Thankyou, Germany
for making me feel human at last,
for making me feel needed at last,
for throwing me into a room
full of dental braces, acne
and correction-fluid-sloganed pencil-cases
armed with a paperback
and an unused English degree.
Thankyou, Germany
for rescuing me from semi-literate bosses
with flabby noses and overbearing jewellery
ordering me to scrub rubbish-compacting machines
with a toothbrush
and allow pilchard-brains
to treat me like a pilchard-brain.
Thankyou, Germany
for inventing a treblecleffish-lettered
umlaut-littered language that goose-pimples my arms,
drags a hairbrush down my spine
and tickles the backs of my knees with a cactus plant
as I twitter “rotzbesoffen drachen pracht
schwanenflügel beschwichtigen oberschenkelknochen,
gespensterhaft herabgeprasselt schornsteinfeger
dreckigen fleckigen gracht fracht bestochen”,
where a deaf pigeon killed by a roof-badger
is a vom dachdachs getötete taube taube,
vom dachdachs getötete taube taube,
vom dachdachs getötete taube taube,
vom dachdachs getötete taube taube.
Thankyou, Germany
for simply being there, a vast
sausage-abundant frothy-beered forest-blanketed
Gothic-churched mass in the middle of Europe, when I
stumbled out of the bogus Tudor bar above which
my artist friend had hanged herself
and realised
at the messy-forked end of life’s lunch-break
that my home,
that price-tagged musician-squashing monolingual island
that turned me into an island
and bankrupted me,
can offer me as much as a hair-gel merchant
can offer a Hari Krishna monastery.
Thankyou, Germany
for massaging my soul
so that I can hear the plashing of the fountains
and the braking of the trams
and count the spots on ladybirds
and throw blackberries at rats
and smell the yeast from the brewery
and smile when a cuff-linked electrical engineer
understands a Wordsworth sonnet.
Don’t be ashamed to fly your flag,
don’t be scared to look in the mirror,
you can be proud of yourself,
gracious Germany,
you are a land
fit for heroes.
Protect your language.
Love your culture.
Soar heavenward with Goethe and Schiller.
Fill your radiowaves with Kraftwerk, Rammstein,
Herbert Grönemeyer, Wir Sind Helden,
Ton Steine Scherben, die Ärzte, Nina Hagen,
Sportfreunde Stiller.
Stop
blaming
yourself
for the past
when all the peacocks of Europe squawked,
Poincaré, Romanov, Habsburg, Hohenzollern and Lloyd George,
as the man with the plumaged hat
slapped the man who pecks at breadcrumbs
and stabbed him in both eyes with a white feather
from London to Vienna to Petrograd to Sarajevo
to Verdun to Bolimov to Passchendaele to Brest-Litovsk
to Versailles, to Versailles, to Versailles, to Versailles,
to Munich to Prague to Warsaw to Stalingrad
to Dachau to Auschwitz to Dresden
to West Berlin to East Berlin.
Stop apologising.
Not everybody is Jewish.
Destroy the drivel-headed schleimscheissers
who would destroy you,
who would cut off the eagle’s claws
and his balls
and his borders.
Destroy your many, many, many traitors,
those arschleckers
who think treason is cool,
who think shitting on your own culture is clever,
who think chopping your own bollocks off and waving them
above your head squealing “Look, look at me, I’m a
sedentary-pissing pathetic mannequin!” makes you a better person,
every vile kotzbrocken,
every nationless, tribeless, rootless, soulless
lump of puke,
dangle them from the Galgenbaum,
glorious Germany, and awake
from your decades of
emasculated
ethnomasochistic
brainwashing.
