Father / No Dummy

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.

Post Views: 467

About the author

Martijn Benders has published twenty-six books, eighteen of which are in Dutch. Critics such as Komrij and Gerbrandy have hailed him as one of the greatest talents of his time. He has also written three philosophical works, one of which is in English and focuses on the Amanita Muscaria, the Fly Agaric. Publishing on the international platform of The Philosophical Salon, he has also gained international recognition as one of the most remarkable thinkers from the Netherlands.

Books

There exists a considerable group of leftist individuals who vigorously opposed the prevailing coronavirus narrative, including some of the world’s leading philosophers, such as Agamben and Kacem. However, this stance was heavily censored and vilified by what is referred to as ‘neocon-left’ or ‘woke-left’, as something associated solely with what they deem ‘far-right’. In my book, I discuss the reasons behind these actions, the underlying motives, and how this is emblematic of a new form of fascism aimed at seizing power permanently.

The middle section of the book is dedicated to poetry. It features a beautiful selection of poems from the Mediterranean region, by poets from Turkey and Greece, who have been imprisoned and tortured by the regime.

The final part of my book is a manifesto against literary nihilism, as manifested in the Literature Fund. It reveals how this fund is dominated by a group of Christians and ‘wokies’, which is undesirable in a free society.

Amanita Muscaria – The Book of the Empress is an exceptional work that sets a new benchmark in the realm of mycophilosophy. While one might be tempted to classify the book within the domain of Art History, such a categorization would fail to capture its true essence.

Amanita Muscaria – The Book of the Empress – De Kaneelfabriek, 2023

You don’t have time to read this, but that’s because you are no longer human. If anything remained of the original person within you, the old mycelia of childhood, you would learn a great deal from this book. In fact, its magical knowledge might become your most valuable possession. This is a book about human imagination and how it fell into the iron grip of transdimensional cockroaches. Additionally, it offers magical tips to significantly improve your life and time acceleration. M.H.H. Benders also takes a light-hearted yet scathing look at the entirety of Dutch literature. What more could you want?