All-Embracing Love

A word from the creator.
You call it gravity
but it is simply love, universal love.

The earth presses you against its bark,
it could easily crush you
or hurl you into space
but she doesn’t. Lucky bastard.

Whining all the time. Backache, muscle ache,
depression. All-encompassing love!
You also have each other.
Fall into each other’s arms. Embrace gravity.

What a beautiful country we live in!
Those who know the seven-mile boots of love
no longer turns his hand to a little love.

*

Love is not an opinion. So come and give me a kiss.

I could populate an entire Type IV exoplanet with opinions.
And even then they would constantly collide like penguins in love .

I want to slide across the moon in a bumper car with you.
You put your head on my shoulder, and your hand in mine
while I point my torch at the distant earth.

And suddenly your hand, your mortal hand
stops in the beam so that a shadow rabbit falls over Africa
and as we make weightless love I will secretly cross
my fingers behind your back to pray for everyone.

*

The revolution

Once there, finally, at long last, she moved
past unnoticed. The greengrocer displayed his fruit.
School cars left the car park. On television
the same games repeated as always. Yet something
was not the same. But no one could put their finger on it

The newspapers were just as superficial and pedantic as
before. On the internet the same hubbub about a genocide, far away.
Until someone pointed to the moon. Look, it’s still just there.
Broad daylight. And there’s a huge hole in it.
Who shot at us?

‘Face trickery’ says the emboldened scientist in
the talk show. ‘A collective hallucination’ says a
renowned psychiatrist.

But people turn off the television en masse. They throw their
wedding service to that one-eyed moon, golden teacups,
plates with frills, hundreds, thousands, the most expensive
porcelain. The whole air swarmed with the finest crockery.

The greengrocer laughing way too hard took off his wedding ring,
the driving instructor accelerated

a precious tapestry of porcelain fell to the earth’s crust
in a benign bombardment
and that stupid cyclops moon just stood there
and nothing else happened.

So everyone turned on the television again. The greengrocer
exposed his fruit. School cars slid out of the car park
like heavy limousines.

Something was not the same. But no one could get their finger on it.
And that stupid cyclops moon just hung there, in the extinguished
light and no one escaped, and there was no one to be mad at.

*

Don’t let love crush you

An uprising has broken out.
I lean out of the window. You are gesturing angrily at me.
Unripe pears on a far too stale tree,

I won’t be fisted by love, my life is a somersault
in acrobat light, why does death always trot on like this?

Here, the only neighbourhood I know,
where I grew up and will die,
in a tired uprising like this
with kleinkunst everywhere.

*

All poems from ‘Sauseschritt’, Martijn Benders, 2015