CARTE BLANCHE

CARTE BLANCHE KATHARINA SCHULTENS

HUNTING LIBRARIANS

venerated Librarians Stabilising The Multiverse I have a question for you: how do I surrender resign and abstain from evil a.k.a. everything?

my teeny baby smells like peanut butter my teenage baby turned into a tiger, brought his cage, and set it up himself.

on her first visit, the fairy queen annihilated three eggs that would have been babies. on the second she kept all of her eggs in one basket. on the third she missed out, big time.

none of my babies, dead or alive, are at fault when it comes to Why Am I So Tired. Why Am I So Tired grows as a vine from All This Shit. my babies keep me grounded.

they keep me in the ground. my babies are not at fault, nor is the ground. my thoughts are trees, stunted, overgrown with vines I cannot let them grow ’cause I Am Out Of Time.

wherever you put down roots it’s the ground that shapes your mind and your heart will Pay For It.

so I’ll just stay in a forest, ok? there’s nobody else and I’ll never be a bird again.

yes I will. woodpeckish for branches, my babies’ limbs.

The Multiverse will produce a haiku featuring my babies, their pale bare limbs plus my beak so Harsh and Fierce.

I will keep this inside. I will stay under fir trees a girl called Eufinger will hold my hand forever and tell me Leviathan Will Come For Us.

I’ll never leave those shadows under the fir trees everyone here is polishing their invisible golden cufflinks squads are fastening their gear, hitching their pitons

into the House, its white marble walls – sporting stars and stripes and beards and bones and guns, smashing the capitol.

my babies don’t like yells, especially those that are male in origin. I’ll try to surrender I will abstain from… what? becoming resigned?

(2021, English version 2022)

A MORSE CODE CONVERSATION ON CARDBOARD

we’re done now, right? are you safe? how long will this be tenable?

I’m about to order a spell, anathema to comments, connectivity.

oh, actually we had the most wonderful time – it was spring and everything

just went down: numbers, hits, every spiel all that insufferable drivel: done; finally: some peace

of mind. for us, that is, i.e. the usual crowd erecting first-world cardboard

co-working spaces out of delivery boxes. darling! of course we had a bar! it was just somewhat

awkwardly positioned, smack in the middle of some random commodity producer’s dirt plot that doubled as EVERYONE ELSE

OUT THERE, a.k.a. the frontline/workers/guy:gal:s that fielded our questions/cleaned our stuff. …I guess they sort of smelled?

well, no more than expected. we probably learned some, um, private equity stockpiling? …yeah. don’t look at those Blue Chips, honey, they only get you hangry. how did we measure empathy? I think by the type of fabric those people used.

right: biodegradability. so essential.

(2021, English version 2022)

knock MOCK CHR CHR CHR CHR

I won’t kill, I’ll just mock, mockingbird, and you as well, moron I’ll ticket all of your off-grid-shit plus your four-wings-drive, excuse me: your ironic pickup truck, Mr. Dirty Birdy Artist, go practice some more

use your elementary school missus for a stand-in, she’s plastering instagram with pics of DADDY at the purity ball back then, in my mean time I’ll mock your sixteen imaginary kids + their alliterative surnames –

I’m sorry, I’m all out of empathy, this is an emergency and self-defensive measures are in order. put your twitter handle where the sun don’t shine, at least then you’ll have a backbone,

take your home-brewed split-screen experts, their fake mahogany background bookshelves stuff ’em all under one of those PEACE cloth masks until you choke I JUST CAN’T: destruction looms and we, collectively, are Dumb Buffy Slaying Party Outfits

instead of masters of the universe, please excuse my French: gf your petty selves. I’m one of you, I’ll mock until we burn I’ll kiss my babies’ flabby white cutesy cankles, see? that’s their 401k

right there, right now we can still afford this…

I’ll mock until your missus looks like me, I’ll mock and slash and slay IT’S JUST UNTIL THESE TEARS HAVE DRIED, I’ll use your fears for frying home-raised chickens, it’s sickening

what you can do when everyone and everything is worth the same to you, i.e.: nothing, Dear colleagues, I implore you, send a Mission I promise not to kill them all, send them to save this missus

hiding my heart. is she, pray tell, hiding within? wisdom is just a lie she says, a knife in your sleeve, if you don’t want to learn any more if you’re too tired to care. so play it close, but look ahead

it’s gonna be epic when we lose it all

post some deep shit on a pastel background, buy a meantime mahogany shelf, maybe some books to go with it – damn, girl, you’re a goner. just STFU, start unsnarling your face and that thread.

Buffy, off-stage: “Nobody cares.” Buffy walks into a bar, promptly turns into a moron. knock mock, who’s there? some of those other babies, the ones that burned

while moonlighting as your punchline.

(2020, English version 2022)

spring your trap, heart, bid me off, tell the truth. I don’t have a care left in the world except, maybe, for my child.

I wish to invoke: oil fields, commanders-in-chief, their crazy eyes. fathom this: every pipeline ends in a crackpot of oily visions, willing to burn the world. I do not wish to invoke, heart, the world anymore.

call me out. tell the truth and name it. say: gutless desire, ennui. wrap me in a shawl and bear with me as if I were an animal caught in a bushfire. please.

we will have to take everything, everything we have it is quite a lot in comparison, it is not enough if you calculate what’s already lost.

(2015, published 2017, English version 2022)

WELL I THOUGHT WE KILLED THAT BUT IT’S EVERYWHERE

don’t you think it’s remarkable, after all those years of outrageous uniforms star-spangled, rebellious combinations of green and gold, red, white, and blue

after all those years of cap and gown, of beards, berets, of ties, of foreign robes, now: all’s in the hair or lack thereof, it yearns: for razor-like partings, for puffs and pomade coiffage in orange, freckles on a dome

so let’s say: he’s getting ready for something

for multiplication maybe, he starts jumping, swaying back and forth, on the stage of his convention centre, and deftly, skilfully, as if he were just breezing through the motions, he stabs multiple journalists behind the curtain he’s fast, he pulls the bloody knife right out of his own back and starts protesting

so why does it sound hysterical if I say: this is happening right here, right now, among us, this is an old song and we all know the tune

(2016, published 2017, English version 2019)

president Pu stood in the stirrups, running circles around us, throwing kisses, fucking killing it. some of my hands started clapping I had nine pairs of those but only those far right and left participated.

well, I was on a work trip, I had no idea if or when or how I would return, if mayhap someone else would return in my stead, real cool and collected, I

was externally funded and put it all on the tab: 1. smalltown, workday, some cook in a cold kitchen fixing us late dinner; 2. downtown SF, 22nd floor, we wore our most distinguished

sneakers in a mockery of casual Friday; 3. nobody spoke they all pretended things will continue to glitter on as is plus, the big one never happens. and the valley ranches

are 4. definitely not just piles of bones while we are busy braving the new world, no. those 4.5 almond producers? not draining the aquifers for three metropolitan areas. those mansion gardens? of course to be watered every day, extensively.

we continued speaking about 5. payment providers and optimisation, about disruptive technologies, key elements to custom solutions and our ancestral line of amazing engineers and dead-by-cancer entrepreneurs wafted through the lobby

on wave upon wave of some amazing Za –

lurking in apps like the proverbial ghouls awaiting fireworks, we waited until 6. Pu, still president, rode down a staircase of imperial files we’d leaked well, we had been on the 22nd but missed out on the Penthouse. so?

we forecasted some futures of commodities, erroneously invaded 7. another of those godforsaken Cold War countries, thus spoke Pu: you all have to imagine Moscow like a song and it plays on the moon, you all just have to understand:

nobody will understand and vice-versa. so, this is your position if you enter 8. Market: your words will drop + curtsy, throw their little legs into kasachoks cliché resistance is futile, this rhythm, this goddamn diplomacy will rule.

don’t bother with politics. cancel your foredoomed love affair. you try to disengage? you are pretending. with mutual respect we consciously uncoupled, haha. is there a way to leave the moon? a way to circumvent facing the music? hahahaha.

see you soon stops my heart so there’s always a soon but there’s never a then and it never ever says when