“In order to write about life first you must live it.” – Ernest Hemingway
-
Junkie
The wild meat wanted
to surround itself,
to clasp down the skin,but it tore open,
lifeless plasma
was released,freely it couldn’t
breathe and gasped
back into the wild meat,out of breath
it broke
for the last time. -
Ghosts in Brussels
I was in one of those periods of absolute uselessness, I no longer knew what I wanted, why I wanted something and how I wanted it. I was looking at the most mindless movies, I was on pills for a cold that wouldn’t go away and at night I amused my neighbors by ping-ponging against the wall.
Pok, pok, pok. They shouted: stop! Pok, pok, pok. Stop! A moment later I was sitting, tick, tick, tick, listening to the ticking of the old spoon clock on my dorm. This one ran asynchronously with my weather forecasting movie clock. Each time it was as if the ticking of one was going to overtake the other, but just at that moment, everything fell back into the same rhythm as before.
Bong, bong! Hit the clock twelve times, the hour the spirits awake. I still had my eyes wide open; for a whole day I had been sitting there, in my red cloth seat dressed in white boxer shorts, a Greenpeace T-shirt and over it a red and white university jacket. The blood was flowing but no longer knew how to find the engine, the body was alive but didn’t know where the mind was, that’s how I felt day after day, as if in a never-ending loop, a dead boring civilian life.
I didn’t want it but I also didn’t hate it, that everyday life without too many challenges. I do hate boredom, “boredom is an unfollowed frustration” William Burroughs claimed. Too much frustration, yes that is possible. Maybe I was looking for my own kind of life, an ultimate free life, free of complexes, but how does such a life look like?
Maybe writing about it would help me. But wasn’t there a danger that I would write what I became and become what I wrote, creating a dramatic form of myself on paper and beyond?
I didn’t want to believe that, though I am becoming more and more aware of who I am, on and of paper drawings, I just have to accept it. I am not a hero who stands on the barricades, not a handyman with claws on his body to make things great or a daredevil who starts a business and attracts money like a magnet, I am just passionate about stories. Stories I picked up from a grandfather who lived through the war and kept a record of everything. He told me all about it, when I was little and looked on admiringly as he fetched streetcar tickets from Dresden in the early forties, where he worked in a prison camp not far from Dessau, and to survive he was an interpreter for the camp doctor, “luckily I was good with languages,” he said.
The buzz in my head was broken by the soft sonorous voice of Leonard Cohen
“Dance me to the end of love”. But my desire had become so great that it also destroyed what should bring me to dance. I finally made up my mind to break with that feeling and took my last 50 bucks, looking for that vanished dance.
Thus I enveloped myself in my black robe, following Lord Byron and the moon. I wandered around, toward the city, empty streets, chilling wind blowing through my boxer shorts and shrinking the testicles, the lights grew brighter, the city, even here, enlighten the empty and soulless streets.
Through the windows of some cafes sat creatures trying to stay straight, raising the glass to the mouth. I did not want to dance this evening with the bottle in my hand. I walked on as fatigue gradually rose to my head from my stone-cold toes, as if my feet had become one with the paving stones. I began to dazzle, the cold making the dimples in my face crack.
Under one of those streetlights, I stood still, I decided to continue the evening here. This pillar would support me. I could see the tinkling of the stars. I allowed myself to stand while coughing, I kept coughing.
Then I saw her, she seemed ideal, she was not a man, not a woman, she had no shape, no lips, no buts, she kept circling around me. I started laughing out loud, started dancing under the street light, I was not alone, I danced with her, danced for hours until I fell down and the muse whispered to me:
“I will help you, if you dare to give.”
-
Medical Examinations
Morning, way too early. Noise – train, subway. Beware of poison gases.
Pants down, medical examination today.
I still have to go to it, that is an annual tradition here in the schools, I consoled myself with the idea that this might be the last time. This time we were dropped by bus in one of those shabby old buildings in Brussels.
Three divided rooms. An examination room for the eyes, weight, posture and teeth, an office to test one’s hearing and a gender test room, a testicle test for the men, to see if everything is well developed.
For the hearing test, I entered a small room with a measuring instrument behind which was a young lady with long blond hair, full red lips and a firm bosom. No, this is not fiction, she really was like that.
She placed headphones on me and I had to indicate where I heard the beeps coming from.
After about five minutes, she finished.
“That all seems normal to me.”
“Well, I’m still young, why shouldn’t it be?”
“Ah you know.”
I looked at her wonderingly.
“If you masturbate too much, it can make you go deaf.”
My mouth fell open.
“So, with you it’s not so bad.” She winked.
Is she kidding me or flirting with me?
“Just kidding huh, no, the youth who live with earbuds in, listening to screaming socials, or go to festivals and hang out at the big basses, there are those who do occasionally get hearing damage or suffer from tinnitus.” She said to me in a more restrained tone, then leaned a little toward and slipped a document to me.
“Would you maybe like to fill out this paper. You see, I’m doing a paper on the condom – use among art students and their opinions about it, the difference from normal students.”
I looked at her, smiled briefly and slid it back.
“Sorry, but I don’t have much to say about that.”
I was quickly outside again.
The next little room was one with a real doctor, a woman with whiskers and thick sturdy fingers. I entered in black T-shirt, orange boxers, and two pairs of socks. She laughed with me.
“Two socks on top of each other? What’s the deeper meaning of that?”
“The black socks are actually too big and they sag if I don’t wear a pair underneath, but since I only have white ones left – which my mother used to buy me all the time – I wear the black ones – from my father’s work – over them. It’s not art, but purely functional.”
“Well that’s good thinking then, now put the boxer down, and I’ll see if everything is still in place.”
She put on a rubber glove and felt my balls. I pulled back a little because I felt slight pain. She looked up at me.
“Does this hurt you?”
“Uh, yeah, sometimes, like something’s stuck, but it goes away. But isn’t that normal when you wear tight jeans.”
“Well, I see a vein splash and feel a slight torsion. I would have that checked out anyway.”
She pulled her gloves back off.
“Just pull up your pants, I’m going to give you a paper for the doctor.”
I looked startled.
“Is it bad?”
“No, but you need to get it treated, otherwise your testicle may not get enough blood flow and deliver poor sperm or even can die. But your testicle is not very swollen and obviously still sets back sometimes. With a minor surgery, one can fix this. They simply sew your testicle to your scrotum in such a way that it no longer gets tangled.”
After waiting several hours for this annual ritual and having been inside for 10 shocking minutes, I could leave.
No that was not a pleasant experience. I called my mother and she would immediately make an appointment with the doctor. After that examination, the doctor made an appointment with the hospital for an ultrasound. Then they would operate my balls.
Just the thing I felt most insecure about was now also literally bothering me. It’s part of life for sure, part of being a romantic in this fucking exciting world, not everything goes the way you imagine it in your fantasies, where a handsome young doctor looks deep into your eyes, grabs you by the balls, looks at your magic stick admiringly and slides her beautiful red-lipped lips over your cock and gently sucks. No, that’s not how it went at all. -
Me as a writer or a fictional character?
I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if I were a mechanic, fond of cars and can make and fix them myself or a construction worker or engineer who put all that knowledge and free time into building and renovating things instead of tinkering on paper. Would my life be different then? At least I would have gotten more merit out of it, but inwardly? Would I be a different person with less fuss in my head?
Um, and then? Maybe I would also encounter the same issues and fall into the same patterns. Sure, I would be less in my head, living less in fiction, more in real life, talking more with my loved ones. Instead of hiding away in fictional characters saying what I would actually like to say.
And would I then be more myself? Or is this just a part of who I am, my way of being myself? Just as everyone finds a way or a place to become themselves, finding peace for a while, and from there confront fears and insecurities again.
Fiction or not? As a writer you dive into your characters and wake up as who you are. When you step out of that zone, life bulges on and you may be able to cling to the stories and those thoughts for a while, but soon reality catches up. If you’re lucky and can distance yourself from it, you can use elements of that for your story and stay somewhere – in balance.
I would even venture to say that as a writer it just helps me to become more human, no, it’s not living in fiction but just being more real. The closer the writer stays to himself, the more he discovers and takes that little piece of regained self with him. He is not an actor stuck in his role, but rather one who develops and enriches his own role.
Maybe I’m like that construction worker who sometimes needs to put it all together and build something that will help him move forward, or like that car freak who needs this, to put all his time and energy into something that will give him some energy again, so that you can get on with it and finally you matter somewhere, even if only to yourself. Yes, maybe that’s writing for me, it feels necessary every time again and … real.
-
That Angel
She has pure brown irises. She wears her long wavy hair as if a gentle breeze would dwell there, as if that is where everything is created. Her gaze sends that pleasant breeze my direction. She sits alone. I sit at a table in the same cafe as her and suck from an empty caffeine tin. I’ve seen her before, but never said anything. She’s always on her own.
I decide to go to her. I stand up with determination, approach her. And begin to doubt fiercely, look around with my head as if I’m being spied on, cross my fingers behind my back, even though I don’t believe in it, but hope that now every little bit helps. She smiles at me with a mysterious look. I feel a heat wave radiating and a hurricane is forming somewhere in my head. I try to take a seat at the creaky little chair next to her. She soon notices that I don’t know where the earth is anymore. Not a determined macho, but a bumbling scatterbrain.
And indeed not only my hair is constantly in a mess, but also my mind. I was again in one of those dimensions where everything passes your mind and you get nothing done. One of those days when you move from one point to another, without even realizing how you got there and, above all, why? In this state I now find myself sitting next to her, only her aura still gripping my lost mind. She looks at me curiously. And uncontrollably, my lips begin to move:
‘Well, well (began I boldly) … (but soon stopped) I … would like to ask you out um with me … want to … talk … I uhm, hope you don’t have a boyfriend … Would you like to go for a drink together someday?’
But her eyes turn my brave beginning into a plea and I lose complete control and rattle off subsequent soon-to-be-forgotten phrases:
‘Tell me yes, because if you say no; it would be the same to me as if I were to die and a dazzling Goddess refused to let me enter her gates and said I could go to hell, only to discover that there are some jerking old suckers, which will make me wake up sweating, wet in my own bed, “Saved!” then shouts out a tremendously heavy nurse on top of me, and gives me another whopper of an injection. No don’t do that to me, I want your lips to be mine.’
She looks at me, her mouth slightly open, I see her wet slender tongue twitching slightly. Silence. I feel embarrassed, dive away into my collar and sip some more on the sweaty tin that almost slips from my hands. She smiles and with her thin fingers she gently touches my cheeks. She places her lips on mine, then whispers softly to me: ‘Find yourself and then come back again.’
A volcanic eruption, the blood rushes through my veins. Red-headed and fully satisfied, my eyes stare wildly through the cafe, all kinds of sounds buzz in my ears. She smiles at me once more and leaves this place. I want to join her, but she stops me, with a gesture of stay put. I sit stupidly. For several hours I sit dreaming away, back alone. When will I see her again? And how did she mean, find yourself? I am myself, am I not? How could I be otherwise? And who or what was she? She felt so unreal, so perfect even in form to me, not really clearly defined, different and so divine that I called her my Angel.
I wait some more time until the waiter encourages me to order something new. I step up, put the now blushed and color faded can back on the counter and greet the strange watching waiter. I stroll around some more in the darkness, where I look for the moon but don’t find it; it has disappeared.
A little kitten chases me. I stop and stroke them. I take them into my cold room. It crawls under the sheets and rolls up purring. I tell her how happy I was that night. She purrs on.
It feels warm.
Photo by Lucas Pezeta @ Pexels -
Nothing
Ooh I want!
I want haunted the child
running into darkness
down long corridors of delight
no, I don’t want to go outside
let me, let me wandering
in the dark, I want, I want
oh so nothing! -
Pause
Locked in my little room, on break, I stopped studying for a while.
Scrolling around now in front of my zombie screen. An Asian man who has to estimate the weight of three very busty women, feels and smells, she squeezes him between her breasts and then he emerges, looking intoxicated. Lost in size. Fake breasts impressed for men, for their benefit of joy, where in ten years from now she can use them as an elastic rope, her entire skin sucked down into a shopping cart to move around. I like big, but no, not like that.I scroll on, a transvestite and a man with crazy glasses singing an easy popsong, scroll, a talking dog and a man imitating a monkey, gone, close that business. I’m not moving on. Not to the more serious stuff. No blood today.
I try to rest for a while, but my head keeps on scrolling. Images of a promise patiently waiting for me, images of a card reader who predicts the future for me, if I only pay enough, images of the sweet woman who once stroked my ego and then told me flat out they wanted to be friends, cause they have no one in their circle like me, a creative mind, funny in a crazy way, and poor, not a nail to scratch his hole, let alone treat them on stuff, with only an old mountain bike to get around, yes nice, such a geek, as a friend, while she lays herself naked next to me and says, you can feel my breasts, but nothing more, we are friends, remember. All these moments now flicker before my eyes at an insane rate. They won’t let me go, my mind is hungry and want them back, in a different way.
Black out. I’ve lost them, they are only there to satisfy lost desires and to keep me in my room.
Break done, back studying.
Matters, boring and not so boring. Parts of life.
Please pause me, for a while.
-
Luring cigars
Between the terrace and me is a canal where pleasure boats pass by. Across the street, an old cigar shop flaunts itself. It tempts me. But I don’t go. I won’t take those big leaves rolled on woman thighs anymore. I don’t want to be a copy of him. My bio dad.
He procreated and moved on. Smoked and shredded from place to place like a real businessman; a bragging man. Where he is, I don’t know. He disappeared without saying much. But on those days when everything seems to go well, the sun is shining softly, couples parade hand in hand, young leaves are playfully seduced by smooth talkers, while I watch mindlessly from behind bitterballen and water-flavored pints, then I see him like popcorn popping up in my mind: why the hell did you do that? Was that typical for man of that century? Or were you just too young and wanted to move on without all that stuff? Do you regret it now? Or have you forgotten me a long time ago? Questions I would like to ask him. According to my mother, he had someone else, had a short fuse on top of that and lived only for his work.
I had to put up with that. But I don’t fight anymore, not with you dad. I’m not trying to copy your style. Yet I feel it’s hard, because that absolutely je m’en fous of his calls to me and I want it so badly. I have been living myself to death for the last 20 years, under the strict watchful eye of my mam and stepdad. Square and at the same time not, because it storms inside. It costs me terrible efforts. You were allowed to go wherever you wanted, and me?
I stayed well behaved, with occasional bursts of petty rage and then a sneer at me: “you got that from your dad”. But I am not him. Dad, I may have features from you, but I will never be like you. I will not leave a child behind.
I will dance and let go of everything that is not necessary and search for what can heal, maybe it will be that beautiful muse, whom I run after like a madman. Or no! Does that make me like him? Or is it just typical for a man in these times, a fast-food neo-romantic looking for easily digestible love? And the one I won’t run away from, where is she? I miss them, unless I sit at my writing desk and type, type like a savage, like possessed, for you, for me and that fucking planet in this fucking age in which you and I have landed.
Just this morning, I thought I came from another world when I woke up. That they had cast me here as a punishment and I had actually lived long ago in a land surrounded by water. It could be, because I love water and when the good boy in me turns into a wild man, swimming or fleeing to an island, surrounded by water and simplicity is what helps. Yes, that’s where I unwind.
The only thing that bothers me is that cigar shop here.
It looks warm and cosy. It smells old and familiar, which I don’t want to embed, a hole in my memory that is filled when I smell cigars. His? Mine?
I guzzle the last of the leftover beer and decide to have a look around. A man with balding head and a pluck of hair in the middle, peers from under his glasses and thinks: what is such a young guy doing here? I nod and look around, lighters of all shapes and colors, the plain metal ones with a big wick appeal to me. Next to them are the guillotine cutters, which you use to cut off the front tip of the cigar. Something they use in gangster movies to punish failed deeds. And then those big and small unhealthy smoking sticks that lie bulging in brown wooden boxes, they smell of South American beautiful women curling them on their legs sweating under the sun. The romance of destruction calls to me too often, because I don’t engage with it.
I step up to the man and ask what he can advise me.
“I am a beginner,” I say.
“Well then I’d rather recommend thin cigars, not those thick ones, try a Romeo Y Julieta, Hoyo de Monterrey or San Cristobal. These are a bit lighter. But I am not allowed to sell them to under-aged people.”
I take out my identity card. I’m used to it already, I still look like a teenager, nothing to do about it. Here, twenty, and a half.
He shuffles over to a large chest of drawers and shows me some boxes. I go for the Romeo Y Julieta, which sounds nice and fatal. I pay, go outside and light a cigar. I inhale and blow out large circles, after which I have to cough for a moment and then quickly recover and inhale another puff.
Ah no, not again, why am I doing this? Because I love the smell, it takes me back to an unfamiliar childhood. When everything seemed fine. If only that’s it.
That old monster must have a place somewhere.
-
For Amy
Last weekend I dove into Camden Town to get a bit of the Amy Winehouse feel before going to see the film about her life.
But like the film, I kept it a bit boring. I didn’t use drugs, did sniff weed on the street and drank a Camden’s Hell and Guinness. But that was it, I had to be sober before going to Leicester Square. That while I was sitting at the bar in The Hawley Arms, the pub Amy frequently visited. I didn’t take her favorite drink, which consists of vodka, banana liqueur, Southern Comfort and Baileys. You can’t make me happy with those sweet drinks. Unfortunately, the film about her life was also bittersweet, aside from the good effort of the actors and the singing of lead actress Marisa Abela; which was quite impressive. This whole immersive experience led me to this try-out poem:
where Amy once sat
drinking down,
and nowXL-t-shirts fall down
like a nightdress to sleep in a myth
where demons wentfighting with a singing voice
that touched heaven and hell
as she fell,in love
with headache liquids
and golden-brown brain fog
with a heart-breaking man
and toxic stories of paparazzi
who tried to destroy this
hard-boiled goddess,
luckily not her voice
her sound will stay
even when I’ll go back to hell
to find this Eurydice
– in search of my own –
at Camden Town–
(Where waitresses hug each other
and that lonely writer smiles
behind his Guinness for a few sips
at this district where tourists
linger and linger and linger on)
Fastfood romantics 