Superhuman Fragments

The air clicks and bites with its lemony tingle
Down someone else’s half-golden neck;
A postcard view - whitewashed walls, itchy-red shingle,
Someone else’s eyes resting on the old fisherboat’s deck:

Kick that salted scar at the root of the mast! -
Bird’s claw, fish’s jaw, inherent humanity’s law:
Eat what they’ve dropped, varnish what they saw.
Stomp the present wound to reawaken the past.

Wood breathes, cracks and breaches give in
Switching off God’s retina for the bird in the cage,
For scrap metal - fu;r U;bermenschen in Formalin -
Who’s quicksilver glistens, never hardens with age,

Who crush walls like paper and bodies like sand —
Exhibits belonging in no carpeted rooms;
Sentenced like Atlas to stoically stand
All too high, too low, too late and too soon.

While 7 billion and counting weave their hearts into silk,
Turning the black Styx into honey and milk,
Those titans who are bored play chess and play war.
Lilac blooms through the window once more

But nothing blossoms inside this deflated chest
And the clump of dried dirt for a stomach
With stone-cold cocoons - a graveyard butterfly nest -
The superpeople’s only Kriegsgepa;ck.

Short lives the summer below the passerby sun,
So I shall sleep again until next June on my shelf.
It comes a maiden, leaves a nun -
For centuries it aimlessly both withered and again begun,
Though I could never stand, survive as one:
Merely a minor superhuman fragment of myself.