Men like to stick to walls

Men like to stick to walls
and beds
to tables
to the plates they ate from
to music.

No matter how strong you sing
that it's over, over, over
that it's done, done, done
that you never, never, never.

And that's when they sing back
from all corners of the room
from between the clean
sheets
they crawl over your table
and spit in the plate you eat from.

They especially like to do that
to your favorite music
to your favorite dance
in your favorite food

Small ode to lost time


Door that opens. Footsteps. Door that closes.
The sour smell of wooden cupboards and the way
light in old buildings squeezes itself to dead
against walls, becomes documentary, unreal
like a fetus in a glass jar. Door that opens.

(But why always this lost time as my strongest
memory: the walking, the waiting, biting nails, 
staring at floor tiles - and the rest, 
that what they tend to call key moments,
a list, a messed up chronology?)

Door that closes. Statement. Footsteps.
Pat on the back. The miss matched color
of my shoes.

The Belgian Ardennes

Very encouraging of course
all these therapeutic pine trees:
the one understands you, the other
contemplates with you, a third
embraces you with some branches
but all with those gloomy
mugs. Everything drips,
drizzles, sniffles, damps, sudses.
Wood that wants to reconcile, heal,
sympathize, but above all 
brood with you. No chance on 
a provocative family park where
everybody's just mucking about
happy and loud. No, here
introvert little streams,
academic survival efforts, feedback meetings.
Intellectual wood-conversations, civilized 
Dutch under a bell jar of eternal fog.
And everywhere creatures acting like
struck-by-melancholy-poets.

It's not 

It's not the colorful wrapped dreams
he is giving you on your birthday,
nor the flower subscription
or the half held out hand,
the entitled arm around your waist or
bags full of dough,

but very simple words
hardly audible whispers,
a half missed kiss
little meanings in the dark,
the soft sucking on your nipple,
searching for the other.

Barely daring to do so.

It's important to live in a boring environment

I am an uneatable night-moth
I distinguish myself from the eatable ones 
by acting like an idiot at just the right time

It's important to live in a boring environment
and I cherish the thought just to be a small example

there are people who walk around with the birthright of 
return behind their eyes
who at the same time plant a flag on every square inch of growth

But it's about NOT wanting to fly to the light
not just being the next sucker who disappears in the sun.

together,

for instance in the bathtub, when you
imitated your next ex-lover
and I had to guess how much
you loved me
then  we tried for the longest time
to look each other in the eye
to see who we were

I was pretty much into you
and you blinded by the foam
was into me.

together still seems
confusing. Me, who looks
at you and you who look
with eyes closed

separated is actually
also a sort of together
when we cry for instance.

last of the autumn poems

the first one who comes galloping up
with autumn leaves
and thereby on this paper

or waves them against my computer screen
so that they're falling on this poem
I will personally slit your throat 

because I'm sick
of words that want to provide comfort 
for things there is no comfort for

too tired mostly
to get up every morning naked and pale
as the same person

I'd rather that you'd forget me for a while,
bury these words in a shallow grave
and lay yourself  right next to it

can I lie there with you? then we meet there
only to awake when this leaf 
has fully disintegrated

because if death can be subdued 
with only a couple of pretty lines
I would have written those for you

I also know
they're not written here
forgive me

you don't understand me

you don't understand me 
we fought against
an enemy 
an enemy would understand me
they told us that there was an enemy
yes we needed an enemy

you don't understand me 
you don't understand
that there was a war and that
I was the person from those days

The white in me

cliché: putting things away in boxes
like you can do with your memory or heart.

I never wanted to put you into something
I only pulled the sheets up to your chin 
and kissed you goodnight

but now that I can't take you from anywhere
- you are somewhere but in nothing of mine -
I wish that I wouldn't have been so stubborn

and I wish that instead of avoiding clichés 
for once I just did
what they said

Disregard the arrows

From half an orange
you can make an ashtray
From an ashtray a keep-box
that is a thingy-box that 
you can decorate as a coffin
for a small dead pet
From a coffin with sand over it
you can make a vegetable garden,
from a vegetable garden, with some
patience, a forest
From the wood a house with a chimney
and if you know who is seeing the smoke disappear,
and feeling the warmth, then you can make a home
From the home a memory
From a memory a monster,
from a monster an apparent clue
An apparent clue is mapping something
out in the wrong direction
Mapping something out means staying inside
the lines
With those lines you can't tie a rope
to hold down the monster in the vegetable garden,
the beast that now is blowing through the 
cracks in the wood
The beast you created with the knowledge
that there is no way back
That ashtray will never become
half an orange

Slow pain

What doesn't happen to you, happens
in slow motion, and is being masked 
by the moments that I happen.

What I'm not doing, I did
in the painful room of my mind
where innocence is stacked 
in a corner.

My love, I did not hit you,
ignored you or impaled you
on my dreams. I did

not ask you for forgiveness.

Pillage Diem 
 
Suddenly a flash that this is it. 
Frowning in the hotel around the corner: 
Not even a toothbrush with you, miss? 
 
Sweaty naked she tosses and turns through 
a thousand sheets, dreams mirrors full  
of discarded looks. 
 
Through a hundred glasses she looks out  
over the city, sees how windows extinguish. 
The bath  soaks off eighty lives. 
 
Yawning she shuffles to the breakfast buffet 
here too some puppet on TV that delights her 
with vulgar worldly disasters. 
 
There curls the bill: one night. 
She laughs - if they only knew. 
 

Inside

Between these busy walls
of self designed algebra
full of heroes and being 
in the moment, our world
cracks and pops.

Here we control the dwarfs.
They paint and write, take pictures of 
objects, they steer what
fits us like a glove.

Outside it's different
Outside the giants walk.
Rigid tie-wearing giants,
that want to mold us, give us
assignments so we can give 
them products.

They travel every weekend
to the emperor, a cyclops
and kneel for his empty gaze,
marked by profit.

We rather stay inside.
The dwarfs are volunteers.
Every weekend we celebrate
all their small creations.