by Tom Kuhn
Who wants to be a soldier
That man must have a gun
And he must load it with powder
And heavy lead, my son.
Who wants to be a butcher—
And what more do you want, my son?
That man must hurt some creature
That humans feed upon.
Augsburg Sonnets
And poems belonging with that collection
Brecht spent much of the summer of 1925 in Augsburg, his hometown, and wrote to Helene Weigel: “As always when I’m orphaned and with nothing to do, I’ve been writing pornographic sonnets.” He had plenty to do in fact and was only intermittently “orphaned.” He intended the sonnets for a collection, added to them over the next year or so, and did begin to arrange them for private publication. But among many other and more urgent projects, this one was not carried through. Some of the sonnets may be what Brecht calls “pornographic,” but most, including these, are best understood under the caption of one of them: “On living badly.” As in The Reader for City Dwellers there is a deliberate, consequential, and sardonic trying out of a number of modes of alienated life to which, within the poems themselves, almost no objection is raised or alternative offered. Any such answering back must come from the reader. The artistry—consummate use of the sonnet form—is really an integral part of the whole essentially (if covertly) moral project. Here are examples of living badly—done beautifully, with a clear intelligence. That combination is itself shocking.
AUGSBURG SONNETS
Sonnet No. 1. On the shortage of wickedness
Even as a child I was for wickedness
Humanity lasts: with Tamburlaine
It went the distance grinning like a clown
And not a cut: all noise, harmless.
What, after all, is your Tamburlaines’ legacy?
A Pacific Ocean of milk for little orphans.
And yet they get their bad deeds etched in bronze!
They owe their fame to sketchy memory.
In vain the human race has ogled for
The man who would at last chop off its head.
Where is this man? Oh the earth’s poor few
Moments are long-healed scars. Yet more
Three or four Tamburlaines could not do:
No final spurt, too tired, they dropped down dead.
Sonnet No. 5. Cow eating
She sways her broad chest at the wooden crib
And eats. See now: chewing up a tuft of hay!
For a while the stalks poke sharp between her lips
She chews them carefully, so none goes astray.
Her heavy body; old and mournful eyes;
Used to bad things, she pauses while she chews
And has for many years, raising her brows—
Spoil her day, that would be no surprise!
And while she’s still provisioning herself with hay
Someone is taking milk from her. Without a murmur
She allows his hands to tug her teats:
She knows those hands. Doesn’t even look his way.
Doesn’t wish to know what’s being done to her.
She makes the most of the evening mood and shits.
Sonnet No. 6. A man gets himself to bed
While light still lingers he reads the newspaper
But he’s already in his nightshirt by that hour.
Quite soon it’s certain he’ll stand at the sink and peer
Into the bowl: is anything floating there?
Into this bowl he sticks his head and dries
After a close examination of the towel, it on the unused corner
Then shuffles blinking to the wall and widening his eyes
He rips that day’s page off the calendar.
He tamps tobacco in a pipe with his fat thumb
Clacks shut his yellowish teeth against the stem
Pisses quite absently into a pot
He locks then in a box, lights the tobacco
And suddenly notices he can see nothing now
Climbs quickly into bed, pulls out his cock.
Sonnet No. 7. An old whore
While our mothers were giving birth to us
The fathers lay down with the thing we came upon
Behind the stove, bloated, who was
All awash still with the seed of men.
Over a little glass of green Chartreuse
Dunking an end of bread, for a little money
With those abraded sunken lips of hers
She told us tales of inhumanity.
But I have seen her watching by me like a mother
So that I’d vomit with less pain
And laughed, myself, a raucous laugh, when I heard of her.
Soon I’ll be hooking dogs with this cunt of mine.
She herself foresaw herself a dismal future:
Against old age and usage art is vain.
Sonnet No. 10. On the need for make-up
Women who hide their parts as one might hide
A rotten fish from the eyes of everybody
And at the table show their faces nude
So that their gentlemen may lick them publicly
They give their bodies fast to him whose pass
Over their breasts was rough and casual
Closing their eyes, against the wall
Shuddering they do not see which man it was.
How unlike her who, with unspeaking eyes
And lightly painted mouth, waves from the window
To any, even a dog, going his ways
How little her face weighed on the light of day!
And yet how courteous she was of whom I say
She must have died: she wears no make-up now.
Sonnet No. 11. Concerning the enjoyment of married men
I love my women in their faithlessness:
They see me fix their fannies with a stare
And must conceal from me how full they are
(Oh I love watching how they manage this!)
Still in her mouth the taste of the other man
She’s forced to summon up the lust in me
With that same mouth smiling lasciviously
And warm up where his was with mine again!
And while I’m deedlessly observing her
Eating what of her lust she has left over
She suffocates the sex-sleep in her breast
Writing those lines I was still full of it!
(But should my sweethearts ever read this sonnet
It will have been a costly sort of lust.)
Sonnet No. 12. The lover
Let us concede: the flesh is weak, alas
Since I enjoyed my friend’s wife, I vacate
My room all day, sleep badly, in the night
I notice I am listening for noises.
The reason is my room is next to theirs
And that’s what enervates me, that I hear
Whenever he’s using her and if I hear
Nothing, I think: so much the worse.
Evening, we’re drinking wine, and when
I notice that my friend won’t smoke a cigarette
And that, when he looks at her, his eyes sweat
I’m driven to fill her glass to overflowing
Force her, if she says no, to drink so then
In the night she need not notice anything.
Sonnet No. 14. Inner emptiness
When in the markets I heard them saying of me
I was a man of inner emptiness
I said at once: that’s what I’d like to be
I did not say it just to make them furious.
Nor did I say it just because it might be new.
I’m empty, so I’m hungry, so I tarry:
My lunch still lowing, I’m dreaming already
I’ll shit the beef that’s eating hay right now.
I must have room in me, then I’m not full!
It is my urgent hope I’ll never eat my fill
And
there’s another thing I’m scheming at:
I must be flat, so I’ll outlive them one and all!
How’ll I get flatter? There’s no herd of cattle
Squashes the blank penny: it is flat.
Sonnet No. 15. On the use of vulgar words
I, immoderate and living moderately
Allow me, friends, that I admonish you
For scattering coarse words around the way you do
As if they were in plentiful supply.
Words, when fucking, may increase our lust:
That it’s called fucking makes the fucker joyful.
Who overuses that word, for example
Deserves a mattress with the springs all bust.
To me pure-minded fuckers are anathema.
If now and then a woman lets go: so what?
The sea’s high tide won’t wash the tree’s muck off.
And the mind! Let nobody try cleansing that.
The art of men is: fuck and think together.
(Their luxury, however, is: to laugh.)
Sonnet No. 1
In memory of Josef Klein, guillotined in Augsburg Prison 2 July 1927 for robbery and murder
I dedicate this sonnet to Herr Josef Klein
And can do no more for him because they cut
His head off early this morning. Which they did so that
We’ll know the world won’t end by one bad deed alone.
They did this to a creature of blood and bone
While he rode on a wooden board strapped flat
(A priest gave him a bit of Holy Writ
Knowing that no God would look out for Klein.)
But there’s too much of this, if you ask me.
I’d much prefer such things did not occur
For truly of their bad deeds there is no end.
I should not like to be seen in their company
(Or only until the money they owe me for
This sonnet is safely in my hand).
Sonnet No. 2. Models
For years in search of who might be my model
Not that I sought for a good man someone better
I am not good, but do not think that shameful
I found no one in life or literature.
Most I sought insensibility but where
I found a man who never lost his cool
In a harsh world, he had no ears to hear.
If he never lost his heart, he was a fool.
Only those who had no water shed no tears
(Hunger I saw feeding on a stone!)
And I found no one happy—only: “It could be worse.”
In the end, it seemed to me, precisely those
Who might have been more to me than I myself had been
Avoided precisely me (they knew me, I suppose).
Sonnet No. 10. On modesty in a woman
I don’t like it when women are dilatory
The kind I like, coming insatiable
And swiftly stilled, expire their fleeting modesty
Without a pause between thirst and refusal.
The act of love must transform her—do more:
Deform her quite! Mixing their bodies
Let the men’s heads and the women’s be as far
Apart as though they were in different countries.
Too modest to lay her hands upon a man
And too libidinous to forgo all her fun
The woman should measure hers to his libido.
Too amiable not to put up with waiting
Too insatiable ever to say no
She is allowed the act of self-forgetting.
POEMS BELONGING WITH THE AUGSBURG SONNETS
Sonnet on living badly
For seven years I’ve sat and broken bread
With baseness and with malice knee to knee
And so he’ll not turn our scant water bad
I say to Envy, I’m not drinking, let it be.
I eat my pleasure from the common dish
And from the common cup I sup my sorrow
I know you wish for more. I say, Tomorrow.
Sooner, friend, you can’t have what you wish.
Such conversation will not mend the soul.
Behind the locker I breathed into my fist
And smelled my breath: my breath smelled foul
And then I told myself, Soon you will die.
I’ve noticed since without much interest
How slowly our small lot of time goes by.
Discovery about a young woman
A morning’s partings, and about to go my way
A woman in the doorway, casually observed
And then I saw: one strand in her hair was grey
And found I could not bring myself to leave.
Mutely I reached out for her breast, and when
She asked me why—pointing at last night’s bed—
I would not go, for that had been the plan
I looked her straight in the eye and said:
Even for one more night, I want to stay
But you must use your time; for that’s the worst
A woman on the threshold there like you
And let’s be quicker with the things we say
We had not thought that you were so far through.
And then desire rose and choked my words.
Need for art
The virtuous woman who gives her lover all
And offers up herself to him quite freely
Must learn that good intentions are not really
Quite enough—he’s also crying out for skill.
And even if her cry of “Iamyours”
Translates to sex with breakneck quickness
He isn’t only interested in slickness
When it comes to emptying his swollen balls.
Although it may be love that stokes the fire
She’ll need, for winters in these harsher years
Some real talent in that bum of hers.
More needful than a soulful gaze and sighs
(Although she’ll need them too) are eager thighs
Performing tricks with gusto and desire.
Sonnet for drinkers
We tenderize our meat before we eat it
Likewise to enjoy our bodies fittingly
Some preparation will be necessary
(Take schnapps and let it trickle through the palate)
The human head is mostly constipated
And from the bowels is under constant stress
“Not suffering is a man’s idea of bliss”—
Achieved when he has self-decapitated
The drinker thinks it worthy of a man
To treat his head the way he does his dick
It is the bitter milk taught him this trick
Disappointment is the eater’s expectation
Not till he shits does he feel safe again
Want nothing at all, that is your best option.
Sonnet: The winner
Where there was no room for an olive tree’s shadow
An unstoppable fighting among men began
All for a little patch of ground where nothing grew
Not even big enough to lay their corpses on
But one fought there quite without any cause
Like nothing in his violence, cursed by all
And when the slaughterers thought of flight at nightfall
He stood there fighting still, in no hurry to pause
Most men were dead by then and lying there
But he stood mowing everything around
Till nothing but him stood and he had won
When he left, the light was bad. Nevertheless I saw
His back and on his back he had a wound
He’ll never lie upon his back again
Sonnet Number 3
According to a medieval legend six Italian virgins, wishing to get to the Promised Land, sold their bodies to the ship’s crew. None reached Palestine.
We’re like that woman who t
o reach the Promised Land
Allowed the crew her body, for that price
Hoping she’d sail into Paradise
With ten salt sailor-cocks in either hand.
We do the same. On such uncertainty
We soil the body, the only one we’ve got
And like the woman, to make it without spot
Again we’d need the whole of a winter sea.
So we arrive after many an enterprise
On shore to give God a surprise.
Yes, we turn up and halt on His left hand:
Well, well, here come my troublemakers. These
Will never be washed clean, not by all my seas.
Against me in the witness box they take their stand.
Sonnet on a fair-to-middling copulation
