Please
Please,
no bald men folding like lawn chairs
in Godard coats from the Salvation Army rack.
As anonymous as possible, please.
Nothing compares
to happiness itself.
Spare me that tin-can voice of virtue.
Spare me the polished dome of forgiveness.
Figure
Do you know the dotted line
a woman’s hand can draw around a smile?
Do you know death’s goosebumps,
the static pull of coming home?
The foretold lights—
flickering at the back of the tongue?
The broom-wagons, pal,
forever sweeping the moon’s dust?
If not,
you may remember my license plate.
If not,
you may wave my family goodbye.
Lonely Funeral
I’m glad you’re dead.
Whatever your name was—Gerrie, Rik, Frans, or Marjolein.
You shriveled like a forgotten receipt,
and now I’m drafted—
a courtesy gig,
the posthumous social face of the state.
We’re all glad
you’re dead. No one
would’ve wanted you next door.
Money? Not a chance.
Poetry? Sure. And decency.
We’ve always got plenty of that.
Your soul’s a B-movie
in democracy’s discount theater—
Still, we think
it deserves a happy ending, Gerrie.
Rik. Frans. Marjolein.
Rooster
In his oil-slick eyes
the french-fry cities
of the future glow.
He pecks at the tiny souls
of extinct beasts, his
great-great-grandfather
sank the ark.
By night he sways
like a drunk lady’s purse
through the coop’s grab-bin,
a quizmaster with no prizes,
but always the correct answer:
Cock-a-doodle-doom. The world checks out.
Cock-a-doodle-doom.
I Gave My Flowers to Ester Naomi Perquin
Everything clicked that evening:
the glasses intoned the light
with such grave poise—
that, were it not a poetry night,
you might’ve mistaken it
for gravity itself.
There was a guitar,
an elitist heron, someone shouting
from the corner in sunglasses.
A silver fox faked professionalism.
Wim Brands yelled “Tjakka!” again
and “Death to all herons!”
Pfeijffer, for good measure,
got one last kick in the ass.
A fantastic evening.
If Alexandra hadn’t thrust my flowers back,
and if Samuel, Arjen, and Bart
hadn’t turned out to be farewell hounds—
then maybe more
might have remained
than the simple truth:
never sign a poetry book
“For Rik. From Marieke & Martijn. XXX”
Assault
A man invades my living room,
digging for the history of a life less shit.
He reads the news aloud, emphatically.
Pretends that living here
is all about common denominators.
I keep his hand at room temperature
and tell him stories
about the value of deposits.
Joy, I say, is swap-meet math:
a lame cow for a dead horse,
piglet for piglet.
There is another life, far away.
That’s why borrowing was needed.
You borrow my living room,
I borrow your hand.
If only we could sell emphasis
like the boys from the newsroom—
things might’ve been different.
Now a future scrapes us, slowly,
the barbed dreams of someone
who speaks only the dialect
of diluted applause.