Love grief

My friend said: it will be fine, stay calm.
Study how to make yoghurt.
It will come all by itself after the infection.

Let it rest
in a friendly environment
with pleasant temperature.

My friend is a Turk.
They like to put yoghurt on everything.

I’m Dutch, I believe in plumping.
You have to rock a lot for that.

Turks know it as ‘Ayran’, but it has lower status.
You swim to paradise through the yoghurt lake.
Ayran they drink in hell, among politicians
and sheep intestines.

I tried it,
up to my neck I was in the yoghurt lake,
but I can’t see a gate to heaven
without rattling it vigorously.

*

Cold

I turelur with two jumpers on
but should be wearing fifty like an owl.
The world’s bursting with arrogant cities
who don’t want to know about my cooing
because the night is one big
terrible jumper full of owls.

*

Wrell

Now that I am in towed in
by friends who mean well,
from a world that is not mine,
I slide felts across the bar and cock
against the cleavage of death
that refuses the tip of my soul.

Everything is prancing in the wrong direction.
Urinals shake out their dead ass heads
over emptied whistles. Closing time beckons.

You see a diamond lord swaggering
in the battery acid light of a facade.
The fog dense like the wrell.

*

On a shoestring

It’s christening death with postcards.
The humming of doom
over endless saved stamps
in grandma’s drawer. The golden weights
chasing a heartfelt word,
a lone cocksfoot on a paragraph.

Blacker than death’s monotonous chip fork,
lonelier than bicycle racks in the rain,

they demolish swimming pools again,
neighbourhood pubs lock up,
windows boarded up everywhere,
ticket machines, mudsocks.

*

All poems from ‘Sauseschritt’, Martijn Benders, 2015