Somewhereville
You sing like a robust guitar palm
somewhat flattened out by
plaster white bandaged love affairs
the words
you sing
are at most, intense short sobs
blooming freely in spring
In the background of the horizon
at each line break
they stutter out the last drops
of a ripe symphony in
fluent and demure gusts
from long ago slit wrists
Summer opens willingly
a new perspective
Landscape writer
First there is the horizon, from left to right.
Then describe the day, that starts uphill
over a twisting path between heaven and earth.
A landscape spawns from your pen and
gradually increases in value,
till about noon. Then the ink has gone dry.
Every time, when the light falls from high,
the countdown starts and quietly everything reverts.
Just past the standstill appears the minute,
and the striking of the clock returns to strength.
The sights have been set.
No view so close
like the fading memory sinking in wrinkled paper.
A field of clouds erases everything,
the afternoon delineates and comes to an end.
Silence makes its rounds.
Insecurities
Everyone who is cheerful, may go to the dandelion room.
That also goes for everybody who's strong and spontaneous.
The social and the tough will also go with Geoffrey.
The others will stay here to stir the paint and then apply
a thin layer.
Somebody there has a question, in the microphone please.
What about the self-confident people?
Your attention for one more moment please! The self-confident people
will also go with Geoffrey and Sylvia to the dandelion room.
The son and the sea
Often people think I'm a girl.
A sweet, shy girl.
I don't have to do anything for that.
Men want to safeguard me.
There was this rose grower. He put me in his bed.
He called his mother, I've got a girl now, he said.
Every day he went to his greenhouse.
He never took any roses back for me, they were all for export.
I wanted to go to the sea with him.
He took a day off and came along.
There are mothers who don't teach their sons how to swim.
I carried the rose grower into the surf,
and gave him to the sea.
The greenhouse I let be. I called his mother
and told her about her son and the sea.
Assignment
Do you still write my dear? my mother asked me.
You used to write beautiful poetry and stories.
I wonder: in what kind of world we are living in...
Do you want some more tea? I mean: all that trite,
they write about things for which there are no words.
She looked up at me. I don't understand why people are drowning themselves in the maelstrom of this time. - come on dear, do something about it. Especially you.
You are capable to create something of value for this life,
with as incentive the word of the Lord that is given to us?
She looked at me. She was grabbing her last chance:
Something to laugh about then, maybe. She smiled.
February
You can not sit closer
to the window. In another house
white balloons are blown
through the room and a hand
is already laying out
the knifes. Who enters now
will find empty plates, under the
table a child is drawing
a smile on the sun.
We're arriving somewhere tonight,
to a party or a bed where
a body is missing. Alongside the canal
a father is cycling with his son
in the little front seat. In his left hand
he holds the head that thinks he's a pillow.
Inside a girl of twelve years is waiting.
Maybe she's waiting to be taken home
but most of all she's waiting for snow.
Coincidence
Winter in Pompeii. A time of
sweeping, cleaning up, restoration
and digging further in the ash.
Students have been deployed,
sometimes a picture is taken.
Six years pass, and in your tent
at three in the morning you show me pictures:
Look, I was a student then,
we dug up a villa in Pompeii,
It was cold as hell, I stole this coin, here!
A couple of years later I leaf through
a catalog about Pompeii. With a shock
I recognize the picture, your thick sweater, your knit cap,
It was cold as hell you said.
Slowly I slide the cold coin over my warm chest.
