"East-West Train" Full chapbook.

"... departing as scheduled luggage racks empty unfilled w/ your rain & your rain... how it adds to the morning..."

I believe I have said this before, but I really enjoy KSE's Sound Library series. I know many of you out there can not listen to music while you read, but I suggest you listen to the song or album first and then read the poems. The subject for this chap, AJ Kaufmann's second KSE release, is the wonderful album Trans-Europe Express by Kraftwerk. I don't want to delve to far into the album itself, but if you can recall Trans-Europe is such an airy and epic journey that seems to glide along the hillsides and meadows, towns and villas, with songs like "Franz Schubert" and "Endless Endless" and of course the title track. Yet for all their beauty there was that disconnect, the electronic coldness that loomed in the distance. Kaufmann's poems have that same feel as he rides through Paris, Vienna, Dusseldorf, Warsaw, and Prypiat, looking at the world through glass. In a world of synthetic coffee, showroom dummies (or mannequins) dance and the train moves on to new discoveries. AJ does not only relive the album, but adds an even stranger view as he translates the music into words. It really is magical.
(Jason Behrends)

Paris

Departing
As scheduled
Luggage racks empty
Unfilled with your rain
And your rain
How it adds to the morning

Paris
4:23
Deaf speakers
Inflamed
As
Sweet St. Germaine
Malacca cane
And the rain
Still 4:23
Violas ablaze

Concrete drops
Of soul
Break Paris
In half
Break Paris
Apart

The train rolls on
How the rain
Adds to
Most anything
We get to see

Frozen frame by frozen frame
Drop of rain by drop of rain
Piece of steel by piece of steel
Paris
Is
Unreal

Metal machine
Disaster

Vienna

We're evening coffee's synthetic touch
Vienna
4:54
And we burst through the city's waltz
Heart
On an endless
Avenued
Roll

(Drums in the room's dim corner
Evacuate all latte angels
Before the bombs
Come round)

That's life's very first rehearsal

Then stray cats appear
Anew
With their leather coats
Tied to their ankles
Some kind of savior
Or mercy
Electric

Braceleted views come breaking through
While mannequins dance all observed

Oh endless halls of mirrors
Oh endless hours of waltz

O dancefloors on cool blue fire

(And the bombs come round
And we're tucked in
Mad)

Dusseldorf

Memorize... analyze... immortalize
Steel-rails

And the tunnel begins
At Rhine's industrially
Pierced
Yet still infant mouth

Bleeds white apart
Blue breeds in color

Steel-rails still
Steel-rails to rainbows

Dusseldorf
And there we are – the collectors of faded gray postcards

That's 5:01
We arrive at station's end
We meet the grim
Conductor

Pass the Apollo... pass the digit-all clock

Pictures of Bowie
Fill up the vacant still suitcase
Fill up the vacant European heart
Lost at dead-ended waltz

There's still chance we might be returning

And Rhine's inners
Wail

The train's back East
Yet again

The train's back to speak with the clouds

Warsaw

Reach Palac Kultury's
Subterranean deep-throated
Rails
So well-concealed and armored

So undergroundly
Hollow

Warsaw
6:00
Here we've gathered gray
Under bright red unity's stars
The stars that still breed terror
The stars
That were never dusted

While Vistula calmly sails her barges
A little girl unaware of Europe
All her lovers reach out
For the railways
Tied blindly
She scratches
At trains

Still on the same goddamn train
Still in the same goddamn rain
And god, it's a nursery rhyme
And god it resembles
Suicide's hope

Bleached is the starlight round here:
Thanks god
It's still morning

The mornings are only
Gray
At
Europe's last
Yawning
Border

Prypiat

At the River Station's cafe
We stop with a well-comforting hiss

Flames shoot out from the broken
Concrete
Tables

Prypiat
6:23

Prypiat's cafe's served cold
And so are all nameless now
High rise blue tower blue blocks

The cloud still speaks in violet

Cross Lenin Boulevard
Cross empire's faded
Imagery

The trees are watching still
The trees are still alive

We stop
The train gets abandoned

The whole utopian dream
Wasted
Utopian mornings ripped out

The cloud still speaks in violet
Sirens wail
And radios crackle
The cloud speaks through our spirit

As sketches of urban infrastructure
Wilderness rusts the trains
No life lost
No life here at all

The clouds only speak in violet.

The harmonium's margin

I am a margin
just as my eyes seem to be
just like a secret life
leaving no traces
behind

Just like the furniture
straight from IKEA
that never quite fits
your
bedroom

Just like the poems
I wrote on your barstools
never seen
spoken
or heard of

just like several missing hours
several strange faces
waking up a whole week later
pretending
it's still the same Sunday
still the same lady
hanging on her man's limp
now hopelessly rusted
shoulder

see her walking towards the market
to finally become
a blonde
to finally please his
nostalgias

and she is a margin
just like my yesterday's
cappuccino
or the closed restaurants' vows
or the way-past-midnight
drunken chorus
of nighttime's blue janitors

just like these streets with no names
strangling out
your verse breath
or workin' ladies
ever pretending the cherry blossom
just to get to your
dollars
just to play your
harmonium

"Ashtray Sally"

I really miss you so
I really miss your style
I miss the way you treated me
I miss the way you lied
I miss your sweet confusion
I long for your disdain
I never thought you'd meet me
On this lonesome train
Ashtray Sally

I miss your pledges badly
I really miss your hand
I miss the way you touched me
I miss your Sunday fan
I miss your nighttime fire
I miss your sweet old song
And how you treat me badly
How you know it’s wrong
Ashtray Sally

In cafés dark and low down
You kept observing me
I loved the way you dance
You loved the way I sing
I miss your evening drinks
I miss your changing moods
I never thought we'd meet here
You never sang the blues
Ashtray Sally

I’ve nothing new to give you
I have to pack my things
Hear city sidewalks cracking
From what the night would bring
I really miss you madly
I really miss your style
I miss the way you treated me
I miss the way you tried
Ashtray Sally

Resurrecting dead sleep's sculptures

Resurrecting dead sleep's sculptures
is a no good occupation
yet the only one
I can afford

I've changed my rooms
beside that
I'm still alone

the rippled faces come always near midnight
pacify
soothe
& promise
death's beauty

come shinin' through green curtains
& a strange delicate sun's
last red
spasm

you've changed your clothes
beside that
you're still empty

a little red ball that's jumping up
round
ironic
no, not the sun...

clawing at poetry's high door
while having nothing to offer...

I'd rather remain alone
I really like this new room

the rippled faces keep callin':
spirits of my true lovers

All ships come to doom's ragged end

All ships come to doom's ragged end
like occasional
butterflies
masts like butter-smeared wings
the thick heavy beads
of a haven
all captains are heartless here
& what did you expect...

the butterfly's tongue pierces your ear
like Noe
at first day of flood
the day it turned out
he was not a madman...
he was not
wrong
while constructing his
fuckin' thing...

his ship's come to doom's ragged end
too...
the captain broken-hearted
still smiling at the raven's
chance of
rescue
found land & a rainbow
where most of us get bogus buckets
for salty water
a-plenty

we're mad hatters here, politely
sailed...
still not at doom's ragged end
but I promise
we're getting closer
& when none are left to
cry out
"Land ho!"
& rats have already abandoned
ship
then we'll know if it's finally home
not perhaps doom's
ragged
end...

Smothering camera still

It's there... a review of your passion
caught on film
an upstair alcove
intellectual lovegod
cat-man
shielded on red
baptized in plasmic screen
war
here...the omnipotent
red eye
tears...
brings forth the anvil of flesh
in a crucial parody
of devotion

gunned down & pleased
while ripped apart
at the anvil's
rusted
edge

the city's all around us...watching...
recording... improving... growing...
seeking a cure for its cancer

it's there... your passions reviewed
embracements/enlacements
in crashed corridors of velvet

if only you're pleased I'm in
smothering
camera
still of the night

Wish I was in LA

wish I was in LA
inhaling a different death
quicker & irrelevant
bored & tempted to run...
here only standstill helps
standstill only
makes it
work...

will catch the nearest plane
& move towards a brighter death...
not the one on cockroach bed
pesticide meadow
thin cold water
meth
but the one where moths are free
to feast on my eyes
& suck out my Pollack
brainstain

the one where pope won't come to visit
and June will last forever...

wish I was in LA
with a tapestry of dormant will
boogaloo
flower
inhaling a different gift

been wearing this death for too long
a brighter one might help...

there, at LA's suburbs
a strawberry lady's waiting
w/ her black/pink poodle
puddle

with a different kind of zoo

how I wish I was in LA
the one in the back of my brain

Eve

the flower of Orient sits tight
immortalized in
Remington's
entrails
as it tells the tale of a mother
under snowing skies of summer
& fades & shelters her monks
like snails

the flower of Orient looks back
to see her eyes form patterns
on the minaret's
tortuous
shrouds
reads under the leafy
vegetable
fabric
reads well above
her lover's
white
lair

soon comes across some sacred
text
& moves it
wraps it up
gently...

so the flower of Orient reads
age-old Braille
of a Prophet

delivers
predicts
& composes
a new
&
sour
Eve
for the times

Trapped between the devil's left foot and the drunken cherub's blackened wing

They've got free wine here – and I think it's nice enough
and I've nothing to tell you right now
I guess we've whispered all our frequencies
earlier...
even the green tongue fails
Figaro
& it's hard to even tell you
what exactly I recently bought
& these eyes are something I've known too well
well

what end to an end
to mean all the means...

& I can't play the piano again
not in the black room's
tower
the voice gets all tied up
in louse piss chambers
& all your territories've been thoroughly explored
pilated
illusorized
longed for...

the voices get dim in the lighthouse
but still – they've got free wine here –
we could drink for a million
years...

why tied to the mast & thrown overboard...

even the green tongue fails
Figaro
trapped between the devil's left foot
& the drunken cherub's
blackened wing

Dead love buzzes best

Ysabelle's real

you came to me as a trainwreck
I liked it
as I've been the drunken trackman
and we knew that we'd sum up to zero
which is quite an impressive number

we'd stay up all nite
and drink with the ghosts of the perched down
passengers
while Ysabelle would serve us
her „Barcelona” cold
no caviar
no wholesale
no vineyard...

I hated her voice and yes, I still do...

and you were real, too

I guess she's still writing songs
somewhere at Soho
w/ her plump blue sneakers
& bourgeois manners
while playin' nanny
to some little
grumpy
Hitler

while I've sung you of dead wives in my welcoming sheets
and the crow's distant ticklin' at my immaculate window
so deathlike & real...

and I was real, too
and I guess you liked it...

but I'm still in love with Death
& dead love buzzes best
almost like in that
summer
song