One night when I was 23, during my first and only year of graduate school in Hamburg, I met another student (or maybe a young diplomat, I forget) on the S-Bahn traveling from the city’s outskirts into Berlin. We had both been attending an international youth democracy congress near the Wannsee, but opted for a night in the city to visit respective friends in favor of staying at the megahostel. He was a German studying in London, a super interesting dude, and we quickly got to talking about politics, music, literature, and language.
He told me that the Goethe Institut had recently declared an obscure German word to be the most beautiful word in the entire language. He wrote it down for me on a small notepad. Habseligkeiten. It literally meant a journeyman’s meager possessions, and could be expanded to mean one’s spiritual and existential collection of trinkets, the things that one holds dear. He wrote down another word, too, a personal favorite, but I forget what it was.
I never saw him again, but the word remained with me, as did the idea. I went on to consciously and subconsiously assemble my own version of habseligkeiten in written form — lines of verse, notizen, things that didn’t make it into my articles or letters but which I nonetheless kept around. Some of it made its way into my chapbook The Hidden City is in Plain Sight, a small work of poems and poetry that capped off my 20s.
The rest went into a doc that I only recently recovered, and which I’ve decided (for reasons I don’t fully understand) to share below. It’s embarrassing in many ways (what honest, expressive, and experimental writing from our youth isn’t?) but I like it, and much of it still rings true, with a playful alternation of sentimentality and frechheit (the other word the student wrote down, I since remembered, which means “cheek” or “freshness”).
Whatever interest these particular habseligkeiten may have to the reader, I’ve found it a gratifying exercise to dump them on the floor and take a snapshot with the thought that they might, finally, be shared.
– ldhw, October 2024
Habseligkeiten / Fragments 2005-2011
Rainy night. The crickets in the same key as Moonlight Sonata. Much better than the hated cicadas. Waking up for work and everything is bathed in a monumental haze. The Kaw River, the waterski practice pond, the hay bales in a holy glow. The banks of the Wakarusa, bound in by the trees. Ladies and Gentlemen of the Plains, the river has won, again and for the last time.
* * *
Midnight at the Osthoff Hotel. Pedro huddles next to the arcade machine pumping his fist while the otherwise empty game room pulses with heroic 8-bit arpeggios.
* * *
At the palace of petrified patio furniture. The screeching tea kettle signals the first wave of winter.
* * *
Drinking things to keep me awake and they keep me awake but also gnaw at my stomach.
Black coffee you are the flat cola of adulthood
we drink you all day
and never complain
* * *
That familiar headache… ideabubbles percolating and breaking against my skull, like the vaulted ceilings of a bubblebath disco.
* * *
The viking-helmeted opera singer is driving her pickup erratically across the highway. No one in this part of Oklahoma writes opera or even understands Italian so she’s singing her heart out but she can’t pick a key and she can’t pick a lane to stay in.
* * *
You wrote yourself into this mess, you write yourself out
* * *
My short-term memory is fine but my short-short-term memory is shot
* * *
Her reverse disappearing
lipstick
doesn’t stain your cheek
until hours
or even decades
later
* * *
“No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings” —William Blake
M. Hamburger:
“Besides, much of what is known as humour is an excursion into madness, especially into a schizophrenic state, and its charm lies in the certainty of return; for such as Hölderlin it is more dangerous than charming.”
In the infernal lemonade of his own conceptualizing” — Witkiwicz
* * *
We like to think the best dramas played out in the irretrievable deleted scenes, lost emails, burned letters, unrecorded moments… We’ll never find out if that’s true, and that’s part of the allure.
But not all. What disappears from reach does not cease to exist, just disintegrates in memory. The salt of those experiences fertilized the works to come.
Too optimistic? Probably, but what are the alternatives? Despair, inactivity… No thank you! Write to keep writing, speak to keep speaking, live to keep living.
* * *
Woke up this morning on a pillow of huge dimensions asking myself how many stuffed animals had to die to make me this comfortable
* * *
In a dream, a bunch of people sit in the lobby of a talent agency. Everyone nervous, some in costume or carrying instruments. But the doors never open for them to audition. After a while the common feeling of discomfort leads people to begin making conversation with their neighbors, and before long they begin telling jokes, singing songs and staging impromptu skits, until their collective energy carries them out into the streets. Flushed with their newfound confidence in themselves and each other, they form a parade that attracts the citizenry in great numbers. The city as a whole has cast off its everyday dullness in exchange for jubilation. Meanwhile, the producers, financiers, and talent agents slowly creep out of their offices and into the street, remaining expressionless while witnessing the revelry, blinking their eyes to avoid the confetti.
* * *
4th of July party not far from the levee. Singing impromptu blues ditties about crossing the Potomac and turning back the Redcoats. Songs about fireworks that got rained on and fuses that refuse to light.
Somebody tell these June bugs / that it’s the 4th of July.
* * *
In the bathroom with the lights turned out, bathing in the starlight. Don’t be afraid of sleeping beauty. Her beauty products won’t turn you into a toad. Her hairdryer sits on the windowsill with the cord still wrapped up.
* * *
Motorcycling with my father past my great-great-grandfather’s grave, following the silent trickle of Clark’s Creek.
* * *
Sleep finally comes, long and deep, arriving on tides of blankness. A familiar breeze blows through this guitar neck of the woods.
* * *
Lo has bad dreams about Voldemort, the villain in a book series I haven’t read. It almost makes me tear up imagining her going to the bookstore at midnight along with the other millions, burning through the final installment to see what happens to the wizard kid. We’re all looking for something to believe in, to inspire us, to be taken in by.
* * *
A newspaper clipping on B’s refrigerator about a man who used to stay in the shelter he worked at in Seattle. An old guy who always walked around wearing a leather aviator hat and pilot’s goggles. Everyone thought he was harmless. But one day at a small private airfield he decided to steal a plane.
* * *
Jenn: “Have a good day at work.”
Me: “Have a good day at life.”
* * *
Galesburg, Illinois. The five of us sat in front of the television with our eyes closed, watching Jon’s DVD rendering of the dream machine.
Flashes of light. A hawk darts through the daylight
I’m sitting on a waterfall dangling my legs over the edge
Beneath me is the maid of the mist
No less beautiful for being fictitious
she went over the ledge
but (it seems) still survived
she waves at me and invites me to join
I smile but can not move
the water runs right through me
temporarily freeing me
from the awful decision I must make
* * *
Stop admiring your unfinished masterpieces
They’re still in pieces
And you’re nothing close to resembling
a master.
* * *
We are who we are
we continue to be
who we once were
* * *
Rumors of Secret Lakes
* * *
Sailing between the heads of Knysna
Searching for the city’s last remaining elephant
On to the impassable mountain pass,
where no Nissan was meant to tread
* * *
Walking in a straight line, maintaining your posture so as not to spill the cup of hope you carry.
* * *
Our lost roads are
the sentences
we refrain from saying
how can you ask
hearts to pay
such a price?
* * *
Listening to Grechaninov at 3 in the morning in dead ass winter. I didn’t shed any tears but only because I didn’t want them to freeze.
* * *
In the end I decided it was best just to skirt the heights, not seek to climb them. The view from the vistas is always more enticing.
* * *
The snow that wasn’t supposed to fall
falls anyway
blowing around in happy sideways winter cyclones
the forecasts shrugged it off earlier
saying there will be no significant accumulation
And though this frost is made of precious few flakes
each one is significant
* * *
Enjoy your cigarette
because this song won’t last forever
and the candle beside you
will see you through the night
but not by much
* * *
There’s a woodpecker pecking against the glass of my office building window. Little does he know it’s bulletproof.
Who knows? Perhaps he’ll succeed.
* * *
I have no further wish to be titillated. The tilting of the earth is dizzying enough as it is.
* * *
At 4 a.m. Beth grabs her trumpet and begins playing along with the music on the stereo while we continue dancing on the beer-stained floor. Wipe it up and dance some more. We’ve been masquerading as grown-ups too long, let’s drop that charade and make sure every song that gets played is loud enough to make us go crazy like kids celebrating getting to stay up way too late.
* * *
When hearts no longer break, just
ache
* * *
Sitting here on the dock with no water in sight
* * *
The headless horseman on the riding mower
Plastic talismans get caught in the blades
to this day her golden pantyhose egg
remains my Fabergé
* * *
My sim card is the stateless wanderer of sim cards
transmigrating from phone to phone
like a soul without a home
* * *
The breeze may blow out my lamp but I love that there’s a breeze
* * *
…To the boundaries of Fantasia
“But Fantasia has no boundaries!”
* * *
Trips impossible to speak about. So you let the sunrise and the silence shape you. If your pen could keep time with your thoughts, you’d still feel no need to make the effort.
* * *
Sunday evening on the Amtrak. The 100-year-old woman mutters what sound like incantations. Her son, also very advanced in years, tends to her, spoon-feeding her rice over the sounds of her protests, from which all I can distinguish is “no bueno” and “muerto.”
* * *
She waits in sibilance
a sarabande of snapping turtles
snowdrift arabesques
a floral bonnet of verses
encircles the Midwest
* * *
Another Saturday in summer with Applecore Jack at the player piano. And you are the drunken nightingale, Smerdyakov with a guitar.
* * *
Bluffwoods in November
She asked what if there was a trail
you needed 3D glasses to see
Through the dark cornfields
near the old cemetery
a bright crescent moon
* * *
Inside the house of winds where I slept all afternoon. The sweeping sounds of passing traffic are overcome by a crescendo as the wind swirls in grace notes and whistles, branches clacking against the windows while the lone remaining candle flickers. When the doorknob turns from the inside, you know the spirits are trying to enter.
* * *
He misdrank
saying: When I get to the bar
I only want to speak water
* * *
Words are her capital
but she’s no spendthrift
she dots her i’s quietly
like the eyes of little owls
silent and strange
words she’s too humble to capitalize
* * *
Maybe it’s time to throw in the moist towelette
and nip our stemware in the bud
our love was a flash-in-the-pan
a champagne glass halo
where there should have been a coaster
* * *
The faucet
drip
a rythmic
reminder
that these
pipes
still have
life
* * *
A tiny tributary carves its way into your heart. A ribbon of affection all the more dear because of its smallness.
* * *
Out in the snow Nathan wonders out loud if he took things far enough. The friends whose company and energy we took delight in only hours earlier will soon be heading back to their respective coasts, graduate programs, and independence of this city we all sprang from. It’s a feeling shared to the point it barely needs to be discussed, familiar to the point of dismissal.
But no… Let’s go ahead and ask ourselves the ever-present question:
Did I take things far enough?
Of course not. But where you wish to go to can only be reached with the accumulation of time and patience.
* * *
Over and over again, that word “equilibrium.” The promised land we have to get back to. Marble columns to sleep beside after quietly crashing the gates and shouting “home free.”
* * *
A wish to eventually return to the river, to retrieve that pair of tennis shoes abandoned on the sandbar.
* * *
What would Godard do if he had to remake his classics set in the present day? His characters wouldn’t be allowed to smoke in cafes. They’d just sit there awkwardly, the pregnant pauses in their conversations conspicuously lacking the romantic aura of tobacco smoke.
The life of the cafes is dwindling in France. I read it in the New York Times. Now if you want to smoke it has to be on the sidewalk, or in secret, like the night train from Naples where the Swiss med student and I smoked cigs and drank wine in the train lavatory while his drunken girlfriend slept.
* * *
I’ve watched the fat calf transform into a lean wolf over the years. Showing teeth and learning where to hunt.
* * *
Q: Why does no one use the phrase “tubular” anymore?
A: they all died in surfing accidents
* * *
Night on the verge of vomiting. The cars drive directly across my brain. The little voices in my head, having failed to receive their latest bribe to stay silent, begin talking again. The fish I ate for dinner start swimming in circles, chasing each other in a deep-sea Virginia reel.
* * *
The foxes have taken over the subdivision
Their furry heads peer out the windows of the vacant duplex
Keeping watch over the decay
while their own playground expands
* * *
You waved your glowsticks so furiously they have since gone out. Now the vultures have overtaken the runway, and unlike you they have no moral qualms about staying up all night.
* * *
He has a soft spot for her in his heart. His heart is huge. But there are also hard spots he never intended to develop.
* * *
Todd in his Lake Merritt apartment. “I’m not used to entertaining guests,” he says. And then he starts doing headstands and walking on his hands.
* * *
Hanging your hammock on the snapped twig between day and night, realizing there can be no tomorrow
* * *
Borges advice not to tamper with original work. “The word, while asleep, gains power”
* * *
Siting on a bench at Kaufmann gardens. The plant beside me, artemisia schmidtiana, is known as “the silver mound.” The frosted, fern-like leaves, like the moon goddess’s luminescent pubes. But for a mortal man to lay hand upon them is to forfeit his life to Artemis, the virgin goddess of the hunt.
* * *
Slinging astronaut ice cream on the black market long after the space shuttle program is canceled and all our cosmic ambitions have been freeze-dried.
* * *
Le feu follet. Alain’s friend asks him if he isn’t tired of mirages, to which he does not respond. I intercept the question and answer with a resounding “yes” and a quiet, subliminal “no.”
* * *
Don’t question my heart
just my methods
which are none of my business
* * *
If you talk about someone’s heart being cold, it usually has a negative sound: Constricted, uncaring, not pumping enough blood. But a frozen heart could have a neutral or even positive meaning. Freezing your heart to keep it preserved, to be thawed and pulped at a later date. Making love from concentrate.
* * *
intrepid / intravenous
what does the heart’s topography suggest?
are you pure of heart
or simply porous?
* * *
“How fast can you take your time, kid?” – William S. Burroughs
* * *
We’re not required to remember anything anymore, we forget what we didn’t know we had to remember… we lost the muscle memory … pieces of our past fall into the ocean in chunks, evaporate into the cloud, in mute splashes that stain the crown moulding.
* * *
What was I burning through
all those nights?
walking through the streets
My headphones steaming,
my head on fire
* * *
when the jukebox has the hiccups
when your lipstick gets all lipstuck
when you take a last sip from the silly straw
when your last fleet of swan boats sets sail on the Kaw
* * *
Sam tells me the old Yiddish folktale about the snowman is in search of a soul, which only the creator can provide.
So what’s it gonna be then, God? Does the snowman get a soul or do you yourself lack a heart?
Oh well, it’s too late. It’s a sunny day and while we’ve deliberated we let the poor schneemensch melt.
* * *
Young poets, unsure of everything except the need to create
* * *
Where in life were you happiest? In the rosy morning glow of a successful afterparty, a firm enough grip on your consciousness to enjoy it, a best friend or two beside you as you one by one pat everyone on the back and put their drunk asses in taxi cabs or to bed. Smiling with wry affection because you know it’s your only night on this planet.
* * *
The drunken friend request, the story of my life
untoward forwardness I had to retract
because I gave it wings too soon
* * *
A ladder rests on the snowy rooftops of Berlin. The Strohpuppe waits until no one is looking to make his escape.
* * *
Like a half-witted hound dog
you have the ability to sniff out
but not pursue
* * *
Insomniache: a mixture of insomnia and heartache
and also contentment
because once it hits
there’s nothing you can do about it
* * *
Today is not a good day for our dinner with Al, Paula said. He got hungry and has already eaten a pound of trout.
* * *
The fog has settled in, big clouds of firework smoke blown in from County and State lines, making the streetlights fan out in a broad spectrum. The connection has timed out and tonight no emails will be sent.
* * *
Tuesday, 4:30 a.m. Outside the adobe igloo windows, the flashes are becoming more frequent. My trance has been broken and the sky is ready to explode. I’ve been waiting weeks for this.
* * *
What I’m looking for:
A job?
No, a window outside of time…
* * *
What I thought was the cry of an infant was the sound of a siren, the cry of a city.
* * *
Looking to the Godhead, looking up “Godhead” in the dictionary. “Now rare,” it said. No wonder I haven’t seen any around lately.
* * *
What was born in the shadows must go there to expire
* * *
A time when we all smoked inside our apartments and it didn’t seem at all strange
* * *
“I dreamed too big,” she said, still stuck in her hometown. But one year later she moved to the coast.
Dreams: simmer on low heat. Don’t overdo it. Listen for that quiet music from your self of selves.
* * *
Sacrifice your greatest dream in a humble offering — it crackles like small twigs as it burns
lucas wetzel 