will pay the bill.
Unless he's tried shock treatment, no one can say
       What he lacks. Plunged from ignorance,
       Your whole life opens up. In free fall,
A projector scans the table of defeats.
Punched strips of naked fear. Things go black
       Before your eyes. Could be dazzlement
That says it wasn't Vico or Machiavelli
       Who said history is blind in both eyes.
Fortfahren ⦠wohin? Seit auch dies
     Nur der fällige Ausdruck
Für Flucht war, für Weitermachen
     Gedankenvoll oder -los.
Was aufs selbe hinausläuft, wie?
     Zug um Zug einer neuen
Erregung entgegen, einem Gesicht
     Zwischen den Zifferblättern
Im Schaufenster, Brillen für Liebe,
     Für schärferes Fernsehn, Särge
Und Möbel zum schnelleren Wohnen,
     Wo Engel an Kassen saÃen, taub
Gegen ihr süÃes, nekrophiles Hallo.
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Wieder vorm Telephon, in der Vitrine
     Wie unterm Glassturz, kaum
War die Tür zu, erstarrt, ein Objekt
     Für Passanten am StraÃenrand,
Starrst du auf dieses Tastenfeld, Ziffern
     Wie der stellare Zauberwald
Am Nachthimmel ⦠dezimales Mandala
     Das mit Erreichbarkeit lockt,
Mit plötzlicher Nähe, Geflüster, Verrat,
     Sogar Liebe â alles codiert
Wie seit langem im voraus, ein Leben
     Auf Abruf, und kaum gewählt
Explodiert eine Stimme in deinem Kopf.
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Unterwegs zwischen Mutter und Ãther
     Auf Sendersuche, den Pulsschlag
Des blutigen Hasen im Ohr, anästhesiert
     Wie unterm Handschuh die Haut
Von tausenden Innenstimmen, â wer weiÃ
     Wer da jedesmal sang, klanglos
Wie im genetischen Chor der Refrain.
     GroÃmutters
Ach
oder das
Hhm
All der steinernen Gäste im Keller â¦
     Bis den Mauern der SchweiÃ
Ausbricht und du dich flüstern hörst:
     Was für ein Aufwand an Panik
Für ein wenig abgeleckt werden, nachts.
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Und morgens schieÃt aus der Dusche â¦
     Wasser, was sonst? Rot und Blau
Steht auf den Hähnen für Heià und Kalt.
     Daà die Haut sich in Streifen
Abschält, bleibt ein alberner Alptraum.
     Kein Dorn im Handtuch, kein Blut
An den Fliesen â das Röcheln im AusguÃ
     HeiÃt Hygiene, nicht Tod.
Und ob Seife noch immer aus Knochen
     Gemacht wird, der Schaum
Auf den Handlinien trocknend, sagt nichts.
     Ãngstlich belebt, an den Haaren
Herbeigezerrt, stirbt ein kurzer Verdacht.
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âºJedes hängt seinen Gedanken nachâ¹
     War kein Motiv für soviel
Unterwegssein, blind für den Fakt, daÃ
     Auch dies sich vergiÃt. Bald