With one eye fixed on the new year
The other on the crazy cat standing near
I smile and find
That hope is on my mind

I
Do
Not
Hope

Silly
People,
Frantic
Paranoid
Trembling

Shameful­ly
Deceitfully
Precariously
Adversatively
Contemptuously
Unaesthe­tically

Unreasonableness
Melodramatisation
Interchangeability
Ps­eudophilosophical
Overpresumptuousness

Since the longing never stops
I decided to prolong
The loathsome silence between us
And let love prolong this lockdown
Of heart and soul
Mind and matter
Fact and fiction

Since home is where the heart is
I decided to hide
From the harshness of our silence
And hide my hopelessness
From you
Just you
Always you

Because I reckoned
That playing a game of chess
Against Death was a bit cliché
I decided to challenge him
For a bit of table tennis
Needless to say
With his boney build
And his empty sockets
I soon smashed
His will to live
To pieces
And I’m especially proud
Of my outstanding performance
In the seventh set

Another day to procrastinate
Another day to stray
Another day to think about
Another day to wait
Another day for marvelous strategies
Another day to think
Another day to plan ahead
Another day for lifeless effigies
Another day for a poem to come my way
Another day for a line
Another day for a question mark
Another day for another day

A poet and a poet meet in a café
Striking up a conversation
About everything and nothing
About love and lost love
About the dark side of the moon
And the nurturing side of childhood memories
About that one time they were both at a hapless poetry event
And about mirrors and magic and moonlight
And mice and men, terrible men
And about women, gentle, dangerous creatures
Who broke their hearts in many pieces
And how they turn innocent boys
Into almighty, all-knowing poets
They talk about their ego
An ego that has become huge
Despite the fact they are not read
And don’t make any money
They talk and talk and banter
And slander and meander
Verbally that is
Until they’re lost for words
And the secret code of life is cracked

Everything is in the eye of the beholder
And nothing is what it seems
So I looked up and noticed
Her!
A red dot in a drab, grey mass
A sense of hope in a world
Where everything good
Is reduced to ashes
And everything bad
Becomes the base of who we are

We were kept apart
But kept on trying
To reach out to one another
And through imagination
And communication
One red dot brought forth a second
And we set our world on fire

We have banished the bad
The drab, grey mass
So that all is left
Is a house and another house
And two red dots
Clinging on to each other
Everything is in the eye of the beholder
So I will just keep my eyes on you.
Until we are reduced to ashes.

It took me 1 year to make it happen
To utter the words inside my head
And present myself as a must to be read

It took me 12 months to get my act together
To turn potential into evidence
Of my poetic competence

It took me 52 weeks to have and to hold
To give myself to the rhythmical art
And become a master of the heart

It took me 365 days to tame the passions
And use them however I please
To cure heartache with lyrical remedies

It took me 8760 hours to go up and down
And invite feelings of hesitation
To thwart my blooming resignation

It took me 525.6000 minutes to realise
That admiration will never suffice
As long as I ignore my own advice

That it might take 31.536.000 seconds to make a big change
But that sometimes all it takes is a second or five
To make a difference in someone’s life

The hum, the hum, the humdrum
Time after time after time
After time
Tedious tension
Rapturous repetition
Antics, Panic, Pandering

The con, the con, the conversation
Never ever, ever never
Never
Average ambitions
Wonderfully lukewarm
Everything, anything, something

I go about things the English way
With careful consideration
And euphoric euphemisms
Ever so polite on the outside
While internal I’m feeling infernal
And the only reason why I can
Is because I’m a ****** English gentleman

Most of us don’t even manage
To become a hero, just for one day
But the Starman came, he saw, he conquered
He blew our minds
A creative centipede
A shapeshifter
A kook
A man who sold his image to the world
And showed us that heroes still exist

Charity is a curiosity
To some it seems a worthy cause
Others find it spiteful
And despite intentions that are good
I think it should be understood
That charity brings fortune to a few
While others are left to rue
Charity is a lottery
However noble it may be

She was utterly convinced
That I was a vindictive fiend
Then came the cheating spree
Which kind of made me agree

From within the safety of the train compartment
Memories, written in stone, glide by
There’s the Roman church
With the statue of the priest and his dog
And the enigmatic farm
Where llamas and ostriches stride
And that one funky albino kangaroo
And after that comes the castle
Which in my mind is inhabited
By an anachronistic loner
A degenerate nobleman
Who hides within his fortress
Hoping that the days of old come back
And after wasted grandeur comes earnest cosines
Carefree children playing football
While their grandfathers smoke
And discuss the Tour de France
And eat Boules de Berlin
Images that I have seen a hundred times before
But  the celebration of triviality
Has never been so precious to me
As these images, gliding by, through the window
Written inside my memory

Have a look at the parade of clowns
Copycats
Copying emptiness
Copying lazy sentiments
Copying spiteful opinions
Tantrum after tantrum
Rant after rant
Idiot after idiot
This is what the world has become
Mainstream muckiness
Dreams of something special
Broken by modern day mentality
Minimal input, maximal output
All aboard the hype train
All behind the laptop
Digital drama democratized
As avant-garde lags behind

The army of halfwits
Celebrating
Celebrating uniqueness
Celebrating false individualism
Celebrating blissful ignorance
Lie after lie
Mask after mask
Actor after actor
This is it
The world’s a stage
The play is badly cast
The words are meaningless
Uttered in vanity
All brain, no heart
All play, no work
All for nothing

But with the clowns to the left of me
And the halfwits to the right
I’m taking a stance against it
Against the copying
The celebration of nothingness
The false individuality
I  won’t utter my words
I won’t play my part
I will embrace the heart
I will take of my mask
And let everyone know
I won’t settle for this
I will come, see and conquer
And then lose it all
But I’ll pick sincere decline
Over false stagnation any day

Get out of my head
With your great expectations
Combined with cynical criticism
And self-righteous selective blindness
And let me get back inside my comfort zone
Where there’s not too much ado about anything

I’ve been mistaken for a conquistador
When really I just break hearts by accident
There’s no evil in my deeds
And no wickedness in my words
I’m just looking for lovers who are lost

I’ve been trying to fix the unbroken
And all I do is break what can’t be fixed
There’s no cleverness in my words
And no thoroughness in my deeds
I’m just a lost soul looking for love

So you will know me by the trail of broken hearts
And the flower in my buttonhole
And that smug look on my face
And the searchlight in my mind
Aimed at nothing in particular

Dear audience
You have been quite disappointing of late
Quiet and inanimate
Unappreciative and overrated

Gone are the days of praise
Of recommendation
Inspiration
And adoration

An abrupt end to the expansion
Of people who read my creations
And charmingly approve
Of a poet of such wit and groove

A man once told me
That I was full of myself
So arrogant and deviant

What  was I thinking?
Writing down that I’m a poet
That wants to be read

So dear audience, skip me
And do leave me be
Alone, with my profound humility

I am not a mad man
Indeed, I’m not a man
I am the Fisher King
An enigmatic fraction
Of your frantic imagination
I come and go as I please
Mixing serene silence
With immaculate impotence
Who will help me
The King and his kinsmen
The King and his people
A barren madman
In a barren world
Living on hope alone
Hope and make-belief

Yet behind the façade
Of a harmless hermit
Lies greatness and goodness
And the promise of purity
The meaning of life
And the riddance of meanness
The secret of bliss
Without ignorance
The purest pleasure
For both body and soul
For the King and his kinsmen
The King and his people
The barren madman
Changing the barren world
Into a painting-like paradise

So forget about reason
And the rules they imply
And embrace the essence
Of my delusional ravings
Look out for the invisible
Listen to silent whispers
And expose hidden meanings
I’ll be here for a while
Resting on the riverside
For I am not a mad man
I am not a man
I am not mad
I am the Fisher King
A barren beacon
In a dark, dark world

I tend to mix up do’s and don’ts
Not out of recklessness
Malice or even stupidity
It’s more a second nature
To walk into precarious situations
Ignoring well-meant advice
Setting off alarms
And wreak havoc
And instigate confusion
And set of ***** traps
To see what might happen
And I am well aware
That curiosity killed the cat
But as long as I’m still standing
I’ll do what I shouldn’t
Because life’s for the living
And living is all about mucking about
Without do’s and don’ts
And with enough curiosity
To make a grown man cheer

Our ability
To detect stupidity
Solely aimed at others

As I’m standing in the spotlight
I see look-alikes swiftly passing by
But none of them pull off
That red dress like you do

And I follow very thorough
Each and every one in my mind
But all roads lead to home
Where rooms are filled with memories

You’ve always had me caught
Between the fire and your vicious sensuality
Playful debauchery
I’d never would have thought
That everything would end up in this way

As you take me by the hand
And lead me down memory lane
A love in black and white
With hints of perfume in the air

You hold on to the leading role
Despite the fact that you’re long gone
But no-one would be able
To replace this femme fatale anyway

With passion and despair
You always lured me into petty ambiguity
Mental disparity
If only I had said
That life would stop being the same

In a world where time flies by so fast
And people slowly forget
How slow things used to be
It is a matter of time and logic
Until everyone in time
Is abiding the laws of brevity

Fleeting thoughts frantically leave the realm of intuition
As the potential of the poem comes to fantastic fruition

For old time’s sake
I read the book you gave me
I read it
And then read it again
Hoping I would find traces
Of what used to be

But all I saw were empty words
And empty memories
I read it
And then read it again
For God’s sake
I’m still trying to forget you

The first time I visited the freak show
I nearly burst into tears
It wasn’t because of the cruelty of it all
It wasn’t because of their cruel deformities
It wasn’t even guilt, not even a bit
It wasn’t about the greed from the stupid ***
Who ran the freak show

I burst into tears because I immediately understood
That the roles were reversed
And that we were the freaks
We, the cowards, who hide our deformities
And denounce our guilt as useless morality
And clutch onto greed and a hunger for entertainment
While every day we ourselves star in the freak’s parade

And the freaks themselves they are not moved
By my dreaded revelations
For them the truth was always pure and simple
Bonded by their deformities
They understand kinship and compassion
As they clutch on to each other
And the parade of freaks moves past them once more

True friends stab you in the front
And look you in the eye
While carefully twisting the knife
Hurting you just enough

With a vindictive friendliness
And vicious compassion
The gentlest way to betray
That’s what true friends are for

As long as we have empathy
Love and unity
Forces louder than words
And louder than bombs

As long as there is moonlight
And music and love and romance
We’ll face the music and dance
And frustrate them with things they don’t know

And we will use our brains to think
And our mouths to speak instead of preach
And our hands to hold the ones we love
And our thoughts for all things constructive

The city of light will always glow
The city of love will never perish
And the only answer we ought to give
Is to celebrate love for and from Paris

Solitary man
Always in good company
Of wonderful women
And Gainsbourgian groove
C’est bon chic bon genre
And rudimental rock at the same time
Crude cool
Love’s fool

Passion and percussion
Lust and lavish beats
Charming chansons
And seductive songs
Melody’s magnetic melodies
Du Jane B & Initials BB
A celebration of beauty

Monsieur Gainsbourg
T’es magnifique
Authentique
Flegmatique
Channeling what it means
To be obscenely genial
Fericiously cordial
What it means to live life
As If there’s only one day left
Toujours
Monsieur Gainsbourg

They throw bombs like I throw parties
And it’s equally hit and miss
Often a mess, never a success
And still we throw and throw

They have Molotov cocktails,
While I serve the regular kind
They’ll bomb your mind to pieces
While I serve peace of mind.

No bloodshed but ****** Mary,  
No barbarian, but Cosmopolitan
And my Irish Car Bombs and Kamikazes
Don’t bring death, but only fun

And the Paradise I’m aiming for
Contains gin instead of virgins
And Nixon doesn’t feed the flames
But keeps us frisky with its whiskey

So we’ll keep on throwing parties
And they’ll keep on throwing bombs
And we’ll keep on serving cocktails
Just to keep our conscience numb

In the long run, we are all dead
She said
So we decided to make
Tonight’s passionate embrace
About the acceptance of mortality
The celebration of fatality
The moral neutralisation of infidelity
All the more reason
To get it on
And whether wrong or right
To use this night
To be entangled
You and I

Words and associations
Forming in the darkest corners of my mind
Unstoppable processes
Result in lakes of shameless insanity
Society would frown
Like it frowns upon everything
That isn’t boring status quo
Or harmless harmony

Everything means anything
And everyone is no one at all
Identities are interchangeable
Changes are identical
My thoughts are vessels
Crashing into icebergs
My words are thoughts
Aiming for the heart

Like a spider’s web
My meaning is all over the place
Towards eternity and back
And equally as easily broken
When everything is connected
It takes one thorough aim
To make everything crumble
To make nothing at all

Like an actor about to enter his stage
The boy who would be king stood still
Motionless, with racing thoughts
And expectations to fulfill

For he knew that to be a king was to be loved
And love would turn to hate
And to be the lonely center of the crowd
That would be his fate

But the curtains fell as he put on his mask
And the doubts, they were pushed backwards
Set in motion, with smothered thoughts
The boy took his leap forward

And all were there to see him shine
And all were there to love him
And the boy, he cried and died inside
And the boy, he became king

On the outside there was joy and pride
As he paraded through the crowd
But there was dread and fury on the inside
And the noblest, purest form of doubt

He felt the fear get to him
And the nausea shook him to the core
But like an actor he should wear his mask
And like a lion he should roar

So the king, he put himself aside
And erased all that he had been
And erased all that he felt inside
And the boy was no longer to be seen

and cockerels

One word is often enough
To make a crowd go wild
Like “Fire”
Or “Bomb”
Or even a vague “Danger”
Sometimes it takes two
“Behind you”
Or “Get out”
Or perhaps a simple “My god!”

Like hens and cockerels
We are often running scared
And running away
From the smallest whisper
The vaguest rumour
And the slightest possibility
Until it is clear that the fear
Was a product of imagination

Then we’ll act as if nothing happened
A collective silence
After a collective madness
And we’ll look down
And mix in the crowd
Hide the fact that we’re aware
That our scare was worthy
Of hens and cockerels

I cherish my madness
Nurture it gently
Pour more oil
So that the flames can grow
I cater to its wishes
Let havoc wreck
And chaos endure
I need it
I feed it
For my imagination’s sake
My creativity’s at stake
Without the madness
I’m nothing
So the thoughts they jump
And bump and bruise
And go from there
To there
And there
And back again
Until order comes from chaos
And poetry from madness
And the calm after the storm
Spurs me on and on

It might not be the thing
You’ve come to associate me with
This elegant display
As I steadily move forward
Do not mistake my slowness
For laziness or worse
I take my time for things I like
As I enjoy the things that slowly pass by
Life’s too short and too fast alike
And I’m just a helpless little pawn
But do not mistake my slowness
For laziness or worse
As you come to see me
As someone who values life
And takes things as they come
Slowly and gently
Like the turtle’s steps

I have the reputation
Of being of brutish disposition
But I am the kindest soul
Taking all things slow
Carefully I tread
As I enter the room
With all the vases
And the precious porcelain
I am not the careless elephant
Who tramples all he can
Because he has the advantage
That he cannot see what lies behind him
Broken and bent
Nor feels the damage he is doing
With or without intent
Instead I am a careful soul
All too aware
Of my potential power
Of the possibility of my machinery
The damage that I may cause
The rampage that I may commence
And the carnage that I may create
I may be of brutish disposition
But I am the gentle giant
Who, with heavy steps
Gently treads amidst the gentry
Vying viciously for the vulnerable
Battling bravely for the bruised
A persistent poet trying to mend
Step by step
Word by word
Poem by poem

I guess I’ve been searching
For the meaning of life
In all the wrong ways
And in the wrong place

I delved into the deep secrets
Of lottery tickets
Hoping that a circle or three
Would reveal life’s mystery

Next up was a casino
Where I went straight for roulette
And found luck almost upon me
Yet the little  ball changed to forty-three

Then I soon discovered
That despite my hopes and prayers
That after my game of Blackjack
About life I still knew jack

So now I’ve come to realize
That life may be a lottery
But that doesn’t mean a gambling spree
Will reveal life’s meaning or mystery

The problem with children
Is that they are too easily pleased
The monochrome boredom of everyday life
Turns swiftly into a colourful extravaganza  
As the mind-numbing and the mundane
Become the mind-blowing and the magnificent

Children have the gift of fantasy
Of carelessness and of hope
They add the extra to the ordinary
With long lost magic by their side.

The problem with adults
Is that they are never easily pleased
The monochrome and monotone
Become an excessive focus
As the mind-numbing and the mundane
Blow away the mind-blowing and the magnificent

Adults sacrificed the gift of fantasy
And seek the companionship of reality
Of money and of responsibility
With long lost magic on their minds.

I’ve met too many
Manifestly two-faced people
Who’d stab you in the back
With the sincerest of smiles
To trust in the true dedication
Of man’s so called best friend

I don’t care about loyalty
Companionship bores me to death
And since I don’t need protection
I’ve solemnly decided that
The most truthful pet
Is my wicked, disinterested cat

Like moths I’m drawn
To man-made moons
To bathe in its artificial light
While the rain pours down
And the world runs down the drain

And in the end I end up
As a lonely, dancing ghost
Blinded by the fake moon
A worthy spotlight
For a would-be Gene Kelly

Every now and then
I need my dose of modesty
To have someone or something
Show me the relativity
Of human creativity

So I go and wander restlessly
Through majestic mountains
With snow-clad hats
And watery feet
And lots of nature in between

And I realise the things I’ve done
The petty man-made magic
Is static and dull and pathetic
Compared to nature’s frantic
Splendour and might

I keep on hoping
That one day I can say
That the artificial can compete
With nature’s regal feat

Though now I humbly admit
That the peaks and the crags
Crumble my effort and wit
And show me all that I lack

People took pictures of each other
Just to prove that they loved one another
Just to prove that they really existed

People take pictures of themselves
Just to prove that they’re happy with themselves
Just to prove that they’re really existing

So they filter their faults, like their Instagram photos
And they summarize all that is good in a sentence or two
And they practice their smiles as if it is worthwhile
To try to like life just to get a few likes

And the only thing that is left to be real
Are the things that are real and that people feel
They shouldn’t be sharing, thinking it’s scary
To actually share what they feel is too real

I know birds and bees
And magnificent trees
I have seen them on TV

I have climbed mountains
Despite my fear of heights
And have also mastered digital tides

There is nothing I don’t know
And nowhere I can’t go
There is nothing I need
Besides my 24/7 live feed

I have met some women
The greatest ones I’ve ever seen
Sitting inside my computer screen

And my conversations are special
Intelligent and profound
Now that I don’t need to make a sound

There is nothing left to lose
And everything left to gain
There is nothing left untold
In my digital utopian world

All I need is my invisible friend
Although I must say
That lately he has been absent
The favours he used to do
Like splitting seas
And sending plagues
And the occasional help
With burning desires
And itching sinfulness
It has decreased
Brought back to an absolute minimum
Making me wonder
If now is the time to move on
But He and I
We go back such a long time
From when I was a kid
And He a couple of thousand years old
So it’s hard to imagine
That it was just my imagination all along

When autumn comes
Trees become exhibitionists
Shaking off their clothes
Standing proud in the rain
The increasing cold
Matched by an increasing nakedness

While humans plunder wardrobes
Nature strips itself off
Back to the essence
Of what autumn means
That Fall is the fall
Of the empire of pretense

So I cannot pretend
And clutch on summer’s façade
And hide under the foliage
Of warmth and joy
I must let the rain
Wash away my pretense
And I’ll humbly lay myself bare
Amidst nature’s nakedness

Most say that Narcissus
Was punished by the Gods
The moment he fell in love
With the man in the water
Yet I don’t feel pity
But gnawing jealousy
Knowing that he
Can control the subject of his love

I will always think fondly
Of the park bench
Near the sad man’s statue
Whose beard of stone
Was sloppily painted
By a bunch of overenthusiastic pigeons

That silly park bench
Where we first kissed
And had our first public argument
About nothing at all
And at the same time
About everything we thought we had

At first our memories
Turned the grass greener
And the skies bluer
And sometimes it seemed
That sad man smiled
Though it might have been an malevolent grin

But soon it became tainted
A symbol of fleeting love
Of passion’s mortality
Its habit of swiftly disappearing
Like cagey, distrustful pigeons
And illusions fuelled by sentimentality

Now I understand the sad man
And consider his faith to be cruel
To want and crave and hope
Yet to be sentenced
His life writ in stone
Near an empty, broken bench

The pictures on my wall
They aren’t mine
Made in a previous life
By a man who used to exist
Pictures of places and faces
That shouldn’t mean anything
But glance by glance
They have replaced
The drab scenes of my own life
Familiar strangers stare at me
And I stare back
Jealous of the way
These black and white phantoms
Gracefully fill the room
While a colourful man like myself
Is doomed to play the second fiddle