I was recently in Berlin for the first time. I was invited for the 25th annual Poesiefestival. I was nervous. As the last of my circle to go, Berlin has always existed for me as this place of parallel possibility: an infinitely exciting elsewhere. I'd been anxiously anticipating my trip, wondering exactly what it would be like. So, (asked no one, ever) what was it like?

Well, the festival was intense but incredibly joyful; a beautiful, big-spirited experience hosted by kind and generous people and bringing together a wealth of diverse poetic talent from around the world. Berlin was... it's complicated. Some of these complications are inherent to Berlin and others I brought with me from home. My mind works in the way that it works, and so a poem attempting (and failing) to sort through those myriad entanglements was somewhat inevitable. This is that poem, and so by way of introduction:

There isn't a Wall. By which I mean, there isn't really a Wall, singular. There was, in reality, a series of walls: an inner wall facing East Berlin, and a outer wall facing the enclosed sectors of the West. In places, the Wall was three walls deep. I hadn't realised this before. But just outside Nordbahnhof S-Bahn station there are three separate memorial markers, attesting both to the walls and to the numerous doomed escapes over or under them. The Berlin Wall is plural, which somehow fits with its endlessly multiplied and proliferating legend. In the 80s and 90s the Wall loomed large in popular culture and in its collective unconscious. It bled into films, TV, books, songs. It wasn't merely a symbol, but a receptacle for any number of wildly paradoxical ideas. It was less an architecture than an event. It was feverish fantasy. It was history.

Historie or Geschichte?

Humm. I recently learnt that there are two German words for history: historie and geschichte. The former being a neatly delineated parcel of past events, the latter being a kind of aftermath; the history that haunts history, history in history's wake. I walk up and down thinking about history. I walk up and down thinking about the “fall of communism”, about the professionalised consensus of a historical past so sanitised and packaged that in places it is indistinguishable from silence. In others, this history is so raw that it bleeds into the present, no matter how corporate, how changed the space. I want to think of geschichte as that part of history that cannot be managed or maintained, that is not amenable to story. History, perhaps, that refuses to become history. As Berlin haunted us, so Berlin is haunted.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what communism meant to me, how despite everything, I still think of it as an unprecedented moral movement without rival in the twentieth century; a deeply serious humanism that sought to end the relations of property from which interests and power grew out of all sane proportion and from which sprang the discrimination, violence, exploitation and oppression of the poor, of women, of black and brown people, of queers. My communism is not a communism of walls. Berlin might shake or reinvigorate that conviction.

I also spent a lot of time thinking about my own history, my own – for want of a better word – identity, what it means to be in another country whose language I could not even semi-fluently speak, yet whose intellectual and literary cultural fundaments I had been steeped in for years. What does it mean to be here as a working-class person, whose ignorance made my every utterance a kind of unwitting expression of cultural imperialism? I often felt stupid and small, but I mostly felt angry with the prohibitions and restrictions placed on working-class education; the way they circumscribe desire and limit solidarity. My German is appalling, but my curiosity and willingness is undimmed. How I want to know a city: the true city, not the fantasy, not my small English projection of the place onto the place. I spent a portion of each day walking until I was lost, fuelling myself with strong Turkish coffee.

Time by yourself, for yourself forces you to confront things: ageing, illness, failure. All the fun ones. But it gives you back to yourself too. Berlin forces a space in thought. And despite the grot, despite my mixed feeling, despite the gentrification and the often cheesy cannibalism of its communist past (the Karl Marx money-box was a real, disturbing artefact), I kind of loved it, and I am forever grateful.

Berlin

/ today, i am thinking: where do i live but in language?
/ anything that inhibits the home must be –
/ english. genre of truncated mindfuck. gives birth to –
/ swords. dead erotic recompense. boring.
/ i am in berlin. i enter the listening city.
/ there are productive melodies. melodies of perturbation. melodies of damage.
/ silver streamers from a balcony. the stag-do's tinsel wig. the smell of turkish coffee.
/ berlin builds roads like romans. moabit is an elegy. neukölln is an elegy. the nucleus of elegy. a nuclear elegy. yr halo is a boomerang. it slices.
/ what did the eminent poet mean when they said elegy?
/ the hulled blue rusk of a flower opening against –
/ no. a state of storm. of perpetual sharp incision. a permanent sharp incision.
/ i ached and prevailed all day.
/ anything we receive inside the ruin of ritual must be –
/ english. this corollary of bones.
/ that is, my rituals come apart in the doing of them.
/ or, perhaps, ritual is not something i do at all, but that which attaches to me.
/ bisecting shadow that just won't quit.
/ i want to live anywhere the sunlight touches ceasefire.
/ a land that never lends itself to consecration.
/ commerce of radiance.
/ the false-economy of sacrifice.
/ body, yr extreme of supple conduct. a requiem, soberly.
/ i prevail. days of exertion and turn.
/ perversion. reversion. immersion. etc. this hotel has a spa!?!
/ i will not pass go. i will not collect one-hundred dollars.
/ she said you're not really a spa person. pungent and reluctant. frump-core. prolewave.
/ she said try not being you for, like, one day. dross apologist. dross apothecary. she meant it kindly.
/ depression at twenty-eight degrees c. everywhere proprietary hieroglyphs.
/ a rose with her proprietary thorn. abounds between mortar.
/ today i will set small fires.
/ i will burn down breath itself.
/ i will visit the grave of hegel. i will visit the house of brecht.
/ i will lodge like ice in the mind of god.
/ or not.
/ today i shall cut a door in his misogynist swallow.
/ i will recalibrate my cry. my whole self will be the oxygen of overthrow.
/ i will be released. be an orgasm open for business. neither wince nor resist.
/ melancholy's pale ascension can do one, pal.
/ any day now, any day now...
/ says the radio. i do indeed remember ev'ry face of ev'ry man who put me here.
/ i bend my body towards whatever bends my body. in berlin, communism returns first as tragedy, then as tourism.
/ a bust of karl marx. with a slot in his head.
/ i will weave a nest from the severed fingers of garment workers. in the mall of berlin.
/ maw of berlin. the red flower widens into life.
/ i am standing where you stood. what they paved was hardly paradise. but damn.
/ i bend my body. what is returned or received inside a word: queer.
/ a body they stumble to solve: communist.
/ the skinned knuckle of extinction: agenda.
/ oh, eminent poet, i do not wish to be the bride of anything.
/ poet: chiffonier of grim futurity.
/ well, maybe frankenstein (jr). maybe jesus christ.
/ reading huey newton in the executive breakfast dining suite.
/ reconsider the martyred female saints as exemplary models of revolutionary suicide.
/ between the sesame rolls.
/ good morning world of morbid knavery! and alpro yoghurt!
/ poets: charlatans of stolen fire.
/ poem, give the meadow its tempo. expired tenderness. lakes and lakes.
/ we get into an argument about whether or not claude cahun was a trans hero.
/ cahun's description was neuter. both. neither.
/ the genius of androgyny. androgenius. is that clever?
/ there are kinds of queer that do not count.
/ how queer is queer enough?
/ how queer is queer enough for what?
/ today i am thinking about power. power is eerie, a supernatural machine.
/ ecstatic structure. luminous trace.
/ today i am thinking: where do i live but the body?
/ inside the auger shell of my anxiety.
/ anxiety too is a kind of ecstasy.
/ i drag this ecstasy behind me. and it is horrible.
/ i circle myself. i quiver and shrink.
/ in the hotel, staff are trained to anticipate that which we – the guests – are trained, in our turn, to desire.
/ except we don't.
/ in the mirror: the advent of a pearl. will require biopsies, heralds cancer.
/ we – the poets – claim to be committed to radical joy but we talk about death a lot.
/ and where is the crisis to hang my commitment on?
/ if i say free palestine the room will erupt. one-hundred pairs of hands. a flock of startled birds.
/ i feel like a doctor, tapping the liberal funny-bone with my cute rubber hammer.
/ often, people look at me like aw bless. i am tight inside their empathy.
/ sometimes, people include me in their spurious woo-woo bullshit utterly unasked.
/ i am smothered in the butter of consensus. wetly cloyed by star-signs, crystal healing.
/ the photographer says i am too melancholy to be a punk.
/ the male poet corners me in order to venerate ginsberg.
/ rhapsodic kiddie-fuck. there's nothing zen about him.
/ in a minute i will get up and walk out.
/ i am counting to ten.
/ look. i mean it. well.
/ no one is listening. they boycott my boycott.
/ sometimes i catch myself thinking: oh god, my poor ancestors! forsaken, encompassed, ignored. recycled as publicly-funded art.
/ i realise that building in under den linden with radical joy! decals in the window is a microsoft store.
/ what did i just hear: kneading? kneeling? needing? keening? something, at any rate, that wears out the joints.
/ this berlin is a season of –
/ treasonable flowers. flower is a sinkhole, stinkhook, hooker for bees. five-pointed flower that blooms against a backdrop of grubby felt and moral failure.
/ our communism was never this: the ribcage of a wall.
/ here, it is discrete, convenient, obscurely patronising. paradise of moribund amenities. tap water at room temperature.
/ on the tram, a man is picking a brittle crust of spunk from his jeans.
/ a curdled worm of spit.
/ i balance my rage in the spoon's hungry hollow, like a heavy egg.
/ season of –
/ of course i prefer to be full and clean. but –
/ today i will photograph the reconciliation church.
/ who would i be with all my repetitions stripped?
/ strain is both melody and effort.
/ what repetition strips from me.
/ a footling thread of song. forcibly united inside of –
/ today i am jaded. the heart – fibreglass, duroplast, cardboard – like a sad trabant.
/ or buying a ddr pin for a friend. while the sun in its brazen payload concentrates on killing me.
/ mother, i am more frightened of chemo than cancer.
/ of cancer than capitalism.
/ there, i've said it.
/ is it terrible that i prefer my fotokabine photos to the professional ones?
/ there, i've said it.
/ did not want to be angled, sifted, constrained.
/ did not want to be magnified. all the painted republics of a face.
/ how hot and wet, unhealthily stained.
/ in the gallery, we were looking at the surface of the moon. until it wasn't the moon, but the wall.
/ obstreperous propagandised thing. picture of a ladder sprawling upwards into absence.
/ on the podcast, the presenter asks why women would be attracted to violent criminals?!?
/ as if we don't live inside a system that glorifies male violence.
/ that exceptionalises male violence.
/ i was looking at the surface of the moon. until it was my face.
/ i cannot sleep. as if i too wish to be sublimely identified with such violence.
/ state violence.
/ desire is how i metabolise violence. assimilate violence into myself so as not to be afraid.
/ i do not hate men. but i dread them.
/ i love communism. but i dread it.
/ today i am thinking: i will have more patience with the spurious woo-woo bullshit believers who come to their spurious woo-woo bullshit in the aftermath of devastation.
/ i am thinking this. but i won't.
/ site of primary emergency. satellite of collapse.
/ nyet! nyet! soviet!
/ a piano suspended over my head by a single silver streamer.
/ it was always english. forging the corpse.
/ today i am thinking: decline the crow. invite in all the doves of arrested development. smile at everyone, show my teeth.
/ outside, the birds of utmost menagerie, skittish reprieve.
/ sad how small my life is.
/ no. insular but wide.
/ thinking: insularity is not natural. the brain curls in on itself under its learnt behaviour.
/ the cultural imperialist assertion that –
/ you don't need to learn [insert foreign language here]. they all speak english anyway.
/ dear teacher, define need. dear teacher, who's they?
/ u meant that i would go nowhere.
/ u meant to force an identification.
/ u meant to stint my solidarity to plainsong. i hate what limits me.
/ english. it is also the very substance of expression.
/ dear teacher u meant to trick me into loving my abbreviated state. but i won't.
/ even so. i have one language, and it isn't my own.
/ so here we are. poems: a different frequency of need.
/ and u were wrong. i have seen canals, cathedrals, glaciers, mountains, levadas, waterfalls.
/ dear teacher i have mimicked the poses of famous paintings. in front of famous paintings.
/ i have seen berlin. where i hold your english in my ready bowl of nauseous apology. and the stupid u have made of me gnaws.
/ dear teacher, i am trying. my language makes an aperture in language.
/ this language. and the sunrise returns to my hand.
/ and the sunrise makes sense.
/ there are accuracies, variations, the strict inevitable day.
/ there's a woman in the mirror, nothing thrives inside her smile.
/ there's a woman in the mirror, her smile is smooth extinction.
/ she will be better. finally break the long gold foil on the life i was supposed to have.
/ the life i could have had without – before –
/ but now and anyway. resident of edges.
/ i did not put this tension in my chest.
/ but i will keep it there. until my fire goes out.