Free Hand Me Down World by Lloyd Jones

recite and suddenly the spark they produce warms my insides. Rainer Maria Rilke. He is dead so it does not matter. The language belongs to the entire human race. Rilke is dead. Whereas I am very much alive and when in need of a meal I recite a few lines. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses: perhaps all of the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only wanting to see us once beautiful and brave ...Yesterday I recited those lines without attributing their source and a woman wanted to take me to dinner. It was kind of her. But she misunderstood. I was not looking for kindness. I was after payment. She paid ten euros for a different poem, also by my friend and sponsor, Rainer Maria Rilke, this one about a dog.
    I choose my customers carefully. Rilke is not for everyone. Some of my customers prefer my flea joke. It is slightly risqué. It is not my joke, that is to say, I did not create it. I lifted it from somewhere, someone, I forget where or who. Jokes are like dandelions. They float across the world lifting away from our outstretched hands. No one remembers where the dandelion is from. No one thinks of its origin. But everyone instinctively reaches out to hold one. That is not Rilke by the way. That is me.
    Millennium Three? I changed my name by deed poll before coming to Berlin. You see how easy it is to become the other—to bloom with the same flower when grafted onto a shared stem. Rilke is my stem. But there are others too. My flea joke, for example, it has more universality than many of Rilke’s poems. Perhaps I will tell you the short version. The long version you will have to pay for. But let me go back to Rilke. The second stanza of the poem ‘Fear of the Inexplicable’. Where he says, If we think of the existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people only know a corner of the room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. These lines changed my life. These lines struck me with the force of a thunderbolt. My strip of floor was so meagre. It was pitiful. This is what it amounted to—a desk before a class of adolescents who resented my presence and who did not want poetry inflicted on their anorexic souls. In their eyes I saw myself as some kind of oppressor. But I continued. I persevered. At night I planned my lessons. I looked for poems that would break open their hearts and minds. But Rilke’s lines would not go away. In the end I tore up the floorboards of small existence. I changed my name to Millennium Three. I drew up a manifesto. From now on, no traps or snares. No fear of the inexplicable.
    I left my life in Paris and came to Berlin. It was that easy.
    I was in search of other free spirits. I found them late at night on the trains. Artists of one kind or another. Not the kind who puts pen to paper, though some did. Not painters or sculptors or filmmakers. I met a new kind of artist whose medium was not language or paint or film…but their lives. Anarchists. Some. Yes, why not? Late at night on the trains we found one another. We agreed on certain principles. One, borders are inherently evil. They create awareness of difference. We talked long into the night about the kind of difference we would tolerate. On the one hand, you see, we embraced indifference. On the other we abhorred the state-inspired delineations and definitions of difference. Borders. Citizenship. Rich. Poor. Entitlement. We forged political liaisons with other underground groups. The more radical were low-profile. By definition they could not be organised. Their spark was spontaneity. Our movements ignited into magnificent explosions of our ideas and values that showered down upon the sleepy roofs across Berlin. The idea was that the city would wake up feeling changed but not know how.
    Well, some were unhappy with this chosen invisibility. These ones exposed