Monoliners

• What’s the Status?

• I have no problem with any religion, as long as it doesn't involve complicated handshakes

• On the market of Love, as well as on that of Employment, I play Hard to Get; so far, the yield of this strategy can only be characterized as humble

• Nine o'clock and all's we-hell!!!

• In my country, there's a saying

• Ice on my windows, sunshine in my house

• Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov : )

• uhn-yoo-zhoo-uhl

• Act normal

• And Martijn was his name-o

• I am the Theory of Nothing

• Long Story Short

• All People I know are Strangers

The Rubberplant

(and Other Office Doodles)

Warning to reader: all characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental, especially the 'I' character.

Some weeks ago, I went for my Final Trip to the office where I was no longer welcome. The classic case: I had to clear out my desk, in the traditional cardboard box, complete with the carefully acted out tragic rituals. Back home, I threw the box in a corner of the room and chose to forget about it. A box filled with painful happy memories and trampled good intentions. Shite & Onions! The bastard box from the bloody office just stood there, gently beating like Poe’s tell-tale heart. However, today I toughed it out and opened the goddamn box to rummage through it. It was mostly junk and office riffraff. You know what I’m talking about, the usual shit: bled-to-death pens, crayons, notes, pictures with smiling co-workers standing around a cake, a garden gnome snow dome, large plastic beetles, water guns, a Viewmaster...

Amongst the refuse, I found some of the sketch books I had been drawing in now & then. Just to spice up my lunch breaks and ward off the worst fits of despair and boredom. Most drawings are from the middle period of my time at the place. After the first excitement had worn off and before the great Spells of Resentment had set in, when my eternal repulsion of aesthetic falsity became too great to draw at all. I could no longer fight against the visual trap: of people looking solely with their eyes, not with their hearts. This was most conspicuous at a place like that of course: an advertisement agency, where there is no place for the heart at all. And content, poetry and integrity are dirty words. So let’s say most drawings are from 2003 – 2007. Three books, 200 drawings each. Today, I photographed (in poor quality) a few, not really trying to illustrate a timeline, or themes, or to pin up a story board of 'years at some office' or any corny crap like that. No, just to bring back some of the good things. But if one wants to, he or she can get all that from this. Just look with your heart.

All drawings available in higher resolution (same poor photographic quality though) by e-mail.

A Rose by Another Name

They asked me why I wrote in English. I couldn’t say. One never knows… I like to put on this costume, perhaps that’s the reason. To turn into someone else. A pantomime villain with a villain moustache, cape and hollow laughter. Or a stoic peasant leaning on his spade, watching his leaping goats. Perhaps a damsel in distress, an exotic dancer, a negro delta blues picker, spy, whore, pirate, king… Ancient, burlesque, crazy, angry, clownish… or all at once. It’s dangerous. Therefore, it’s nice. However, at times, I don’t like the straight jacket it represents. Then I want to flap my arms and howl with frustrated rage. Get back to my own planet, if there is such a thing. Maybe I don’t like to write in a foreign language at all. Perhaps I shouldn’t. One gets tired.

Victory Boogie Woogie

Single Malt , fathoms deep, we truly slayed the Dragon! Summersaults & Exultation, we sunk her boorish brigades! We smote, we kicked, we overthrew, we victory-victora-victoriayed! So do the hornpipe, dance with us, adore on the wall this taxidermy of a single breast. Lick the stripper glitter from our vest. Fourteen souls on the dead man’s chest. Ha ha ha and cha cha cha, all suave, divine; and a royal gulp of wine. Oh joy! Oh rapture! Hoorah, hoorah! Up she rises, slay the bugger for there she, there she, thar she blows! Sing tooralooralooraloo. Thanks and praises, naughty phrases, tonight we’ll sing our songs and moon a copper’s wife. We slayed the Dragon for good!

And thusly ended the Wildman’s chant. Low voiced brooding took over, later soon to be replaced by serene prose and echoes of quiet elation.

That your moon go down. And Nightfall on your Reich. An army of horse-like men will come a-fighting upon your fields and shores! From the snowy peaks of Athos to the white creeks of the South American jungle. Dogs on your trail. Slaughter of the bandit troops, a massacreous ecstasy of gutted fish and broken biscuits. The possessed midnight rooster is given freely.

There, we said it! Serene prose crashed into the room.

Girls’ bottoms, chicken soup, summer slumber, helium group, southern breeze, childlike mind, conquistadores, unrest left behind. Wonderful illusions of unambiguous nature, devoid of doubts, morale, utility.

Growling wolf go kjssst!
 

[Written for the occasion of the incoming result of a four-month legal scrum with my employer who wanted to fire me after eleven years of loyal service... The authorities, in their immeasurable wisdom, have judged said dismissal to be completely unlawful.]

The Joy of Poetry II

Waking up on another grey and fatigued morning. Taking up a fresh book. Crisp black on immaculate. Stepping into an enchanted forest where sunlight danced [Danger! Danger!] executing indefinite forms and colours… welcome to assumed reality. An earthy smell with tones of Styrofoam. Woodland flowers, gum and empty beer bottles on the litter. Leaving the city's drum rolls and scraping tram wheels behind. A choir of birds, manic at first, then dying out to absolute silence…

I was submerged in magical wordplay, reading with wonder and joy. Following the lines in trance, singular connections made in the brain, coupling cold lead bars to felt-packed grand pianos.

Anti-cantos. Lightning on the Bilges. The Sublunary. The Trodden Mystery. Song of Masks. The Power of Paralysis. Sorry I shot the Horse and the Dog. A Tiger Underway. Triangle. 27 Poems and No Song. Swine Pink Postcards. Desertology. We Saw Ourselves Change Into a Small Group of People. No Folksy God in Your Backyard. The Voice on the Third Floor. Sacred Comedy. From the Earth. First This Than That.

Black magic jugglers, burlesque entertainers, great migrations, knife fights, drunken gold-diggers on a Saturday night, silent murmur to pipe-smoking Gods, a car that doesn’t start.

The Joy of Poetry

On this grey and silent morning, I decided to read a poem and whipped a volume out of the cabinet. Faded skeletal letters on stained buttery vellum... It started with an anonymous woman in evening gown, and some prudish innuendo about this person’s promiscuous nature. Way to go! Then, there was talk about her quivering lips. This made me raise an eyebrow. It was followed by moonlight on her cheek and neck. Another eyebrow went aloft… and although feeling slightly nauseous, I pushed on, overcoming the words ‘weeping’ and ‘happiness’. It was when the poet employed the phrase ‘moonlit jasmines’ that I howled with laughter and forgave the man his ‘loneliness of our clouded existence.’ Then I went to the bathroom.

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.