their most famous son across T-shirts and hats, he
smiles boyishly from a million postcards,
they name chocolates after him and then
erect monuments to those chocolates
in the town square.
It’s not the same here. My tooth hurts.
Easter Sunday, sweetshops sweetless, beerhouses
beerless, party-shops birthday-bannerless,
pharmacies ibuprofenless, pavements
lifeless besides a foreign-looking woman photographing
a lump of stone and a chin-scratchingly
ordinary door. My teeth hurt.
A neckhair-ruffling howl of a whistle of a drone
stalks me along a green bridge
over green waves flanked by cuckoo-cradling green,
back across the invisible border.
No fences, no gates, no puzzled squints
at my fuzzy passport picture, no eagle stamped in ink,
nothing. Just horizon-to-horizon
globalism. Maybe one day there’ll be a huge poster.
Big Banker is watching you.
Neuralgia marches through my gums
and up my cheek, makes inroads
into my left eye
and occupies my left ear.
My face hurts,
as huge bikes and beards bomb past me into Bavaria,
past a shop named
“Führer”.
It sells moustache-strokingly normal windows,
roller-blinds and solar panels. “Made in Austria”,
the billboard trumpets if I translate correctly,
“Royal quality for a middle-class price!”
My brain hurts.
I find a machine and buy some chocolate.
