CROSSING

 

“To you did I entrust my treasure, my legacy,

poverty, hatred, I succeeded in making every

human hope perish in your conscience

over every joy so that I throttle her I took

the muffled leap of the ferocious wild beast

I called the executioners so that they bite your

throats I called the Furies so that they stifle

your screams so that they cover your blood

with quicklime and I cast you into the cloaca

I fortified and dried your skin in the wind

of the crime in the detention camps and you

have the idiotic laughter of the hopeless

on your faces but I lured you anew to the banquet

for which I’d get lust again, maybe, so

with Christian steam ‒ you pull the death

by the tail with all your cravings, with your

egoism, with the cannibalism, with the socialism

and with all the capital sins without you believing

in the original sin so that you take possession

of all that is terrible, in retail, slowly, on a trial

basis, that’s what the mission of your cultural

cannibalism requests but until that gets into your

hands the terribleness, the revolt must be fought,

demolished, encircled, even cursed and annihilated

it must be understood on a theoretical and historical

level as a form of imperfection, of a stumbling block ‒,

the idea of passing across the earth without you leaving

any trace behind is per se as fascinating as she can be ‒

the life is the future all that belongs to the past seems

to be arbitrary, stupid, absolutely futile. In full anxiety

you idiot, you should remember that the thing you are

afraid of will lose its every reality sometime and its

every sense that the past looks out for all that supervenes,

that the past is eviler than the death. You man, you’ll

remain a jackal!” screams Satan, “Pull the blanket

over your head or the nuclear fire under your ass...”  

It was an endless dream and the phantom jittered

and held forth so that I write these hideous pages

more boring than those of much quoted Hegel.

Nonetheless this very moment no reproach coming

on the part of the people or of gods could touch me:

I have the conscience so reconciled that I feel

as if I had never existed.