Three poems from ‘Lippenspook’:

You make me

A mole overwhelmed by bright sun.
An earthworm in a stampede of buffalo.
A bat seeing itself on radar.
A lanternfish in the Dead Sea.
A brainwashed tree-refusing walnut.
A centipede in an expensive pen shop.

That’s how I feel
when you pipit into my eyes, love,
that’s how I feel when you feel by.

*

Hand in hand against destruction

See how that moon sticks on my fork. A magnificent duel.
A cruel spectacle. A man against the stars.
A man starred by the stars.

Lands dream nothing.
They just lie there landing in boundless nothingness,
like you and me, once, hand in hand against the destruction.
Soundless against all death. But I exaggerate, you know that.

*

Conflict

She said to me
I read Lucian Freud
about radical individual freedom
which appeals to me enormously.

I said
Yes, but that man was an artist.
You are a smoking therapist.

She said
It doesn’t matter.

I said
Why doesn’t it matter?

**

Martijn Benders, from: Lippenspook, Van Gennep Publishers, 2016.

Soon part of the collection ‘The Book of The Poems, collected works of Martijn Benders’.