something that has no colour, something <br />that smells of nothing, something tenacious <br />is dripping from the amplifier bureaus, <br />is hardening into the seams of time <br />and shoes, something bloated <br />is issuing from the coke works, is bloating <br />the dividends and bloody sails <br />of the hospitals like a wan breeze, <br />stickily intervening in the elbowing and gossiping <br />about professorships and primages, flowing, <br />something tenacious that kills salmon, <br />into the rivers and leaking, colourlessly, <br />and killing the flounder on the banks. <br /> <br />the minority has the majority, <br />the dead are out-voted. <br /> <br />in the state printing shops <br />deceitful lead is arming itself, <br />the ministries are haggling, august <br />smells of phlox and dead resolutions. <br />the plenum is empty. <br />in the sky above the radar spider <br />is writing its tenacious web. <br /> <br />already the tankers on their slipways <br />know it before the pilot appears <br />and the embryo darkly knows it <br />in its warm, throbbing coffin: <br />something is in the air, sticky <br />and tenacious, something that has no colour <br />(only the young shares don't sense it) : <br />it's against us, against starfish <br />and cereals. and we eat of it <br />and incorporate something tenacious <br />and sleep during the blooming boom, <br />the five year plan, sleeping <br />unsuspecting in burning shirts, <br />encircled like hostages by a tenacious, <br />colourless, bloated maw.<br /><br />Hans Magnus Enzensberger<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/to-all-telephone-subscribers/
