Too late

We are too late,
We danced, we shouldn't have done that,
we were desperate, not good,

We took a heavy burden on our shoulders,
we should have asked: why is this burden not light,
we should have realized: this is wrong.

We spoke about love with carefully chosen words,
carefully??
Do we dare to state that?
love, 
and then carefully?

We looked for excuses,
our kingdom for a good excuse!
We are too late

let us not forgive ourselves,
let us not,
no.

Where I live.


Well, this is where I live
It's not big
But I'm close to everything
Right in the city centre, very handy
Please sit.


My wrists?
Oh, It's nothing
You may look
Slit open.
It didn't hurt
It was like licking an envelop
and cutting your tongue

Do you want coffee?

It was quiet
I saw myself lying there
like a dead blackbird on the lawn
I was able to go everywhere
right through walls

With milk

I went to the cemetery
There, that's where I'm going to lie
Behind those two oaks
Next to our beloved
and deeply mourned Willem Elsschot
and the hedge
Just my bones
The rest you need for spinning your wings.

Sugar

Slit open,
It was like they surrendered
At first there was nothing
And then it was like two red
flowers blossoming

How could you do something like that?
The shame
We were always there for you
My baby, why?
Always clean clothes

Of course I'm crazy
Lost
Every week, once a week
I have to go
to him
I talk
He nods
and tells me that
between eleven and twelve
he's my friend

Do you want something with your coffee?
Something strong?

Geese


What did you mean when you said:- depth.
That is a word that I feel right now - depth.

Some geese flew over,
a clear cold sky in December.

THAT is what I mean you said: geese.
So Goddamn high with their thin shrieks
what is this being alone together?
this blind destiny?

knowing of that depth which we call the heavens
it's a very old feeling - a sort of compassion,
older than me.

I have seen and heard these birds all my life.
I dreamt as a child that they would take me with them
but I know now that they would have left me somewhere.

Aha, I said.
We stood  there, watched and listened.

Topography

You have not been mapped.
You would be a beautiful country.
Arms stretched, your feet together,
the camber of your head;
meridians to divide you.

I didn't learn you in school
no cross section on the black board
thin layers of time,
petrified.

We talk
but I don't know your borders
or the channels you dug
no circles of your cities
no wind-rose, no flag.

No coast where I can wade ashore.

Low tide

I withdraw and wait
This is time not going to waste:
every minute the future is transforming.
I am an ocean of waiting,
thin as water surrounded by the moment.
the sucking disposition of my low tide,
which pulls the minutes and prepares the flood
that hides deep in my darkness.

There is no time. Or is there nothing but time?

The walk


Our conversation slowed 
our questions we answered by looking
at the slow world around us

the villages and pastures below
the birds almost dissapearing in the sky

we sat down to look at this beautiful 
indifference and the redundantcy 
of our questions

Everything you wanted, It was everything.


It was the curvature of a shoulder blade,
the phosphor of a new drunkenness,
the insomnia of a metropolis.

I never slept twice with the same day
and life was only life when at night
a halo appeared from my glass.

Some June morning and I reflect over a stale
breakfast: 
I hung around so many people,
traded so much sunlight for a spark
of eternity 

and look at me now:
in this pale light with my dirty nails
and cotton clouded head.

If only I had believed less in my thirst.
Cared less about the antidote
for my carefully studied death.

Glass

Every morning she stood in front of the window waving.
I waved back, but didn't know who she was.
Outside life continued, but hers
didn't extend beyond the glass

When I came back from school I looked:
fourth window, ground floor:
a white wall stood silent
as if she didn't really exist.

Then I ran into her outside
her tread careful as if walking on broken glass.
She suddenly didn't knew who I was.

Me

I
write poems
like thin trees

who handles
language
so sparse as me?

maybe
my father
was stingy
with his seed.

I never 
knew him
that man

I have
never
really heard a word
that didn't hurt

to write pain
you need
very little
words

Paradise


To impress this actor at my table
I tell him that the most beautiful movie I ever saw was Paradise Lost
The camera didn't move and everything was black & white
strange as a paradise, no, even stranger

The actor tells me that I probably mean the movie Stranger than Paradise
I concentrate on the sign that says "reserved"
till the letters swim and the world is a stain

The world, my world is getting harder
passion is my way to escape from reality
but I can't express it
that's something for an actor

the actor get's up and leaves
there is a world waiting for him
I stick around for a while

For R. F.


I wanted to send you flowers
a sort of winterflowers
with the brown tones of a ripe rose
and the smell of nights of walking
on dangerous grounds
enclosed by neglected hedgerows
behind which you would suspect daffodils
of the months behind us
daffodils, a scent I probably mistake for too "lovely" 

that kind of flowers I wanted to send you
not by mail or unwrapped
no, they would have been brought to you
by an Indian boy with a classic Greek profile
who studies German at the university
and who wrote himself a choreography
on the music of Mozart

that kind of flowers
by that kind of boy

but there is not much blooming
in my wintergarden
and I heard you were allergic
to mushrooms

Perfect


Making love
in fresh cut grass,
in order that later,
much later, in death,
we smell a little
like hay.

Rope

I tie him with a rope, to me.
With hands to the bed. Connected.

Now the wounding really starts. With 
care I gag the mouth, blind 

the eyes. Entitled, ready, I start 
to undress. The edge, the inside.
Completely upset he asks 
for a cure. But I weigh too heavy on him,

I am burning. I am the upperhand, 
I am to the teeth.
Reconciled, I declare:
war, my love. Existence.

Policies delayed are...


What am I doing with my life?
Postponing.

I think long and hard,
ask the same question
and think again.

The sun rises, a blackbird sings.
And I think: What If I stop postponing? 
That thought is unbearable.

A cloud starts to cover the sun
in the distance a church bell rings-
I ask my question,

like always, for the last time.