| WILTAIN MENTAL HOSPITAL
X I I haven't seen my daughter for a while. For quite a while. She is very cheerful. And busy. She is very busy. Has hardly time to breath, or to go out. I haven't seen her for some time now. She is always so happy to see me. It makes me sad, because I know she is not. She is not happy to see me. She slows her car down, not to overrun a dog or cat. She visits me because once I was her dad. Now I am her guilt. They have a fireplace. And Christmas. And a god. II I behave well. But I don't understand it; I noticed a brick in my pocket. I couldn't remove it; the pocket was sewn closed. The doctors didn't undo the stitches. One blow with the sledgehammer. The brick broke in half. A few more blows. I was bruised. There's no way out, they said. III I saw the dust on the windowsill. I saw it and I saw it. I saw where they tried to clean it, with water. The wall had like tears, grey tears running down from the window- sill. Ugly. Why don't they remove it? You have to press hard, moving to and fro, leaning on your finger, using your nail to get into the cracks. IV This place was built for people like me. I know a few piano chords. Sometimes I pounce and pounce. I hurt nobody. My wife, child. Everytime I go for a walk on the grounds I think of them, the photo I have. They wear scarfs and gloves. Behind them the sparkling river. It's a photo I hide. I wash it every day; wash away my fingerprints, the secret message at the back: We Lov ... What does it mean? I removed some traces of ink. I keep on saying I don't know who they are. Why do you keep it, they ask? There isn't much around, I say. I don't even have something to throw away I say. I can use this, I say. This fucking photograph. When there's no one around. Now bugger off. 17-18 December 2005 ________________________________________________ PSYCHIATRIST X He looks at me from behind a window, dirty window, smudges, brown water dried up. His eyes are strange, wide open, his hands touching the glass as if he would like to touch me. Who is this man, staring like a bird, sad staring, gagging with its beak wide open, asking. I cannot help. I told him so. He writes it down. He looks so old. ________________________________________________ Understand I understand. They have to protect the outside world against people like me. You simply can't have everybody running around. As if nothing had gone wrong. But I can't help it. I'm scratching paint off the same grid of the same window, same corner, same fingernail, right indexfinger, pointing, scratching the world. 31 December 2005 ___________________________________________________________________________- CLEANING THE FLOOR X (for Paul Verlaine, d. 8 January 1896) She scrubs the floor on her knees with a handkerchief. Her mouth is like a sailor's. The mask she wears is throbbing. I can hear her breathe from where I sit. She scrubs and scrubs. Someone says: "She removes her traces." Cleaning the floor with her black dress. Some of the dirt is ingrained. Decades of immortal desolation. 3-4 Jan. 2006 ________________________________________________________________ STORY X She typed on her thighs. She typed on her thighs as if they were a typewriter. With a kind of real feeling. And words and sounds came out of the mouth of her thighs, a long ribbon filled with words and deeds and streams of people as she typed and typed, timeless, ageless, on her bleeding thighs. On her thighs bleeding people. __________________________________________________________- MOUNTAIN POEMS I X A soutane. A bullfight hanging from a rope. Rain channelled. Castanet leaf whirring on its branch, detesting our faces. 12 Jan. 2006 ________________________________________________________ II X A steady trickle of water, words seeping through a filter of moss, old paths, guitars, lanterns, tents dragged to this camp, bit of wind varnish, synthetic click of camera's, battery, red light. The view, sky on top is a roaring, moulded lion of eternal clay, what to make of it? How to look, what to think, the campfire still warm and not wanting us to return. The empty tins, prints in the sand. 5 Jan. 2006 ______________________________________________________________ III X the pine trees are covered by by a large hand of soft skin a voice and a world covering the ground is white coffins white coffins of pine-needles as a river flows beneath calm cloud and September taking its wooden pedestals feeding them to open fires 13 Jan. 2006 __________________________________________________ IV X The mountain never swam to a clock; it has drops of rain, people on its back, pretending they belong. Day dream of their work, hours spent prattling behind pc, the rallying to time "it's time." What do they pretend on his back? Again: wooden beams of their houses. A sturdy roof. Here they wear shorts, use candles, or torches and batteries. Busses crawl clouds of smoke into streets of cities, London, rain like paint. 15 Jan. 2006 ______________________________________________________________________ V X There is the call. Is it the call? It is the call, but not ours, not mine. Someone was called as he/she walked outside/inside, slept, baking, drinking, good health. Someone was taken, removed, leaving the earth behind, hut, house, human beings lapping words, towns. Humans dancing in the light of the moon., singing their deaths, celebrating the call, another, and another- You won't hear yours. 15 Jan. 2006 ____________________________________________________________ VI X Certain parts of the mountain look like a bald head, no skin, tenderly touched by crafty ants, millions of small movements, removing layer after layer, antennae touching, jaws polishing, sanding down the ghastly and finest parts the earth has to give, to all those mouths to feed, to survive. 17 Jan. 2006 ____________________________________________________________________ VII X The sun circles the earth like a fiery necklace the sun sun sun The earth is a poor man begging for the sun's rays poop earth poor The earth is a beggar here in this universe beg now beg Sun shines like a mountain like a large ship of flames shine ship shine The eath's moon is a girl and her hands are ashes shine sun shine Shine and circle the earth the earth is a poor man the sun circles the earth __________________________________________________________________ VIII X A mountain is not its birds. And it is not the lizards. Nor the wind licking the dry grass. Nor me sitting on my bones. A mountain is becoming. And somehow it never ends. 20 Jan. 2006 _________________________________________________________________________________________ PORTRAIT X She is holding on to her hair, wringing, then uncoilling the strands. Slowly wiping her charcoal life off the perilous page. Soot falls through the floorboard cracks where one day outlandish voices will ring, sudden mouths, tongues and jaws. The growing of children on doors, walls, the paved roads. Where old, pale grown hands mend, or stop mending what's become unwanted. New things impossible to bare. 30 Jan. 2006 ________________________________________________________________________________ Coretta Scott King X 1927-2006 Now she may not breath. Now she may not talk nor lift her right arm and hold it high, speaking a million tongues, raising an ocean of voices. And he may not breath. And he may not speak dreams, new days ahead as she lies quietly beside him, beside the not so calm of his death, the not so calm of color, everywhere, her voice in the cities, marching where dust and rain penetrate soulful eyes, as their voices speak, louder, multiplied, carried by a fertile wind. Child, raise the sun! Take its beams like reigns. Let it green what's dry. Her singing along the sky. Then let hear what's blind. 5 Feb. 2006 ________________________________________________________________________________ Watching A Joseph Brodsky* Documentary The sky is a labyrinth of snow crystals. Each crystal queues up on top of each prior queue, forming layers on the rooftops, ledges, statues, the bridges of Leningrad. Trams, cars, buses carefully explore the streets they know intimately, the river still in its cast. A dog gallops across the screen, disappears behind the right hand speaker of the tv. The poet recites or reads with urgency. Thrice confined to a mental institution specifically designed to create patients. Sent to a labour camp, for being a poet, equals a parasite (??????????)*. It is about the same work a farm-hand does; bitter hours, bleeding hands. He lights a cigarette. Removes its filter. Words and blue smoke mingle. Slide of the exiled Brodsky sitting on his case, heading for one of the many places he could call home, America. Journey towards a roof with holes for a view: the Galaxy. 23 Feb.2006 * The questionmarks represent a Russian word. The correct font is not available on this site. The poem will be send as an email with the word. Brodsky was a Russian/American poet and received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 1996. ___________________________________________________________________________ _ Cartoon Mother 'Nay', she said. She was a big woman. A cartoon woman. A drawn mother walking through furniture like a ghost. She was about to sort things out, the way she walked. But before she could do anything she dissolved; my imagination did not know what to let her do next. There she goes again, right through my furniture. 2 March 2006 _____________________________________________________________________________________ The Disease With No Name for Z.M., South Africa She lies on a bed of flies, unable to walk or stand. There is no one around to wash her diarrhea stained sheet, let alone a person still alive; she asked in vain. She can't get to hospital, travelling dirt roads, gravel roads and the tarred roads closer to some help. The only help are the vans moving bodies to the graves, holes punched into the earth, rectangular and relentless. "Don't go inside, your mother is tired." Three children wait in the sun. No one enters her hut as she is 'contagious'. Relatives divide her few belongings, blaming the government for all this, saying they don't buy medicine that heals, but cars and houses. The government suggests garlic and beetroot for a fit and strong body. The president says poverty and a bad diet is the main culprit. So it is here to stay, claiming the mud houses, most now empty, or else soon to be vacated. Whole villages are abandoned; many roads lead to nothing. Not so much as a whisper, from dead end to dead end. But the Disease With No Name knows where to go, with its eyes closed. 6-13 March 2006 _____________________________________________________________________________ The moon grows like eyes. [don't really like this poem - Joop] The mist hangs like hair over my burning lips, kissing hommage to the silent scalpel as eggs clot in brimming winter. __________________________________________________________________ Ode To My Heart Between the sheets my heart grew, from winter to winter. A waterfall of blood sinking stones, getting closer to fire. One spring, at the door, I will wonder whose heart it really is as it stops; I can't get there with my hands, nor the honey dying between my fingers. Dragon winter; god arranged this. Dragon vulture pounding burning the universe. _________________________________________________________________________ The Man And His Hound* X This man is made out of stone, granite of your broken sink. He makes sure that no one can close the door called AIDS. His shoe-shine shoe keeps the door ajar. He enjoys being watched as he reads his books with fairy tales. He believes in plants and flowers; they make the dead people smile, they change the flow of rivers, change what is north into south. But it doesn’t change the night. It doesn’t change the appetite of the dead animals, of the gnawing on fingers, the face of the one you will never meet again. He sows dead seed. The harvest overwhelming. He must be all smile and wealth; shoe-shine shoe keeps the door ajar. Plants and veins grow and rot, grow and rot, air the assassin, soil, and a black horse eating meat. His dead sleep like the fast moving clouds, the small lizards waiting for a bit of sun. It takes as long as it takes. Hiding underneath a big boulder, waiting for raindrops and their little flies of spring. * South African President Thabo Mbeki and his minister of Hell-th. 19 March 2006 ___________________________________________________________________ KwaZulu-Natal * I float above this land of always being and people, nutritious fires and the never yielding sun in the palms of their hands and eggshells. This land has come from far, from days lost in dust, and the streaming rusty red, noisy and wild, meeting its ocean deep and wide with its birds and teeth of slashing shark, unapparalled. The wind eats skin and mouth. Flowers chew, rivers spawn. A hidden murmur that lives on the banks bleeds history in grief. Carefully this moon will be discovered by diggers in trenches, between trees and haloes. *South African Province 20 March 2006 ______________________________________________________________________________ I sit on my hands X watching the morning unfold onto a white screen, the night reel packed away, animals, murderous hyena's. On the right I can clearly see dark, sturdy arms of trees, the slim moustaches of the deft bushes, carrying their bridal flowers. 'Darling' they kiss lace into a summer-field drunkenness and slow dusk, murky evening and pearls of lamps, eyes going under. 30 March 2006 _______________________________________________________________________________________ Small man from a large country. You walk the snaky paths, rumor, until you reach the coast, damp moustache in a corner of the sea. Once there I don't know if you smile or not, if you are happy or not, with the wind in a fist, are you happy? 1 April 2006 _________________________________________________________________________________ Close to the stone. The willow X bird sings a confusing story about chunks not re- presenting Truth at all. In- congruous photo's, not giving a whole picture, distorted shape, colour, magnetism, swirl. The compass of the blood. It is a white, hot city. It will lift and disappear. April 2006 _______________________________________________________________________________ Day after day I add, subtract, X crouch towards the dunes, towards my Normandy on the beach. There I will lie still, a wind dying down in my head. The red and white lighthouse retreating. _________________________________________________________________________ RIVER The river travels from mouth to mouth. A long ribbon babbling through landscapes made of stone, grass, cows, small towns and the chimneys of the screaming cities with their drowned, drugged, rich and poor. Only when there are rocks and the river is thin can you hear it break up into sopranos, tenors and perhaps a few more voices : singing rocks, leaves, twigs, a dragonfly. How the wind begins in a heaven. How rivers made some people rich and some others poor; looking for gold and bottles and lanterns till late at night. Compared to an ocean this is just a drop, jumping for joy though, sliding like a truck after the rains, carrying dead things, but also seeds especially made to conquer the long arm of winter. To break its panes with gloves, scarves and the freshly painted grass, unashamedly, sticks its fingers of rich yellow buttercup up yours. 30 April 2006 _____________________________________________________________________________ I do not want to meet you. I do not want to see you. X What Life might have done to you. I would hear about a husband, a lover. About the children you have given birth to. A long time ago I tried to put my arms around your waist, sitting on the back of your bicycle, you bringing me home. Then you unshackled my arms, my hands. We laughed. You didn't laugh. I didn't laugh. I fell like a scream far away from you into the well where you danced till deep into the night of Love piling up. Now I meet you in my daydream. You come out of nowhere, your face, a woman's face (I cannot remember your face, not after 3 decades), unrecognisable. But I see the soft imprint. The soft face like that of a prophet appearing between the clouds. You enter my head like a panther. Is something eating you away? Have you died? Am I dying, going back in time to the cruellest moment? The moment I realised I could not have you? And the river sped on. 4 May 2006 ________________________________________________________________________________________________ TERMINAL I How can you - I mean - How can I, anyone, understand what it entails, this message ? It is a ship running aground, on the beach, next to your slippers next to your sandcastle. Or a seagull underwater. How can it fly? It can't. It can't. Old people with lots of wrinkles somehow feel the pinch; they become quiet, thinking mode and start to speak softly as if to themselves, as if it is some secret, or as if they don't want to hurt you. They look at the ground. That is all they really know. The message is looking at the ground. There lies the solution. II How can we survive. I mean, we can't. We never survive the length of this sword, the distance of this bullet piercing a hole in the wall. Look I can see something on the other side. I can see something, someone staring back at me. Looking at me- It's me. Ofcourse. It's always me, screaming through this hole. III How do you feel this morning? No, I don't feel much - not with medicine, a rope around my forehead, the top part of my skull disappearing; I drift in a circle of warm air sitting on a bench. The swearing of the clock on wall on wall on wall wall wall wall I curse the slow cracking of my bones the drifting of my ribs a thin cloud of organs and and parts into a veil vapourizing 13 May 2006 ___________________________________________________________________ Heroin The river crawls like a snake in my arm, into my bowels, bounces up into my head, then flows gently towards a pasture, and trees, the lovely beeches, branches of a forest getting thicker, the sound of strange birds louder and louder; purple red horizons of birds of paradise. They say that one day the forests will be gone, destroyed by fires, our dining-tables. But they are wrong. The river flows to pastures and the roots of beech trees. 20 May 2006 ___________________________________________________________________- Father and Son Story Away from the roof. Come along, and away from the slope. In those days we used to sleep in the snow. Baby's were born in the snow. We used the kerosine and a propellerblade and a few instruments from the cockpit. A wolf spilled blood on the snow. Then we saw the trees, pine trees. They made us really feel cold and hungry. Suddenly there was a campfire, no food yet. Here it comes, something nice and juicy, veal and potato salade. Our socks were wet. Then we went to bed and daddy told me a story. Now I am fast asleep. Come, let's go home. _________________________________________________________________ It was and it is. Her face replying as I stand and think about the years gone by. Your love fulfilled by someone else's dream of child. How you entered the innards of my stairwell. No mother with hands for the night, but bars like veins. As I bled your no. _____________________________________________________________ What are you screaming about? There's no one around! The walls here do not have ears. And outside your door trauma/soul doctors reign. They study books about soothing stuff, the right words, treatment, good idea's how to assuage people like you and me, or try to. Knowing the maze is here to stay, that they need to lie on someone's couch as well, to stop them from deteriorating as we speak. A couch is made of skin (leather), wood and foam. Two years guarantee. It's final destiny: landfill. 24 June 2006 ___________________________________________________________________ I take your hand, which doesn't mean much. I have been touching my stomach lately, felt the soft tissue, the worrying tissue getting ready. Or perhaps I should say I have, physically, never felt as ready as now, right now, that time is moving towards me and the leaving, my hand, your sagging smile, my heart rinsed under a tap. Arteries clogged with fat. Latex fingers. 25 June 2006 __________________________________________________________________________ Woman, 1950 X for Willem de Kooning I saw my mother. She sat opposite me. There was the gnashing of teeth and I saw the harbour, flight, no, not a plane, a boat, and wind only when I arrived. How did I get here? How could I have left where I came from? And flames were smouldering, yellow, N.Y., the streets as fast as brushstrokes, stop and a fast line back, as if I cut the canvas, fast and a watery line, the brush filled to the brim with lines and the fleshy pink of a puddle, dripping out of her. ___________________________________________________________________ Woman (Charcoal drawing) X for Willem de Kooning He looked at her watch, he looked at her watch and saw time grow it grew out of her watch it grew out of her woman grew out of watch out of the engine room onto canvas, fluidity of light and dark rainy brush of April, bush and the red lips, fool's dream her shameless unearthliness tomorrow-eyes. I want. Is that what she says? Roots removed, Egypt, todays newspaper falling flakes on his stomach like flakes as she eats _____________________________________________________________ this is the day X this is the who this who is what what is this who however is this who whatever is this who's how and the day this is the how of day this is the who of how what is this who's how this who is what this is the who this is the day.. 5 July 2006 _____________________________________________________________________ Running like a lavender lilly. Blooming between the trees and the sweet dreams of temperature and running water tapping the black hill, its hands getting older, engraved, scarred by the elements and food, water, cold and heat and how the brain slowly adds to this burning chaos erosion, eroding order neat in a row after row without eyes, a glimpse of our newly planted sapling, soil disturbed, restless. 7 July 2006 _________________________________________________________________________ She opened her ear and let the ants outs. Parts of her leg were decomposing rapidly. Who would carry her away from here? Who would touch her now and take her away from this all? ___________________________________________________________ She would not say where she came from. Perhaps washed ashore, tied to the wooden mast of someone's sword. She did not know where she came from, she dare not speak, just mumble, the sound of some of her organs. They did not understand who I was, where I was from. It would not change the inside of me, never. It was the first day, it felt like the first day, the waves claiming land. The sun was setting as if for the first time. Where ever they would take me, they were in charge, let me know it, and I followed the lead, opened my mouth; as if my skull split in half, gurgled the tongue they liked, sounds that resembled theirs and they approached me in their land of empty space, where the bark of the beech resembled the skin of forefathers, the blue-ish colour like a mist, colouring the landscape. _________________________________________________________ The Boy Cycles I heard your voice in the dark. I held on to a tree and listenend. I heard the beating of my heart. And there you were, cycling past me, the tree I held onto. You face had no expression. I thought that rather weird for a six year old boy cycling in a forest filled with the voices of roads, remains, sorrow. You tried to imagine silence. To get that spark of a wonderdoctor, while asleep, soft, or not. But you felt the world turn beneath your wheels, realising there was no way out for them, how to remove the bad words, how to hide the truth that silence, that silence was the end of things: silence would stop someone's heart. _________________________________________________ Message On A Shell* X written for Poets Against War With the smile of Innocence or not, Israeli girls write their names on US shells made to obliterate Lebanon because it is evil and kills small children, women, husbands, civilians. The shells with names and ‘from Israel with love’ plaster the walls of ruins, the stitched faces of survivors, amputees, with layers of flesh and blood. Pink limbs rotate in the air, metal and bone, fragments of a neighbour. Hospital beds contain chunks of flesh, beating hearts. In a street a dog is searching for its owner who seems to be everywhere. *Israeli girls write messages on shells at a heavy artillery position near Kiryat Shmona, in northern Israel, next to the Lebanese border, Monday, July 17, 2006. July 2006 ______________________________________________________________________________________________ With Big Eyes I cannot swim. I cannot hold my head up. The big sharks swim past. Rip trees out of the bottom of the sea. Clip the moon and the whining stars. Fog and ships float to the bottom like a jelly rain, of roads, voices floating and the popping of lungs, hearts, mouths gasping for love. Love is diving, gently, with big eyes, on its way to the bottom of the sea. 6 Aug. 2006 ____________________________________________________________________ I cannot dance; lifting my right leg, cart-wheel gestures with my arms. But I have the right to exist, trying to break the fish-bowl my head is stuck in. Who put it there? Why? Can I go on without it? 6 Aug. 2006 ___________________________________________________________________________________ I had never been so close to the mountain. I realised that there would never be an understanding, grasping, taking the mountain by its shoulders, shaking it and saying: 'what is your secret? It can't be because you are high.' And the mountain had already changed, within five seconds, changing light, the earth's orbit, my blinking eyes, the shadows of the trees leaning more towards the ground. 6 Aug. 2006 ___________________________________________________________________________________________ There is this bird on a trees' highest branch. I see his dark silhouette, and he sings, beak wide open, the sound coming from his slightly swollen throat, amplifying his dearest wish. Nailing me to the ground. ____________________________________________________________________________________- Although X I sit on a star I am still scared to fall off. Not because it will hurt, but the unknown might have colours I do not know. _________________________________________________________________________________- Lebanese House A pool of blood and water, colliding with dry sand on the concrete floor. Newspapers lie scattered. A pockmarked patch on the wall talks like a nervous stuttering neighbour who saw it all happen. 19 Aug. 2006 _____________________________________________________________________ Drift - Drawings and poetry X ___________________________________________________________________ TOP |
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