Cloud Rags

”Music is just as descriptive as cooking”
// Philodemus.


What I was doing before I began

A woman bends over and brushes something off her calves, thighs and buttocks.
It is dust. It is gravel. It is small straws of grass. It is ice cream. It is urine. It is you-know-what. It’s the kind of thing you can never brush off. It is heritage and environment.
You put one picture next to the other and compare them. You translate them into what you know. Your tumbling turns into somersaults.
One more thought goes to pieces. Let go of my hand, really, let go.
And at the same time, everything that seems hard is big and easy.
What others are afraid of, I do with my left hand.
Nothing exists for me only. Nothing is only for me.
Cloud rags. Strawberry smithereens. Stuff that easily dissolves and disappears.
The birds wake.
I pull my sweater closer, pull down my cap and slurp noisily.
I want to disturb the nature and the culture just a little.
I am making tracks destroying your tracks.
And even though it right now, since the music made the birds fly away, is completely silent, my head is filled with sounds; ring signals, the humming refrigerator and the roar from the lawn mower.
I’ve created this pause myself – this emptiness – that made it possible for all the other things to flood.
There are so few things you learn by heart, I reckon. And a lot of things are ugly and hard to understand. But it doesn’t really matter.
No one has any real skill, I reckon. Everyone just keeps surviving. Okay.
How many years of practice does it take to get that secure faith that lets you trust almost each and every word that your inner voice sings to you?
This light-handed mixture of simple observations with heavy load.
Romance and self-distance. Resistance and width.
Solitude seeker and social junkie.
Wanderer and farmer.
One has uncovered one’s field. Once there one better drill deep. You can run very fast but never hide.
So, be still.
The rocks lie like eyes in the water.
The water folds itself over the beach that leans out into the water.
The wind brings loss from North West.
In a store, there is a young man working in the cash line. “When the season is over, I will be gone too.” he says. “When the last guests have left, I will be going too.” Where is he going? What is he up to? “Don’t know.” He can do whatever he likes to. He can just stay put until the next season and go work in the store again.
Or he could spend his money on a one-way ticket to Rio de Janeiro. Or rake leaves in the cemetery.
Maybe all he really wants is to get an apartment and a job that he can go to every day. Back and forth. Never go fishing. Never run away from something. Never listen to that little piece of things-never-made that twists and turns and scrapes behind that constantly growing layer of fat in there, close to his heart.
Just not pretending. Never pretending but being for real. I’d rather pretend.
I grow my boat around the lake. I hit, in doubt, my neighbors bridge.
A pair of cranes. Causing us to curse, smoke and drink.
The countryside and the big city are both good lonesome companions. Small towns only equal suffocation. The in-between cities might still have that ability to show a hand-in-hand way out of it, over there, right through the blocks and below the rowanberries.
It looks like a white, frozen lake that I make a track through with my bare feet.
Now, sleep for an hour and become just as old than you ever got.
How hard must that kick in your butt be? And who’s gonna kick you?
Forget everything about style and reason. Make it swing, make it flow. Put your ears on that chair. Go out for a while.
You are lucky. There are a few of us that have fantasy as a profession.

Mathias Worbin