Een Gedicht voor Herman Gorter, in EngelsAs a faery running through a Spring wood
Of seminal smells and feminine hovels;
The winged nymph with wounded feet.
As a sleeping woodbine hugs the cease wood
Of the warbler’s tree, whose song is rung
Out on morns for the grieves of the fields below.
As ploughmen hoe in rhythm and rhyme;
The soil tilled in Spirits of the Highs;
Shades and wraiths, with eidolons, appear.
As mystic old stories regale in the breeze
A light-shaft from heaven opens a cloud
And the Sunday and autumnal feeling returns.
As the villagers gaze over a valley’s galliards
Danced by the greenflies and gallflies, bluebottles
And fireflowers, a wake takes place in a public house.
As hours flow softly over the hills of a fantasia view
Four men haul a boat to the river, over which
The will o’ the wisps are playing in the dusk.
As the old walls of the old cottages begin to crumble
An old woman’s face crinkles in the sunlit afternoon;
Clay-like she looks, but not unhappy.
As the dew sets over meadows of rest spiders webs
Shoot across the land and glisten; droplets of semen
On them, pollinating unbelievable colonies.
As a widower sets the kindling to fire the chimney
Seems to speak to him, whistling words of whimsy
That bring tears to his eyes and accommodate hope.
As visitors wander into the open arms of the indigenous
Some of the older spirits make it known
That they don’t want them here, in the gloaming of night.
As silence pervades the landscape, the forest creeps in,
As if Macbeth were here to be haunted, and an old poet
Is allowed to wander the woods and ask questions every now and then.
As the bows and arrows are lifted by munchkin boys
The girls play in the moonbeams with posies and
Sit sewing daisy chains while their warriors keep guard.
As pages are slowly turned in illuminated manuscripts
The rumour mills begin to circulate the gossips of
The more secretive lives in the village; all speculation.
As the parish church opens its doors on the Sabbath day
Three ghosts always attend the gates, silently ushering
The congregation to their pews.
As cats search for little rabbits and sparrows to eat
They sharpen the claws on their paws and the teeth
In their maws, and prowl stealthily over the undergrowth.
As our imagos of yesteryear slowly wear down,
A reminder of the faith we used to keep
Is spied through the stringy leaves of the crack-willows.
As Dutch and Flemish tongues, through Flanders,
Through Belgium, intermingle; in Germany it’s quiet
In the Harz and in Heidegger’s hut; some remained mute.
As fingers yellow from tobacco the countryside;
Its canopy of sky and draped leaves, retains the wafts
And wreaths of the smoky exhalations.
As the children grow up, some get married, some have
Children of their own, some lose their way and turn to
Drink; others remain flâneurs all down the days.
As the steeple is still, as the cross on the hill remains still,
As the brick well is still, a hobbling stripling finds his way
To the ale-house and has a dop in there.
As Lent is about to start a mother of three makes chocolate
In a saucepan and tells her kids that this is the last they’re
To have of it before forty days is up.
As the mythologies of the place thicken up and gain renown
A few of the old boys sit back on deck chairs on porches
And cynically deny that the ghosts and pixies ever lived there.
As the scientists work underground to recreate the Big Bang,
And the little black holes anticipate their inception, the residents
Of one house close the shutters over the downstairs windows.
As the old poet sits on the gravel path in May time,
He follows vapour trails left by the ghosts of the unborn dead,
Miscarried from womb to tomb; smiling for the living.
Brief Curios on PavementThe bus shelter hives melt Formica implants,
Light shining through, as air traffic control
Oscillates and countless buses depart; red, white and blue.
All the cars, all the brake lights, head lamps -
Too many nondescript entities filling dead space
As dead weight on our shoulders.
Heathrow is a purgatory; a temporary state, a death-waiting
Chamber; each LED sign offers a different destination,
But, haven’t you heard? They’re all exactly the same.
We’re on a mass one-way ticket to the slow slipping away.
I watch you, each of you, as you each walk past in slow motion,
And I see you horizontally, slowly sliding down this
Cliff face of pavement into a hell of artificial light.
I mean as little to you all as you mean to me,
Though you see me, writing, and look on curiously;
You’re like everyone else I’ve ever known; brief curios
In pavement portraits. Paint me as your latest exhibition,
I want to be of some value, somewhere along the line,
To you.
Filled with obligation; I am not modern. Sometimes
I feel I’m not even of this world, which I neglect to
Understand. But then I miss the dead faces of every
Multicultural face here; through your skins shines your skulls;
Death awaits you all. And when it comes?
- Nothing.
The world is a fear, of each other’s fears. We’re scared to leave
Others trembling; whereas if we were alone we would soon know.
It is ‘Other’ that makes us so. Scum hit, scud street, filter tip,
Crack in pavement, crystal meth, icy tarred death, dead can, windswept,
Heathen traipsing, dust bowl, shit smear, shoe scuff, pastel mural,
A directionless arrow pointing, old man puke, the cardiac arrest of
Another hopeless victim; God’s prey, suitcase, broke glass, shoe lace,
Toe cap, tyre scrape, Coke cup, glossy magazines of no words;
These words, the scattered ashes of time; all on the sideways
Pavement; Hades’ slide. We’re all walking, underlit by fake light;
Our faces illumined as if angelic; lurking in the shadows lies every
Untold deception. The bags around our eyes are larger than those we
Check in; amalgam sin. Look at this world askance; lie on your side
At the airport and watch the multitudinous dead glide ever closer
Towards realising it.
Bed-sit Composite The lampshade melted from the ceiling and dripped on the bed
Enveloping the stalest meat laid to rot by years of disregard; he
Would have said something had he someone to say it to, the landlord
Informed the police who quickly cleared up the debris and switched off the light.
So coiled, moths invade a brain, torn in two, by hands estranged:
And glance, fortune misplaced her keys, a little lackey sucking knees;
Above Hungarian shops on small streets, running parallel in veins feeding
Superstition in a starless sky. Parcels arrived for a Mr. Snake, and they
Shook as the postman held them hesitatingly an arm’s breadth away from
Face, saved a teaspoonful of brown time before leaving the flight making
Wind turn in on itself and a roar heard sucking itself out of a blackhole.
The fighting for existence; the culling for space in Mohammed Christ’s
White wine inversions; a sector known in reputation, which to land upon
Is dustier than the fortnightly visit to Grandma’s hospice; her pale eyes
Cutting to the quick. A whisper is a rasp from the oesophagus of a haggis-old
Inner-tube. A lonely man carved a shilling’s worth of life for himself in bed-sit
Trammel; detuning an instrument all the days he went on with lax strings and
Shoelaces untied, he had sixteen spoons, a penknife and a potato-peeler; the
Television began to bore him. The drinks cabinet displayed dregs and dead
Spider’s legs scattered about blown by the extractor fan from the sewage works
Underground, a connected suffocation gave an immense and overwhelming
Temporality to the scene inside the brain that was ripped at the seams and
Plasters placed over punctures; a rubber man with soap and celluloid eyes
That squelched when blunk. The padlock fastened to the outside of his door
Had been closed; through shackle the die-cast was fed and the door nobody
Knew about. After a week crawling commenced and decomposition of the
Left ear and each iris began to close, a smokehouse pinholed foiling any
Attempt. The helplessness of a treacherous, once magnanimous, Presbyterian
Syringing its throat with sludge and backwater heroin eyes stared from the
Boarders; the many-men’s slit windows, they watched an ant collapsing,
Righting, rolling and tumbling again and again; but then it’s dead eyes
Sharpened. A shock rang out; stepping back the panel looked at watches
As if the time told the truth. This little guinea pig had swindled the delegates
And they shat themselves on the spot. The ionisation of his blood had caused
An adverse curdle that the scientists could not predict and when the entity arose
They saw in his eyes nothing, abject futility, three jurymen died on the spot.
The void stared the rest out and a hundred and forty-six years later thirteen
Web-ridden skeletons were found staring each into letterbox windows around
A small shack bed-sit amphitheatre in the middle of which laid a dead mutant,
Representing universal extinction. The nihilist’s exhumation led to the laying
Down of tools and each worker that visited walked over miles of infertile land
Into an acrasiomycete swamp, pulsating with the tolling bells of superstition,
Into which each sank not even gasping for air; in all this time one man’s beard
Grew to the length of seven British motorways; he sat upon a mountain in
Tibet and, although dead for more than a century the hair never whitened. The
Manmade mongoloid in the bed-sit crawled into the beard; half his heart still beating,
Dormant had it lain, he wrenched himself up the curtain of solace to the chin and at the top
He pulled out a pair of sheers and chopped.
