Nicky Ackermann

“In this sense, God is the great companion – the fellow-sufferer who understands.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology

“I've always thought the most effective method of distribution is to give your work away.”
― Heathcote Williams

“FOR MILES Your sound is faultless pure & round holy almost profound Your sound is your sound true & from within a confession soulful & lovely Poet whose sound is played lost or recorded but heard can you recall that 54 night at the Open Door when you & bird wailed five in the morning some wondrous yet unimaginable score?”
― Gregory Corso, Gasoline

“Railways, by days and by night. The flowers in the cuttings with their sooty blossoms, the birds on the wires with their sooty voices, they are their friends and long remember them.

And we also stand still, with astonished eyes, when-already from the far distant distance- there's the cry of promise. And we stand, with hair streaming, when it's there like thunder and as though it had rolled round heaven knows what worlds. And we're still standing, with sooty cheeks, when-already from the far distant distance-it cries. Cries, far, far away. Cries.

Really it was nothing. Or everything. Like us.

And they beat, beyond the windows of prisons, sweet dangerous, promising rhythms. You are all ears then, poor prisoner, all hearing, for the clattering, oncoming trains in the night and their cry and their whistle shiver the soft dark of your cell with pain and desire.

Or they crash bellowing over the bed, when at night you're harboring fever. And your veins, the moon-blue, vibrate and take up the song, the song of the freight trains: Under way-under way-under way- And your ear's an abyss, that swallows the world.

Under way. But ever and again you are spat out at stations, abandoned to farewell and departure.

And the stations raise up their pale signboards like brows beside your dark road. And they have names, those furrowed-brown signs, names, which are the world: bed, they mean, hunger and women. Ulla or Carola. And frozen feet and tears. And they mean tobacco, the stations, or lipstick or schnapps. Or God or bread. And the pale brows of the stations, the signboards, have names, that mean: women.

You are yourself a railway track, rusty, stained, silver, shiny, beautiful and uncertain. And you are divided into sections and bound between stations. And they have signboards whereon is written women, or murder, or moon. And then that is the world.

You are a railway- rumbled over, cried over- you are the track- on you everything happens and makes you rust blind and silver bright.

You are human, your brain giraffe-lonely somewhere above on your endless neck. And no one quite knows your heart.”
― Borchert Wolfgang