To All Telephone Subscribers Poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger

something that has no colour, something
that smells of nothing, something tenacious
is dripping from the amplifier bureaus,
is hardening into the seams of time
and shoes, something bloated
is issuing from the coke works, is bloating
the dividends and bloody sails
of the hospitals like a wan breeze,
stickily intervening in the elbowing and gossiping
about professorships and primages, flowing,
something tenacious that kills salmon,
into the rivers and leaking, colourlessly,
and killing the flounder on the banks.

the minority has the majority,
the dead are out-voted.

in the state printing shops
deceitful lead is arming itself,
the ministries are haggling, august
smells of phlox and dead resolutions.
the plenum is empty.
in the sky above the radar spider
is writing its tenacious web.

already the tankers on their slipways
know it before the pilot appears
and the embryo darkly knows it
in its warm, throbbing coffin:
something is in the air, sticky
and tenacious, something that has no colour
(only the young shares don't sense it) :
it's against us, against starfish
and cereals. and we eat of it
and incorporate something tenacious
and sleep during the blooming boom,
the five year plan, sleeping
unsuspecting in burning shirts,
encircled like hostages by a tenacious,
colourless, bloated maw.