Coming into town from Zerzabelshof (a suburb of Nuremberg) I saw a shop where with big letters over the she shopdoor was written "10 Gedichte f�r 5 Euro" (10 poems for 5 Euros) -
Curious I looked there again - was someone writing little poems for money? - 10 for 5 � - what an inflation! - But as I read the sign again I saw it was: "10 Gerichte f�r 5 Euro" - & that's quite another thing - 'Gericht' means 'dinner' or 'meal' - so the sign wanted to say: "10 meals for 5 �" - so I had in the first moment the idea : ".. so you get there 10 meals for 5 Euro instead of 10 poems for 5 Euro .." - but of course my conscience corrected this vision at once to just what it was - you can chose there between 10 different meals which cost 5 Euros (about $ 6) each..
But selling poems for small money remembered me to a happening in my youth. When I was about 17 or 20 years old - it was the wild flower power time & I was deep involved then, a time where everything seemed possible - I once needed money for a concert or something - I scribbled little poems - about the size of a haikoo on slips of papers & tried to sell them to passer-by's for an amount about 1 DM - I wasn't very successful & I gave up soon, but they'll never know, what ingenious poetry they had missed & maybe they were not worth my precious thoughts..
