Time machine Poem by Nicolas Born

Without it really ever having begun
I'm in a big group of people
contemporaries
they seem to think my body is the homeland
so too the dear departed old acquaintances
the oft-mentioned
the disappeared those rolling along on rollers
severed from time embalmed to the bones
mocked by history
I have the distinct impression
that everyone is here
the bushes part the skies flicker
stars light up animals rouse themselves
and the clouds run back and forth
We encounter a travelling theatre troupe
a young man with death in his eyes
introduces himself: W. Shakespeare
as he writes and breathes
Oh yeah we all know him
"Why do you write" asks one of us
who'd maintained his interest
Shake turns away in disgust
and gets to work on the costumes
"Why so much death on so many stages?"
Somehow that doesn't really seem to matter here.
One of the ladies whose difficulties
are technical difficulties says
"There'll be no getting around the historical distance."
She is known for reacting to crises
with hysteria
We move through time
like a pencil
"It seems to me" I exclaim "as though we're running on the spot"
"Maybe so" a brawny guy grumbles
We appear at once as bright dots
in the age of technology
in a giant hashish cloud filled with
sniggering industrialists
"Hilarious Hilarious"
Berlin 10:30am Good morning take your seats please!
It concerns a man from the Centre for Adult Education
who shoves me aside and cries "I have always stood
for the separation of the author and the work"
Right away I tell him a story
from my mother's childhood
a striking proof of my wholeness
and his silence is truly ambiguous.
He emerges out of this eternity in brown
corduroy "Do you know Hans Magnus Enzensberger's
renditions of César Vallejo?"
Presumably he knows everyone will love him
for that He prances about He needs to go
"If you don't get out of here quick" I boast
"I'll turn you into verse"
But he insists on a quotation
". . . had I never been born, some other sorry wretch
would drink this coffee!"

Translated by Marty Hiatt