Where Dionysus still smiles

Outside the crickets sing their summer songs.
It is songs of dust and all too little rain mixed to the distant beat of a tractor.
Outside it is August in the year of 2022.

But inside.
I found an open door and took it as a silent welcome even though it might just have been the wind who had pushed against the gate, over and over again, until the hinges gave way.
But inside.

It is 1960 and the past cools my temples.
It is 1960 and the calendar still counts the days of the year,
every year since,
and loops the present perfect tense without acknowledging the crickets chancing songs outside.

It is 1960
and Dionysus lifts his glass as if to show me that time doesn’t matter
and that present, past or future doesn’t matter
as long as there is wine to harvest and orchards to plant and as long as one does caress the seeds to sleep in long winter’s hours.

Times have changed I try to tell Dionysus but he won’t hear a word of that.
He won’t hear about people having forgotten to listen to the crickets’ worried songs.
He won’t hear about people having forgotten to caress seeds to sleep.
He just smiles his crooked smile.

I already know, he says as I turn to leave the vine vault, as I leave 1960 and as I step back into the outside.

The grapes are ripe, three, four weeks earlier than expected.

ListenListenListen the crickets chant as night falls.

Let’s drown together

„You have to see the sunrise over Venice“, I was told. But there were clouds in sky.

But all in all, you don’t need a Palazzo –

…and you don’t need the view from the Campanile di San Marco

…or canary birds on balconies,

you don’t need a sweeter sound than laundry drying in the wind

or a more spectacular smell then the remains of the Mercati di Rialto

if you just walk the remote lanes of the city, getting sooner or later inevitably lost.

Just breathe on inconspicuously

Guess my thoughts, I say,
to myself (because there is no one else I could ask)
and I answer:

It would feel a little strange to be a Rumanian stray dog
in Constanța

but I could do worse,
chasing cars
chasing fleas
chasing my own shadow as long as there is a sun in the sky.

 

Time puts a cigarette in our mouths

It once has been a cinema and now it smells of pigeon muck and bent metal.

When I was young, we went to the place and bought popcorn where now all kind of waste is dropped.

Inside, derelictions dwells on broken glass.

Outside, rose hips take back the staircases.

 

Have You Forsaken Me?

I never cared to take a look. But one day, on my way to work,

I peeped through the shattered window. And there,

inside,

was a small, dusted world, waiting to be kissed awake. (blink, blink and it may be gone)