Straight in the face

"I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance, any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it."

Hunted Down (1859), Charles Dickens, novelist (1812-1870
 

Home Alone

"On stage, I make love to 25,000 different people, then I go home alone."

Janis Joplin, singer-songwriter (1943-1970)
  

When the night

When the night finally manages to lie still

heard are the trains rolling over the sleepers

slow heartbeat rumbling across the city – dadum dadum –

necessary toil in the necessary dark – dadum dadum –

obvious sleepers booming through the slithering lights

an even resistance against the order of things

– dadum dadum – dadum dadum –

as the night inert shepherds the weak into her lap

the industrious secrets follies, passions and weariness

collars up their feelings against the cold – dadum dadum –

somehow warmth to be found nearer the bodies

and no longer in the broad daylight of – dadum dadum –

– dadum dadum – legitimacy belongs to the wolves

– dadum dadum – where make-believe sleepers

lie still lest they stir up some restless memory

– dadum dadum – and petrified – dadum dadum – let it

steal their soul – dadum dadum – dadum dadum – dadum dadum –

The Chest

That's a broken piece of furniture

which, missing a leg

jams the drawers and the doors –

rendered useless.

Moved from corner to corner

until it no longer fits

out of fashion

out of usage

hauled to the attic or the cellar –

too sturdy to easily yield to the axe

once had too much value to be burnt –

so leave it then;

broken heirloom too cumbersome to change house

only to change hands without being touched –

so leave it there, then.

The house will go down when it does,

surviving that very house perhaps.

Why did that leg go –

those who could have remembered are long gone –

but the chest, stayed.

 

Take a pill

happenstance happened quietly

nobody yelled or beat their chest

no drama really

it was as easy as the dull rest

like an over-the-counter-morning-after pill

for minor catastrophes

just as things went downhill

up went the fees

no one cared though, it was mesmerizing

so much chaos so superbly orchestrated

a caprioling murmuration of starlings

in the vespertine dusk 'fore the endless night

we let it happen because –

no point trying really since –

something without no real cause

no real consequences

would we remember it years from now

would we remember the when and the how

best be buried with the whole shebang

lest it start growing a sharp set of fangs

 

Le grand cambriolage

Sometimes I wish somebody broke into my flat

and burgled everything – even the books

even my clothes – nothing even to be sat

and nought but dust sheeping in the nooks.

I'd then be homeless and run with the gale

cross deserts and all them little brooks

I've been dreaming of as if the grail –

I'd then be free from everything that hooks.

I frankly don't know what's pinning me down here –

everywhere I seem to be turning my looks

I see nothing but madness tier upon tier

I see nothing but what the mind snaps and crooks –

Yet everyone content with the same outlooks

– only I at peace with what reality brings –

while all seem arrayed in ready-to-burn stooks

while all see the essence in booze, drugs and flings.

Sometimes I wish somebody broke into my flat

so I could finally shirk off this pack of rooks

and go my own way for this isn't my combat –

to each their own fading bliss in their own fading books.

 

Games

Children play-pretend they're adult

playing dead

because there's nothing else to do

every day

at four on the

gameless playground

mirror shards beaming

like a sniper's red dot on the forehead

killing on sight

no cover, even in the dark of

the abandoned shack –

recreational death

mimicking that outside

the other one the adults play

and can't stop talking about

dismembering locusts

recreating death

because pain is not felt

but it feels good to bring it

– heck yeah it does –

perhaps even going as far as

dancing around the carcasses

because rituals have to start somewhen

and all those black threads

covering everything

all stemming from the one broom –

children feel like witches

riding the dark night –

it covers the sounds

muffles your footsteps

no-one can hear you or

the kite-runners of Karachi

– we know what happens to kite-runners:

they either get caught or thunderstruck –

children hopscotch from earth to heaven

sometimes on shards of botched buildings

crudely chalked on the patched playground

the game is avoid stumbling

over the pitfalls, over the graves –

to be underground is to be forgotten

if only until after the living's to return –

no children game is ever innocent

and the adults play-pretend children

contradict in terms:

children playing grown-ups

and adults pretend they're Peter Pans

because too much reality isn't fun, right –

the preferred oblivion of

a doll which will obey our every wish

a delirious dance in a nightclub

the costumed thrill of a carnival

no game is ever innocent

aiming at some lower point

the elusive in-between

where everything comes to life –

sometimes a squeaking, squawking bike

endlessly circling in a closed patio

and a little imagination is all it takes

– but is that even innocent now –

Exposition “Jeux, rituels et récréations”, Gare Saint-Sauveur, Lille, 2017

 

The quiet life

A pound of flesh is a pound of truth

the selfsame self in silence and fury

tied to freedom, unstoppable

funnelled by one's own choices.

Silence in solitude

fury in revels

silence in sleep

fury in destruction.

Dancing around ruins

unashamed and unconscious

– impressions on the mind

must be as red-hot irons –

zeitgeist margin in a satellite centre

going down as the world goes down

plummets like an asteroid

because it is bound to go down.

Chaos as the norm and the everyday

no fixed point but self-preservation

building up of one's own reality

no other voice inside but that which

exalts the brute

and feeds the drowsy rage

quieting what might have been a voice

– stifling conscience –

making sense of the inconsistencies

square will nonetheless fit into triangle

with justified ends and means

so as to sleep the sleep of the just.

Bound in fury and silence

unthinking each next step

but having prophetic dreams about it

in which truth is fleshed out –

but is silenced in the fury.

This, is her quiet life.

 

Fardels bear

"We also deem those happy, who from the experience of life, have learned to bear its ills and without descanting on their weight."

Juvenal, poet (circa 60-140 AD)
 

Innocent

She wept softly that she was innocent –

the shell of the barn still smoking

sizzling beams fireflying in the dusk –

the smoke blending in the near-darkness

stinging the eyes and the nostrils

keenly unseeing and unsmelling the body

at all costs – that she was innocent –

they had tied her hands to the oak –

anger mounting, the horses restless,

the women shivering in the chill –

judgement had to be passed quickly –

there was no way she could be innocent –

yet she pleaded, and looked harmless,

but she was uncannily beautiful –

many confessed to the blaze in their belly

which was everything but innocent –

that poor lad here had paid the price in full

for yielding to the lure of her beauty –

'twas best the barn had burnt – but innocent? –

they all knew her to be odd, and lusty –

she herself knew to be innocent – innocent –

cinders in her hair and on her hands a charred scent.