Father
Hanging on the jukebox of time,
his crest creaking with ultimate crestiness.
His sallow leather jacket just not wide
enough for his eternal youth.
His eyes bombers.
The apocalypse itself
shyly asking him for pocket money.
*
No dummy
Rather the fjords of a real face
than such an outstretched future face.
Something you can still descend into,
with a little light. With politics in the nose.
A thunderhead I want to see.
A canis that can’t be broken.
Not a slacker with a star on his head.
*
Both poems: Martijn Benders, from: What do I buy for your darkwilde powers, Willem, soon available as an english collection and part of my collected works The Book of the Poems
My father was a nozem. Such an elvish crest was his secret as a teenager, and early on he managed to score my mother, who was equally a child of the 1950s, with it. Real boomers, then, holiday as the meaning of life, blame them, at least it’s better than their parents’ religion. I try to capture my father’s mood in these poems. He always had something tough but also that ultimate lazy, and maybe tough and lazy are uber-interchangeable. For instance, what is a tough cow? That doesn’t strike me as a cow that tries very hard to show geemnity. Maybe a tough cow is a cow that refuses to conform to cowhood, or toughness is a kind of purism, I don’t know. To be honest, I can hardly remember pocket money either, so maybe as an apocalypse I was indeed too shy to ask about it. There too, toughness helps to save money and fend off doom.
