The Walk

Walking through the city, I saw all sorts of things:
A car that wasn’t burning
Houses, not yet collapsed
People, who weren’t fighting
A sky, from which no rain fell

No panthers lurking in the trees
The Coliseum, vanished without a trace
A parade of elephants walking elsewhere
Shaking their large grey behinds
With a bushy tail

Then my feet touched no silver gutters
And the ants were denying everything
Fleets of ghost ships floated through the canals
In perfect random order.

All sorts of things I saw:
Boats unsunk
Lights unlit
Tram rails unrusted
Windows unbroken
Pavement unworn
Heads not laughing
And many things more.

I lie as a
dog
at the feet
of my existence

Gogol's Echo

I took a walk in the city today. In the middle of Kruisstraat I saw one of my neighbours roaming past. It was the man whose wife had died so unexpectedly two weeks ago. He wandered about in the snow with an uncertain gait. He whistled energetically.

Loose Thoughts

ͽ  At an art exhibit: oh no, a neo-surrealist!

ͽ  In the book shop: and where the fuck is the philosophy isle gone, goddamnit?

ͽ  At home in my chair: I love to hear a man with passions. But I prefer to hear a man with lost passions.

ͽ  Later: ‘Accent Aigu’... good book title, band name or cocktail.

ͽ  In the end: Throw the telephone off the hook and instruct my teddybear to open the door for no one.

The Continuing Facebook Feud

Card For The Commonwealth (as published on Facebook)

I wish you a good day people, here’s a card to you all. I took a short vacation from our commune, yet I returned. This in no small part due to some rational guidance and kind words I received from dear friends, and to something I read this morning in a book of intelligent and fair being. In this book, a man, troubled by similar worries as I, spake to another man. The first exclaimed how he be distraught by experiencing the impossibility to stay and proclaim his own ideas in a way that they would be heard and produce results, and that he therefore chose a wandering life, all kept to his own.

So then the other bloke says: “If evil opinions and naughty persuations cannot be utterly and quite plucked out of their hearts, if you cannot even as you would remedy vices which use and custom hath confirmed, yet for all this cause you must not leave and forsake the commonwealth. You must not forsake the ship in a tempest because you cannot rule and keep down the winds.”

And there you have it, folks. I must not forsake this ship.

On the Good Ship Makebelieve

Whether or not this trip was made under the guidance of benign Gods is not for me to say. There was darkness. There does Man.

The wind howled in the rigging fore and aft. The ship was tossing about. Warm was the coke and the TV heavily distorted. The cook got sick, barfing abaft. Some hands lost their minds. Many got lost in the fog. But all the way, our figurehead stood firm and proud, leading us bare-breasted with a smile and a wink.

The journey took us to lands far and near, real and makebelieve, through mist and dreams, rain and typhoons, shite and onions. There we saw meadows in bloom, where brown-eyed cattle stood lazily blinking in the sun. We saw unclothed girlfolk, pure and righteous. They made us lie down in green pastures. Leading, restoring our soul. Priests of perversion they were, giddy gals. They were laughing, playing with purple veils and perilous skateboards.

We climbed over hilltops, laughed hysterically, we asked for forgiveness. We crawled through jungles, oozy, dying of thirst. We met druids, knights, whores and pirates, advertisement salesmen and mariners in various states of intoxication. They gave us riddles, they smote us with confusion. Creepy vines obscured our way. In a clearing, we were attacked by cigar store Indians. So we fought like lionesses, then skulked in the undergrowth till we heard bloodthirsty sirens breaking in shining song.

Scratched and bleeding we stumbled upon some ancient ruins. And some new ones too. Two hundred and sixty five thousand stones. Jubilation, rejuvenation. Yes.

Up

Time crept forward in the cramped, dusky room. The silence was so absolute, you could almost hear the dust draping itself onto the polished faux plywood cabinets. A slight, regular ticking noise came from the corner of the office where the partially dried out leaves of the large potted plant quivered in the airflow that was caused by the blasting radiator. Nobody spoke. Every once in a while though someone’s chair would creek. Søren stirred his coffee as quietly as possible, carefully watching the metallic surface being sucked into the vortex of the liquid. Å, let’s descent into this Mælström… ‘t was the sixth cup of the day already. Søren made a note of that on the appropriate form.

He saw Mette winking at him from across the room. Mette had greasy hair that looked good on her. She also had greasy spectacles and vermillion sneakers. They had gone out one time. He had made a fool of himself. ”The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved,” he thought as he looked at the wall. The 2 o’clock shadow fell just above the one from a week earlier. Søren made a mark of it in pencil. Connecting the dots and... voilà! There you go… Heliocentrism? Not in here mate! I’m the son of modern observational astronomy, Søren thought, but a bad son.

A big pile of documents, stapled together in bundles of four or five sheets, lay on one end of his desk. Søren took one of the bundles and with an experienced flick of his crimson destapler he took out the staples which he then placed in a transparent plastic receptacle. The paper was chucked into a grey plastic bin. After every 20^th staple he made a note of it on his report chart. When he was done, he sighed. Almost a record for this week. Well done Nosferatu my trusty old tool, he thought and glanced over to Mette to see if his enthusiasm hadn’t been too obvious and flamboyant and might have produced what could be considered unnecessary sounds.

The rest of the afternoon was occupied by doing this month’s add & subtractions, the checking of customers’ telephone numbers, to establish a pattern and the Leprechaun file. It was hot in here... Mette’s lips were red and shiny. She had a little golden crucifix dangling on her bosom. And yet it moves... Søren pondered on this for some time. He must have dosed off. The writing was on his forehead: Y T R Ǝ W Ơ Ѭ ҉.

Søren picked up the phone and called the time service. ‘Thank you,’ he said, as he always did before putting the phone down. He made a note of the time on his form and got up.

From Now On

Jack’s face looked phthalo green in this light. Meg had her head supported by her two soft, pink hands. What peculiar ring she wore, made of some kind of a white stone, or petrified whale sperm. You looked at it for maybe ten minutes. When your eyes locked, she smiled a silly smile. Complete meltdown in you. Somewhere in the back, Bob and Frank compared their iPhones and all of their splendour, the darlings. A fresh batch of young girls coming into the bar distracted you. Seventeen? About. Danger! Danger! They were laughing and wearing funny knitted woollen hats. Much too hot in here. Zip zap, tip tap toe, dance across the floor, knots and buds, a shadow, smudge, a phantom.

Simone pulling your arm brought you back on earth. This was the reason you all gathered tonight, her dooming departure… an eight month trip to the Orient. My God, you were gonna miss her, no man could tell… Cheers, babe. Olga and Bette were laughing like mad. That was probably the best thing to do too. What the hell! Discussing the state of affairs in the world, and solving them in between two beers. Though blurred eyes you watched your friends laugh. Universal Love ruled between these walls for a night.

Later, you found yourself stumbling to the toilet, where you pissed on your shoes. This made you howling with laughter. When you returned you asked Meg: ‘Will you varnish my skull? Just for fun?’ Sure, why not. Confetti, meat, the pipe dream of a waitress’ smile. Out of nowhere, you invent a piano player and a man in uniform. Where were those can-can dancers?

A cold wind blew outside. You shouted: ‘let’s box up the moon! We have no need for it now, for Lady Luck will shine on our path from now on!’

Celluloid Lives

Eight hours long in a room full of strangers with familiar faces... Eight hours of being subjected to a friendly atmosphere that grew more macabre by the minute. I sat on my chair, locked up with a whirlwind of self-conscious thoughts that grew stronger over time and more and more horrific. I know these people… I love these people... then why can’t I for the life of me talk to them?  

The family had gathered in a little village in the south of the country to celebrate the 94^th birthday of the Madre familias. The woman had fought herself through two world wars, eight Popes and three Queens, and single-handedly raised a family of five children, all with nothing but her husband’s high income and the help of a battery of nannies and maids. Now she was being wheel-chaired into a room to be the birthday girl. We toasted her with a glass of pink champagne. Here's to you, Grandmother... love you!

After I had been sitting smiling in my chair, a diversion was created. The family was summoned into the next room to watch a computer presentation my uncle had made. He had transferred all the old celluloid films my parents had made back in the days when my older brother and I were still young & cute. Films I had not seen for the better part of 30 years. My uncle had put a score under it of music of the time: Sgt. Pepper, Jethro Tull, Van Morrison, Iron Butterfly and the likes. I watched from behind the back of my aunts who were dressed in black. 

And there it was… my youth in 8 mm, with In a gadda da vida blasting through the room. A psychedelic nightmare as well as a soft dream in faded colours. Two unreacheable kids jumping up & down on their beds without making a sound. A walk in a zoo, a giraffe in close up. There I was twirling on a merry-go-round, my face tense, pale, half happy. Laughing birthdays, people mouthing silent messages through the ages. Large cacti in our window sill... my grandfather, still alive, playing the piano in the room with the dark brown cork padded walls. I wore surrealistic swimming trunks while sitting alone in an inflatable orange swimming pool in the garden while all the neighbour kids were playing together in another pool two houses down the block. Different trunks while digging up my grandparents’ garden. All around, my hippy aunts swirled around in India dresses, the uncles wearing beards and straw hats, looking exactly like the cover of Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma. In the sun... in the sun. My brother tried to set up a folding garden chair, succeeding when the lights went low. The dog slept under the table. Mom had long red hair.

When Life Gives You Lemons

(sorry, Angela, wink.)

Waking Up

Each morning, after waking up and having let existence slowly seep into my being, I strech out my arm and slide open the one curtain I can reach from my bed. Then I sink back onto my cushion and stare for a long time at the tree next to my window, and I notice that the little yellow leaves have once again reduced in number overnight, giving way to the skimpy black branches more and more. Then my eyes fall on the corpse of a bee that has been laying on my windowsill for weeks now… a small but monumental mummy, covered in an ever thicker bluish layer of dust. Little bugger, I think... lying there, being dead, ruining for me another day that has yet to start. My eyes travel back to the tree and the white drops of water on the window pane. The quivering leaves are buzzing in the frame, like butterflies caught in a windshield wiper on the highway. Small fields of colour against the frantic black lines.

The Second Law

The story starts with a description of the scenery. Some trees. Firs. A blackbird hopping from one branch onto the next and back again. The clouds and the effect they have on the lighting. How the rain fell on the dried out earth and the view over the lake. All done in an esthetical pleasing manner, masterly creating a perfect sense of forlorn lives and isolation. But all this was more than made up for in the second chapter with the murder of Mary Barrett.