Checkpoint Charlie

by
Rachel Rabinovitch

 

1: The Triumph Of Love

James Joyce had twenty five operations on his eyes.  Sigmund Freud had thirty three operations for cancer of the mouth and throat.  Wystan Hugh Auden was arrested for urinating in Barcelona.  Sir Winston Churchill was an anti-semite.

 

2:  Deep Blue:  White Pawn To Bishop Four 

"I do not want to be I, I want to be We!"

Bakunin said that. (Much despised by Marx.)
Hirsute; slope shouldered; no Tsarist.

In the whorehouse of the mind:
That's where you define 'define'.
A swirl of crows, an odor of sperm:
Place de la Révolution!

Witchcraft of princes at the Dresden Gates.
Apples and a noblewoman
In a snow white landscape.

Sing it, Tommy:

     Checkpoint Charlie

     falling down

     falling down

     falling down

     Checkpoint Charlie

     falling down

   

You Are Leaving The American Sector.

Vy Vyezhayete Iz Amerikanskogo Sektor.

Vous Sortez Du Secteur Americain.

Sie Verlassen Den Amerikanischen Sektor.

Bye!

 

3:  Neural Slice

           This sentence is a lie.

Man is a dog with a brain;
His leash, gold's horrible grin;
His bone, war's scarlet plain;
His bitch: evolution.

Multimedia now embrace
Der Hund in every human face:
D'avignon, no Attic posture;
Transience, not alabaster.

Deliberate regression.  Zerfall.  And yet
Amid the tall green stalks, amid the corn --
Angels singing.
A blaze of blossoms.
Veritatis splendor.

 
Scenting perished stars,
Time's wolves break through the gates;
A Leninism for beginners
Darling, don't be late!

Nietzche in Turin.  See, it starts to snow.

 

4:  We Be Borg

One Two Three O'Clock Four O'Clock Rock--

We be Borg.
We be Borg!

Gomen na sunao ja nakute --

Resistance be futile.
Resistance be futile!

Via Con Dios, My Darling --

We gon' assimilate yo' momma ba-ad!

Strawberry Fields Forever --

We be Borg.

 

Napolean had hemorrhoids
Karl Marx had them too.
As did Wordsworth.  Ouch! Oooch!
Pu wee tu wit a woo

As amid blotches of furniture,
God sat silent as Heidegger,

Eyeless at Gaza, at the malls sans change.

 

Television Commentator A:  "Since we're changing we must be improving!"

Television Commentator B:  "Since we're moving we must be getting closer!"

 

     There were seas and mountains
     Sharp dorsal fins
     Landscapes primeval
     Dunescapes of skins
 
     Prayers like knives
     Towers gull-swirled
     The forests of Hokkaido
     Abysses of pearl.

 

I want to go to Heaven.
 

5:  The Interpolation Of Dreams
 
Eliot was an anti-Semite;
Schopenhauer was one too;
Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner,
Santayana, Jean Cocteau,

Henry Ford, Will Shakespeare also,
Solzhenitsyn, Pound and Kant,
Dostoyevsky, Mencken, Jung,
Celine, and Henri Montherlant;

Philip Larkin, Paul de Man,
Hemingway and Wyndham Lewis,
Nietzche, Dickens, Geoffrey Chaucer,
H. G. Wells (and Lindburgh too was);

Andre Gide, and Simone Weil,
Heidegger; Drieu La Rochelle,
Leni Reifenstahl; Knut Hamsun;
Gore Vidal; Colette as well;

Henry James and Bobby Fischer,
Henry Adams, Gorbachev,
Chomsky, Chekhov, Newton, Spengler,
Paul, Peter, and Piuses I through XII.

 

6:  The Battle Of Borodino

Homo futurus:  man is now no more.
Ice ages beckoning; polar debris.
We ran, we ran, choking in thickets of time;
Valkyries pawing air, and whinnying in north light.

               This sentence is a lie.

This sentence is also a lie.

This one too.

 

7:  Laika

Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili was an anti-semite.

In August, 1949, the first Soviet thermonuclear device was detonated in the northeast Kazakhstan region of Semipalatinsk in the USSR. 

In March, 1953, Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili died of a stroke in his rooms at Kuntsevo as a recording of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's twenty-third Piano Concerto revolved on the turntable beside him.

In November, 1957, the first living terrestrial mammal, the dog Laika, was successfully launched into space, never to return. 

Moskva Moya!
Strana Moya!
Vy Samoya,
Lyubi Moya!