Even your family can betray you

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[EDITOR'S NOTE: This poem, published in March 1919 in Spinke's newly founded literary magazine, Keine Heilung für Liebe, is the only surviving work of the nine poems by Spinke that appear in the table of contents of the magazine. The circulation for Spinke's publication was extremely small, reportedly selling on 34 copies, and even Spinke himself did not save any issues in his personal library. We owe the discovery of this poem to Spinke's long-time friend, Gustav Landauer, who had cut the poem out and pasted it on the inside jacket cover of the copy of The German Ideology he kept in his bathroom. Only the fact that the backside of the page contained the table of contents clued scholars into the possibility that perhaps many poems and stories written by Spinke are no longer extant.]


Art Deco Dream

I dreamt it was the twenties
And we were in the tallest building in the world;
Your wore a green dress
That hugged your waist and hips
Then disappeared
Into long, patterned stockings
Laced with curling threads of gold.

Your hair is short,
Like a flapper’s;
And you wore pearl earrings
And we said goodnight
On floor number three—
Through a black-meshed grate
I watched the top of your head
Start to sink away
Down to the lobby
After the elevator door had closed.

But then I ran,
Ran down three flights of curving marbled stairs
With golden-stemmed banisters,
Racing the rumbling elevator—
And I slid across the lobby floor.

To the elevator
Dinging open
Revealing a thin sliver of you
That I shocked mutely
As I burst in—

And I kissed you into the elevator wall
As the door slid closed.

I reached blindly for the thinly scripted buttons
And managed to pluck out a 3 and a 66
As we kissed the most passionate, overdue kiss
Against the elevator wall.

Floor three,
And we don’t know if the door ever opened,
But as the machine prepared for the long boost
To floor 66
It rumbled
Like a rocket ship
And you giggled
While we kissed.

Then—zoom—off we launched,
Kissing in suspended space,
You climbing up my body,
Me climbing up the walls,
For gravity weakens
Against our upward acceleration.

Then—ding—the sinking feeling;
And before the door can open
I press floor 112
And off we launch again,
This time you almost float above me,
Kissing me from the clouds,
Deep, magnetized kisses
That lift one up.

Higher, we both thought:
How high does this building go?
And looking out on floor 112
It was like another world
Inhabited by a different race of people
Who breathed thinner air
And drank drier drinks.

Then one, almost accidental press
Of 225
Yielded a prohibitive buzz,
And with the door still open
Our vessel began to sink—

But we would have none of this!
Without time even to determine the highest floor
By studying the condensed lettering
Of the elevator panel,

Out we floated
Onto the cement balcony
With miles of sturdy building below us
And a tall, skinnier stretch above
That vanished into the mist…