Greetings

I remember the wood board floor
creaking, the magpies in the garden
the frost flowers on the bedroom window

that you said, in a past life 
I was a watercolor, no, a blank line

that the sweetgrass in the bottle
floated like a seahorse

that after counting to a hundred
I went looking, missing the last step
in the dark stairwell

that the phone card was left stuck
in the booth by the side of the road

that in the hall of the airport
the air suddenly turned solid
because I walked into a glass wall

Yes, it's fun to hide
but a disaster when you're not found.

Horny poem vs Love poem

a devil poet hung around my 
bed with eighty verses.
God almighty he hissed
what is there written on your body
where burns the torch of the horny
you've have never made it with a word

I will bite the sentences from your breasts
dump the love, rub the sweat
grab and pinch the darkness to shreds
your body deserves a long verse of
hellish heat untamed unresisting wild
and screaming fright

he tore open my finest phrase 
pure for the smooth poetry
he scratched rough letters in deep thighs 
slapped a title around my waist
drooling with too many faces

tonight I will let the devil poet come
in my lowest regions
I will lick eighty verses from his hand
introduce him to the land of love
fuck his poetry heart till it burns

Like Gods

Uncomplicated we lie here
between half blind and entwined in a hazy
early Sunday morning full of liberating water
that washes salt from hair. Outside the sea is

of a blue plexiglas. Waves iron themselves a
clear plane and the secret is kept about the flakes
of sunlight in your eyes now that you don't notice

the window.  Behind it a world breaks up in
gold, a child hides in a suitcase, searches for
coconut in a palm tree. We stay
indoors, where the sea is a soft rhytmic rustle.

It doesn't ask dressing for wet wounds.
In a dreamed vineyard we run ourselves dry.

Only a small man

A man is only a small man.
he falls asleep,
with his mouth open
his dreams escape him without a trace.

And in the morning nobody who can say
which name lay on his lips,
and what kind of expression went with it.
He takes his empty suitcase and leaves.
Some say off to work.

Enough for today 

Enough for today with poetry about love
because while writing about it I didn't practice it.
Life often let's itself rather be described 
than lived.
That "you" of whom I always speak so highly
doesn't live except in the way I described you.
You kiss and you leave like the wind-vane turns.
My record keeps skipping a beat,
like it goes, as they say, in real life.

All those lovers with their doors slammed shut.
I wouldn't have the time to grab a pen If I had 
to check myself in front of a mirror all the time
with stiletto heels and manicured nails;
You can never catch a poetess on her own pen.
She always has an answer ready
because you hurt her like she had planned
although sometimes her words turn against her;
they're at least as unfaithful as her lovers.

My words are not. They stay chained to me.
Never was there a more cruel mother in poetry
than the one who kept her children pressed close against her:
'Stay forever like I whispered to you before'.
But no, ink is like blood.
So I say, go on, be free,
but don't go home with strange men.

And then 

And then 
the cutest guy of the evening lies next to you
No camera can take a picture of what you see now.
So totally close he is, with you.
And then you think about people running into the sea, about how animals play with each other, a young kitten loosing itself in the buttons of your couch,
a sparrow that you hold in your hand. In shock. 
Never seen a sparrow from so close.

If only I don't have to go in there, into those eyes.
as long as that creature doesn't start to look at me, doesn't sit 
on my newspaper, because then you have to pet it, with consciously 
guided hands, while you think:
I want to read on and I will never become a good mother.

Then after a while 
you have to push the creature off your newspaper
and for minutes you are not able to read, out of guilt
and sadness, because you won't become a mother.

The best way I've been to the sea,
was by just lying next to it. You don't have to ask 
something like that to a sea.
But how do you do that with the cutest guy of the evening?

Lego

With Lego I re-enact
 the accident 
a couple of times

Big atoms give
the victim  a
weak gravitational 
acceleration

Even in the ambulance
his smile is indelible 

Alone

I have books and music
I have tea and coffee if you like
I even have ashtrays and liquor

I have a telephone, a coat hanger and a doormat
I have paper and pens and I draw and I write
and I've got ears and eyes and hair that hangs over them,
I've got a heater and windows through which we can see that
inside it's nicer than outside,
because here we have language,
I listen and say:
here I am
I've got the words
but  it remains quiet in my room.

Amsterdam

Again boats pass by my window. I can almost touch 
them with my fingertips, they sail safely from century
to century straight for the harbor. A high voice
narrates a genesis in three languages, this and only like 
this is how it went down with the spices and the slaves,
the women were ready under their velvet dresses 
and the men were hoisting love all the way up.
They crammed their lofts full with profit and grain.
My fingers touch the daily things and
smooth them out, they caress the past: faded views, 
self portrets in clair-obscure, memories-
Horses that galloped but are now waiting in stables
for the end, of winter, until grass grows again from
the hardened soil, gets heavy, cuts. Motionless
heron. Bird that catches fish. Woman who walks with fire
in her hands until it extinguishes but revives it with words. 
A lake where a late light glares over.
Until it fades. Until it wears away.

Tate Britain


We follow the numbers and the lines
to a room where a sheep lives in
a formaldehyde solution.

There are butterflies nailed to the wall
their wings blue as the sea.

So there is more in the world that I don't understand.
In every room there are people taking pictures
of a painting.

We stop at where Ophelia is about to drown
between the wavy flowers and the green.

You say that it's just like a fairytale,
but I'm closer to the water. I point to the
woman who without her camera doesn't know

how to look and unfold a now never-to-
be-fold-again map. This Museum

has at least forty five rooms.
When you shove me over the threshold
there is nothing you recognize. 

Patterns


The sun has cleared a path towards the door
sliding across the edges of the table.
I waited with the porcelain plates, how dull
the glasses and the painting that is too big
for Its frame. In the letters I write you
I sometimes ask the right questions.

When I look around words run from the curtains
across the wallpaper. They trample each other
these days to hide in the grass.
We stuck together like cotton candy,
like summer heat to a roof.

This is neglected now (like ink that runs from
the table onto the rug, you suffering 
from a sweet disease and me having no wonder drug)
like all the other things that upon closer 
examination only make stains: the sea, the
leftovers in the dishwater and again that grass

in which we laid. From above we must have looked
like frozen gods with a plan that must have been
higher than that night with my arching back 
on the Persian rug.

Famous last words 
 

Probably it was something like 'shit'. 
Or 'hey'. Your dad used to say 'hey, hey' a lot 
in a specific way, which you would imitate 
with a question in it, fitting for crashing  
into a ditch. Or 'whoa'. 
The car was a rental after all. 
 
You seemed like the kind of person that 
would have fantasized about how 
that final moment would be. You would have prepared 
some kind of utterance. (They say that Voltaire 
while he was dying felt his own pulse to  
check how far gone he was). 
 
There are many versions about 
what he said while doing that. 
Maybe you had written something down, 
written and re-written but in the end 
in the car there was only water, ice and glass.
No words, no time. 

In the 36th year


I've never been like this:
after 35 years as small as a seashell
and tired like an old house,
were ghosts roam freely, 

No shell, no house. But the fleeing cover
of a trembling animal, life sized, startled,
carrying my name. But the name love?
A name so frequent but a silence so rare.

I haven't had much rest over 35 years, the simple rest:
that of people watching, listening, not thinking,
sleeping like babies.

Darling don't say anything. I'm a finger, 
doing everything wrong so that I can write,
write and write again. I wanted to close 
my eyes and sleep like a ship against your skin.

My reasons I don't know. I chose me
when I was still merely a light, a forgetful 
kind of late angel? But words are false,
words are cats in heat with wisdom.

I wanted to sleep like a child on the beach,
like the child I never was, the woman that 
never got to grow out of that child, the person
that now and then runs through me, crazy jogger.

Darling, don't say, I lived so intense, 
and so full.  That's ridiculous.
But if you can make it that my eyes find rest
and that behind my eyes, in that screaming emptiness,
you'd find my God, that fool of love,
I'd be forever grateful.