passports and foreigners

I am here,
Passport and mother bound,
I am walking the too cold streets of Berlin,

City of history,
City of death,

Alongside a child-mother and dark skinned brother,
We rarely fit together, much less
Here

I leave tomorrow,
Poem-less,
And heartached,
Cold to the bone,
Restless and coffee pot jitters

I have not cried here,
Not for the 6 million Jews
or the Two Million Others,

I have stepped on steel faces and listened to the sounds of stomping,
I have whispered danke not dankeshein afraid of these sounds in my mouth,
I have museumed my feet to blisters,
And cemetary respected my ancestors,

My nails are blood low,
The cuticles torn to bits,
My belly is uncertain,
My mouth chapped and ripped

Something is so wrong here.

Yesterday we rang doorbells and drove streets,
Walekd up three flights and pushed a number 36
Entered a strong yellow apartment complex in a nice neighborhood on a street I can't or won't pronounce,
I shook a parkinson's trembling hand
Stepped under thresholds and into kitchens,

Together we saw the stolen,
The driven out,
The home of
Vera and Martin shed in the years before 1929

This was ours.
Our house.
Those vines could have been ours before the bombings of East Berlin,

In our home the man hid in a dark and quiet corner of a hallway a menorah.
Not Jewish and fearful,
I wondered if it was ours,
What he had done in the years after,
If he would have killed us or hid us,
I looked away,
My feet the only semblance of reality

Martin and Vera
Martin and Vera
My grandparents I've never know
They knew
Before Kristallnacht,
Before the camps,
They knew
America was the only option

Never assimilated anywhere

Here I stand,
Between 3 lands,
As much their legacy as my mother

Surrounded by
Shitty metro and blonds hair
I am leather coated and fully armed with fear,
Bearing Vera's eyes and Martin's skin and a past my mother, almost orphaned barely knows herself,

Foreign and aching,

Lost
Between America Spain Germany and Jew
There is nothing but cheap air fare standing between my identities
a 21st Century urging me to embrace all four,
A skin color that tells of no history or meaning and only the lost windows of forest and nomans land

I am here
Roaming cold streets
Turkish Jazz
Sandwiches
And Avant Gaurde Museums.

Today we spent 4 hours in a chocolatierrs,
My mother's 33,000 dollar salary purchasing 300 euros worth of chocolate
The ginger and marzipan the only visceral memories of dead parents who died too soon after fleeing a fear bearing country,

She speaks duitch and I am lost,
Orders me orderlz like the worst of the Germans
Her English decibles seem harsher with each day we remain here,

My mother is German,
Longing to be like lost parents,

I am armed here
With reperations
And what I thought was entitlement,

But this
Will never be mine,

I will never come back,
It is too painful,
Too scary

After World War I Germany was hit hard
Blamed for the world's mistakes and saddled with debt and misgivings,
Stripped of land and Army and bearing,
Somewhere between punishment and a Greater Prussia
this here feeble land was armed and dangerous strong in the militarz sense,
World War I and shame lost in clouds of cannon smoke and SS boots

Germany regained it's strength then,
It's doing it again,

Asked if they would be okay with their children marrying a Jew,
50 percent of Germans said no,
In the Jewish Museum

Quiet but raging,
Anti Semisitim remains despite history on every corner like advertisments on the internet,

It is easy to ignore what has happened in an outstreched city and the fear of guilt in tired dreams,

I cannot and do not blame my generation for their grandparents

But I cannot evade the fact that anyone over 80 here probably would have killed me and stamped me with a star,

Worse,
I am here hearing of my own American inaction in the 1930s,
How we Democracy and Savior turned away boats of starving Jews,
We too too fearful,

Worse,
I am here
hearing stories
And walking streets

Thoughts of Darfur racing beneath neural pulses
Knowing of my inaction,
Tainted with my own history,
Jewish
German
American
Spanish

I bear a burden
Of having done nothing in spite of my heritage

Wonder if there is anyone without these brutal scars,
These rotten memories,

Can't believe how deep I sleep,
In a nuclear age of internet and atom bombs,
With dessicating bodies and impending envioronmental disasters,
How a year abroad has meant I have changed nothing but my love life, haircut, and apartment,

How do we sleep?
we dream?

Who will rescue us
When we have done nothing of this nightmare?

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