PART 1
Temptation is my life’s ignition.
Nowness, thenness, nothingness, the usual.
Perhaps fulfillment.
So be it, so be I.
I will be sane,
I will be the same.
Life is creation,
but your permanent nature’s tax,
a tendency toward disorder.
Lights go on.
On the right: passion.
On the left: desire.
In front of me: temptation.
But wait
I will become static.
Alexa, order a pack of fags.
Turn off the lights.
Play music.
Put it into my mouth.
I savor it.
A woke a cappella – he’s so liquid.
And I am some graph.
There’s no abuse, so don’t confuse it.
Just don’t make me bleed.
I look up when I want to find anything.
Recognition starts a recognition.
PART 2
”But why drag myself to past scenes?
I want to dream, not to weep.”
A child in time speaks to me,
icy eroticism, Ice Queen, hop, chop, for now,
whip your horses up, giddy up!
and then
climax.
climaxing.
groove.
I, the looksmaxxing
for fifteen people in a supermarket
as if passion could be proven there.
when everything is crushing to death,
labels fall out of mouths like facts.
and I?
I cycle.
I am semi – der Fick – otic,
a cultural guy.
I sit in the disabled slash bike section
on the train at 9AM,
watching politely
as everything gathers itself
without me.
Reliably unreliable
I am far from okay,
shaking from stimulants,
an expert at hiding it.
In a failing effort
to be kinder to the world,
eventually after 2021.
PART 3
A constant force,
eternal flow,
a couple techniques,
a perfect dynamic
ecstatic flight through the night.
a beatific smile,
a soft landing,
a slide
(never a happy ending).
We will be never-ending.
Sometimes dazzled
by passing headlights,
I hold onto thoughts
that weigh nothing.
Locked into a daydream again
Why do I bend the knee so often?
In a squeezed amount of speed,
time can see
but not observe
like it used to be.
PART 4
You return, not to a beginning,
but to a threshold that remembers your weight.
Names were never the door
only the quiet breath before speaking,
only the tremor in the hand
that knew it could not hold forever.
You say nothing yields now
but stone, too, is only patience
misread as permanence.
What you called strength
was merely the body bracing against its own echo,
a cathedral of clenched hours.
Let the knees remember the fall.
They are honest archivists
bone does not embellish,
ligament does not revise.
There is a wisdom in the body’s refusal to forget
what the mind keeps polishing into myth.
And pain
yes, pain does not lie,
but neither does it speak plainly.
It hums in a dialect of fracture and fire,
a language you are still learning to hear
without translating it into escape.
You run
but even flight has its gravity.
Dreams are not anchors,
they are tides that borrow your shape
just long enough to return you to yourself.
See how the bread surrenders
how it becomes more of itself
in ruin than in preservation.
Softness was always its destiny,
absorption its quiet theology.
And the cigarettes
not neglect, no
but small rituals of vanishing,
thin columns of time
burning toward an invisible sky.
You feared dissolution
as if it were erasure,
yet all things that become
must first relinquish their edges.
What loosens is not lost
it is unfastened into truth.
She dances because she knows this
that form is only a brief agreement
between motion and stillness.
Her body writes what language cannot:
completion without possession.
And you
hesitating at the altar of your own pulse
you blame the heart
for its imagined recklessness.
But the heart is no fool.
It does not attack
it endures,
it waits,
it opens only when breaking becomes
another word for beginning.
Even now, in your dissonance,
there is a music assembling
strange, yes, and unfinished
but rich with the sound of something
finally learning how not to hold itself
so tightly against the dark.
Patrick Nowa is a Berlin-based fine art photographer and music producer. Growing up in the ’90s and 2000s shaped who he is today. He briefly studied philology and philosophy. During this time, he began working as a sound technician in small theaters and local venues, and he gave his first live musical performance 13 years ago. He still performs under different project names. Art was something he had a grip on from an early age. He loves long-distance cycling. Today he works on balance and structure. He’s shifting in a new direction.