go west

GO WEST, YOUNG MAN!

GO WEST AND GROW UP

WITH THE COUNTRY! 

that‘s what the father of my father‘s father used to say; 

whereupon I reckoned — no, not the lyrical I

not the I which speaks in this poem

but rather I, the very I, who stands in his room

hunched over his phone, typing away —

the flesh and blood I — that is to say:

Tanner himself.

I reckoned I‘d manifest my own destiny

and so I turned both my head and my devices

out and onwards into the east

til by fortune (or by folly)  

my foot found his respite upon a hillside 

in Austria, in Österreich, that is to say:

the Eastern Realm, or Easterrike —!