window-cleaner sees paintings
Window-Cleaner
sees paintings MENNO WIGMAN Selected & translated by
David Colmer
Introduction by Francis Jones
2016
Published by Arc Publications, Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK www.arcpublications.co.uk Original poems copyright © Menno Wigman & Uitgeverij Prometheus, Amsterdam 2016 Translation copyright © David Colmer 2016 Introduction copyright © Francis Jones 2016 Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications 2016 978 1910345 61 0 (pbk) 978 1910345 62 7 (hbk) 978 1910345 63 4 (ebook) Acknowledgements The poems selected for this edition first appeared in the following publications from Prometheus / Bert Bakker Publishers: ’s Zomers stinken alle steden (1997), Zwart als kaviaar (2001), Dit is mijn dag (2004), De wereld bij avond (2006), De droefenis van copyrettes (2009), Mijn naam is Legioen (2012) and Slordig met geluk (2016). Arc Publications is grateful to Prometheus / Bert Bakker for permission to reproduce the poems in the original Dutch. Earlier versions of some of these translations were published in the magazines Cordite, Dutch, Island, Little Star, The Low Countries and Modern Poetry in Translation. Design by Tony Ward Printed in Great Britain by T. J. International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall Cover design by Tony Ward & Ben Styles Cover photograph © Tony Ward This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications.
This book was published with the support of the Dutch Foundation for Literature
Arc Publications ‘Visible Poets’ series Series Editor: Jean Boase-Beier
CONTENTS
Introduction / 7 Translator’s Preface / 14 from ’s Zomers stinken alle steden (1997) 18 / Jeunesse dorée • Jeunesse dorée / 19 20 / Bijna dertig • Almost Thirty / 21 22 / Bloedgang • Blood-beat 23 24 / Laura • Laura / 25 26 / Semper Eadem • Semper Eadem / 27 from Zwart als kaviaar (2001) 28 / Misverstand • Misunderstanding / 29 30 / Grootsteeds • Big-City / 31 32 / Leerplicht • Compulsory Education / 33 from Dit is mijn dag (2004) 34 / Telefunken • Telefunken / 35 36 / Hotelnacht • Hotel Night / 37 38 / Dit niet • Not This / 39 40 / Tot besluit • In Conclusion / 41 42 / Bij de gemeentekist van • Beside Mrs P.’s Council mevrouw P. Coffin / 43 44 / Levensloop • Growing Up / 45 from De wereld bij avond (2006) 46 / Vuilstort • Rubbish Dump / 47 48 / Zwembad Den Dolder • Institution Swimming Pool / 49 50 / Glazenwasser ziet • Window-cleaner Sees schilderijen Paintings / 51 from De droefenis van copyrettes (2009) 52 / Tot mijn pik • To My Dick / 53 54 / Lelijk zijn we • We Are Ugly / 55 56 / Het is dat men de • Because You Know That straten kent Part of Town / 57
from Mijn naam is Legioen (2012) 58 / Aan een man in de • To a Man in the supermarkt Supermarket / 59 60 / Kamer 421 • Room 421 / 61 62 / En dorpen waren er, • There Were Towns, vernielingen Vandalism / 63 64 / Openbaring in de H&M • Revelation in H&M / 65 66 / Tuincentrum Osdorp • Sunday, Garden Centre / 67 68 / Oud-West • Old West / 69 70 / Soms voel je bijna dat • There’s Times You Almost je leeft Feel Alive / 71 72 / De maan is onder… • The moon has left the sky… / 73 74 / Zomeroproer • Summer Riot / 75 76 / Hitlermüde • Sick of Hitler / 77 78 / Natte woorden • Wet Words / 79 80 / Promesse de bonheur • Promesse de bonheur / 81 82 / De weg van alle boeken • The Way of All Books / 83 from Slordig met geluk (2016) 84 / Herostratos • Herostratos / 85 86 / Rien ne va plus • Rien ne va plus / 87 88 / Aarde, wees niet streng • Earth, Don’t Be Hard / 89 90 / Beddendood • Bed Death / 91 92 / Toen ik begon te schrijven • When I Started Writing / 93 94 / Pijn • Pain / 95 96 / Tot de bodem • To the Bottom / 97 98 / Afgeblauwd • Unblued / 99 100 / Tegen de natuur • Against Nature / 101 102 / Rouw en ruzie • Grief and Grievance / 103 104 / Vandaag is iedereen • Everyone Is Beautiful mooi Today / 105 Notes / 107 Biographical Notes / 108
Post-punk drummer, dark romantic, dandy of disillusion? The poetry of Menno Wigman
“Far and away the best poet of his generation”.1 This was the reaction of fellow Dutch poet Ingmar Heytze to Menno Wigman’s 1997 debut volume, s’ Zomers stinken alle steden (All Cities Stink in Summer). The recognition has continued. Wigman’s second collection, Zwart als kaviaar (Black as Caviar), won him the Netherlands’ coveted Jan Campert Poetry Prize in 2001. Now, five more collections have followed, plus a two-year tenure as City Poet for Central Amsterdam, and the 2015 triennial A. Roland Holst prize for his poetic oeuvre. Menno Wigman’s reputation is assured as one of the Netherlands’ leading poets. And as perhaps his country’s most exciting poet in terms of form: “a craftsman who knows what he wants”, in the words of poet Alfred Schaffer. There’s a back-story to this. It’s no coincidence that Wigman, the master of pulsing, post-modern poetic rhythms, was a drummer in a late-70s teenage punk band. Still in his teens, he also edited a zine about music and antiestablishment politics. Here he not only wrote most of the articles, but also increasingly included his own poems. And several self-published collections followed before his work appeared with leading Amsterdam literary publisher Bert Bakker in 1997. Wigman’s vision, especially in his earlier poems, may seem post-punk – harsh but stylish, modern, urban. His work, however, is rooted in a longer and wider poetic tradition. He has published several anthologies of Dutch poetry, and in poems and interviews he references twentiethcentury master poets Hendrik Marsman and J. Slauerhoff. The latter, in fact, supplied the epigraph for ‘Rien ne va plus’ in this English-language collection. Moreover, Wigman has translated several volumes of nineteenth- and twentieth1
Translations from Dutch reviews are mine. (FJ)
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century poetry: Rainer Maria Rilke, Leopold Andrian and Else Lasker-Schüler from German. Plus, tellingly for his own work, Charles Baudelaire and Gérard de Nerval from French. In 1998 he also published a collection of French decadent poetry: Wees altijd dronken! (Always be drunk!). In a 2001 interview, Eric Brus asked Wigman if he would call himself a romantic decadent. Perhaps – but more a “dark romantic” in the nineteenth-century sense, came the reply: I’ve long been fascinated by 19th-century French ‘decadent’ poets, like Jean Lorrain, Jules Laforgue and especially Charles Baudelaire. […] I think I have a similar feeling about the present day as the French poets then: the feeling of living in an end-time. […] It’s a faster time than ever, but not a very rich one. And yet: there’s a huge variety of pleasures available everywhere, and that’s not easy to dodge. A lot of my poems are about pleasure and its ultimate consequences. The glass is drained, and what are you left with? […] You can also see it as a battle against the drudgery that life’s always threatening to become.
Baudelaire was also known as a dandy. For Baudelaire, dandyism was not just the pursuit of perfection, but also “the burning desire to create a personal form of originality”, to “combat and destroy triviality”.2 In a similar sense, Wigman was called “the dandy of disillusion” by Erik Jan Harmens, reviewing Wigman’s 2009 collection De droefenis van copyrettes (The Melancholy of Copy Centres). I’m not totally comfortable with the dandy label. Baudelaire notwithstanding, it has a nuance of unseriousness – and Wigman’s work is far from unserious. Wigman is, however, a perfectionist. In a 2004 interview with Annette van den Bosch, he reported that he typically produces one to two couplets in a writing session, and works for months – even up to a year – on one poem. And combating the trivial is one 2
The Painter of Modern Life (1863), tr. P. E. Charvet.
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of Wigman’s poetic purposes. Or rather, trying to combat the tragic of the commonplace, by exposing it to the reader’s gaze – though he knows full well he cannot destroy it. In this he seems closer to Baudelaire the dissectionist of the human state than to Baudelaire the detached dandy. So, on the one hand, Wigman calls out the truly trivial, such as the “kilograms / of lifeless hours” spent watching TV in ‘Telefunken’. On the other hand, he doesn’t flinch from the everyday awfulness of an aging mother losing her mind in ‘Room 421’, or a dying father losing his body in ‘Growing Up’. When Wigman’s first mainstream volume appeared, in 1997, he had just turned thirty. Though its poems have a young person’s directness, these are no juvenilia. They already have a tone of ennui, of spleen – as in ‘Laura’, where love only comes true when the lover is absent. In the recent poem ‘When I Started Writing’, he hints at how a cluster of tough life events in the mid-1990s, while he was writing his mainstream debut volume, gave this volume an earnestness of purpose: … Death was tugging at the door of my car and I woke with a start, defenceless in a white ward. That was when I kicked Beauty off my lap and got a grim second wind and played my opening chord.
This earnestness of purpose, coupled with punchy accessibility of style, continued to power the collections that followed. Wigman is unafraid to tackle the grimmer sides of life. Yet, however unflinching his gaze may be, he rarely writes grim poems. A key reason is their wryness of tone, as in his vision of a drowned Holland after global warming: … a village church floats through the water, fish make their homes in city squares, a wet grey sea from Utrecht to The Hague.
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Instead, what strikes the reader of his poems most is their incisive originality of insight – in Harmens’s words, the “fresh, but raw wind” that Wigman brings to contemporary poetry. Typically, the viewpoint is first-person, that of the ‘implied poet’. That is, the poet as protagonist in the poem’s drama, whose persona and history may or may not overlap with the poet who actually wrote the poem. As for what the protagonist looks at, a key theme is the inevitability of aging (‘To my Dick’) and death (‘To the Bottom’) – one of poetry’s oldest topics, stretching back to Gilgamesh and beyond. But Wigman’s themes are wider than this, spanning the spectrum of the modern, urban human condition. New love (‘Promesse de Bonheur’), for instance, amid the shades of old loves (‘BigCity’). Chronic backache (‘Pain’). Panic attacks (‘Revelation in H&M’). Religion and godlessness in a multicultural society (‘Old West’). Mass shootings (‘Herostratos’). Copy centres (‘In Conclusion’) and clapped-out TVs (‘Telefunken’). And poetry-writing itself (‘Misunderstanding’, ‘The Way of All Books’) In all these poems there is a subtle but strong sense of social commitment. This is not a call for action, but a simple human sympathy for the lonely or the alienated, the drunk or the aging. This is shown most strongly in the ‘Lonely Funeral’ orations (see Translator’s Preface and Notes). These are moving precisely because they break with the pious conventions of funeral poems: … Call it tragedy, rhythm, rhyme – time, that dirty carnivore, ensures an end that stinks. But she’s asleep at last, asleep. So cover her up, make sure her weary feet don’t need to tread the streets again. Turning from content to sound, what strikes the Dutch reader is the energetic, musical force of Wigman’s verse – a
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force that David Colmer has rightly, and successfully, striven to recreate in his English translations. This concern with sound patterns – that is, poetic form – is quite unusual in modern Dutch poetry. Conventional twenty-first-century free verse this isn’t. It is good for reading out loud, though, and fits well with the poems’ accessible diction. But Wigman does not see himself as a performance poet. As he told Van den Bosch, “I judge a poet first and foremost on their text, and only afterwards on their performance”. His poems’ sound, in fact, is as carefully crafted as their content. And as with his content, Wigman does not follow traditional sound forms, but references, riffs and reshapes them. Crucial to this musical force is Wigman’s use of rhythm. “You write poetry with a drum-kit in your head”, a fellow poet once told him. “I’m obsessed with metre”, he said to Van den Bosch – “good use of metre has a suction effect, it drags the reader through the poem, as it were.” Sometimes Wigman’s lines are regular, but they just as often vary an underlying metric theme, as in this iambic tetrameterpentameter alternation: Gelukkig, ze is weg. Nu zal ze helemaal en meer nog dan ze denkt de mijne zijn. Nu zal ze nogmaals
Colmer’s translations give a similar mix of theme and variations – rather than a line-by-line replication, which would be both unnecessary and fiendishly difficult to write. Thus Colmer’s English versions of these lines are just as strongly iambic, but with different line-lengths than the Dutch: Thank God, she’s gone. Now she’s completely mine, more so than she could ever guess, and it’s a certainty
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In terms of verse form, Wigman’s 14-15 line poems, complete with ‘volta’, or sudden twist of sense, echo the sonnets of his nineteenth-century predecessors: ‘To my Dick’, for instance. Occasionally, he references more complex forms. Thus ‘Hotel Night’ is a pantoum, where one verse’s lines 2 and 4 become the next verse’s lines 1 and 3. Sonnets are structured by rhyme. Wigman’s poems, however, do not so much use rhyme-schemes as allude to them with halfrhymes and assonance, and occasionally with full rhymes. Colman’s English versions often make similar allusions. In ‘Growing Up’, for instance, both the Dutch and English make similar use of half-rhyme: het huis waar ik voor vriendschap heb bedankt. Maar nu mijn vader aan vijf slangen hangt the house whose warmth and friendship I refused. But now my father’s plugged into five tubes
Other binding forces in Wigman’s verse, and in Colmer’s translations, are alliteration and internal rhyme. In the lines just quoted, the Dutch v- and -ang- motifs are reflected in the English f- and -ou- motifs. Translators of poems, especially formally-crafted poems like Wigman’s, inevitably have to navigate between the twin pulls of recreating the original’s poetic form and its semantic meanings. There is no best course to take: translators’ preferences differ. Colmer’s preference, as he explains in his preface, is to try to convey both, but to avoid going all out for rhythm if that means warping the meaning. He believes, however, in using other means to get poetic effects across: replacing rhythm with vowel-rhyme, for example. A challenge for all translators is how to convey real-world items, names and concepts specific to the original writer’s home world. If translated literally, these risk meaning little to the translation’s reader. But, unlike in prose, the
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tight space of a poetic line leaves no room for explaining. Hence translating creatively is the only way to keep the all-important allusions and nuances. At this, Colmer is the master. To give just one example, from ‘Big-City’: met Sander sliep ze in Berlijn, met Jean, met Stein… she slept with Sander in Berlin, with Rick, with Jim…
If Colmer had simply kept “Jean” and “Stein”, an English reader might have stopped short to work out their gender. Transforming them to “Rick” and “Jim” makes this clear, thus keeping the reading flow. It also gives a triple -i- vowelrhyme to echo Wigman’s full rhyme between “Berlijn” and “Stein”. What’s important when translating poetry is not to slavishly reproduce surface semantics. It is to recreate poetic meaning. That involves analysing, or simply sensing, the poet’s own mix of semantics, allusion and sound – and then remixing it with new ingredients from a new language. Wigman’s poetry is a powerful brew in Dutch. Remixed in Colmer’s English, it’s heady stuff too. Francis R. Jones Northumberland, July 2016
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TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
I first encountered Menno Wigman at Amsterdam poetry venues some fifteen years ago. He stood out not just because of his rhythmic, rich poetry, but also because of his unrestrained contemporary themes and the intensity with which he read: a rock ’n roll poet whose almost nineteenthcentury sensibilities extended to his dandyish persona. It was gripping poetry that deserved an international audience and I was immediately drawn to the challenge of trying to translate it, but that was a common reaction from both professional and amateur translators and I was too busy with other projects to try to muscle my way into the queue. Some ten years later, though, I was pleased to be asked to translate one of his poems (“Earth, Don’t Be Hard”) for a Dutch documentary about the Lonely Funeral project, in which poets attend the council funerals of people who have died destitute and alone, and read a poem they have written for them at their graveside. Discussion of the translation with the poet was harmonious, the results were encouraging, and I began translating more of Wigman’s work and placing the translations in magazines around the world. I translated some poems off my own bat and was commissioned by magazine editors to do others, and gradually, over a couple of years, the material began to build up and I saw the germ of this collection forming. Wigman’s poems are extremely difficult to translate, but not at the initial, interpretative stage. Whether the poems are autobiographical, fictionalised or inhabiting other characters, they have a welcoming lucidity and pose relatively few semantic problems. I only had a handful of preliminary questions and several of those were related to ambiguities, Dutch words that could be translated as two distinct things with no English word that united the different meanings: avonddienst, for instance, in the poem ‘Summer Riot’, which could be either a religious service held
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in the evening or an evening shift in a place of employment. I automatically read it as the former, but doubt crept in. The poet provided confirmation – another word with potential religious ambiguity. The translation problems came with the attempt to render Wigman’s artistry, the beauty of his language, trying to emulate his technical mastery and his ability to use poetic form to make apparently straightforward content deepen with empathy, emotion and, sometimes, humour. Fellow Amsterdam poet F. Starik (organiser of the Lonely Funerals) has described Wigman as “the poet with the highest density of instant classics” and this is more than apt, as Wigman has an uncanny ability to produce poems that seem as if they have always existed. When you read them the first time they feel like much-loved, much-anthologised standards. Wow, how have I missed this one all these years? If a poet is guided by sound and picks out meaning according to the soundscape he is trying to create, the translator inevitably sets to work in reverse, trudging behind meaning and seeing the sound, the essence of the poetry, fall away more and more with each step. Trying to claw it back requires flexibility, luck and inspiration, but also a willingness to deviate slightly from the path laid down by the original. A bilingual edition lays those deviations bare, but I hope the more open-minded readers agree that the liberties I’ve taken are justified by the poetry that results, and, as far as the literalists are concerned, I can only wish them happy hunting. Wigman’s poetry is almost always metrical and, like most Dutch metrical poetry, highly regular. Many of the poems are rich with alliteration and assonance. Although he seldom works with fixed rhyming patterns, he often uses end rhyme (full or half) at crucial points. Making the metre of the translations slightly looser has allowed me to
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stick more closely to the content while avoiding unnatural and jarring language or passages where the translation is simply marking time or worse. Although it was not always possible to reproduce specific rhymes or even key couplets, I have compensated where possible with internal rhyme or alternative patterns, sometimes over a longer distance. Besides Wigman himself, I would like to thank Judith Wilkinson, who provided valuable feedback on earlier versions of a number of these translations, Jean Boase-Beier for the careful and challenging editing and P. C. Evans for his advice and encouragement. Any weaknesses in the translations are all my own work. David Colmer
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window-cleaner sees paintings
Jeunesse dorée
Ik zag de grootste geesten van mijn generatie bloeden voor een opstand die niet kwam. Ik zag ze dromen tussen boekomslagen en ontwaken in de hel van tweeëntwintig steden, heilloos als het uitgehakte hart van Rotterdam. Ik zag ze zweren bij een nieuwe dronkenschap en dansen op de bodem van de nacht. Ik zag ze huilen om de ossen in de trams en bidden tussen twee maal honderd watt. Ik zag ze lijden aan een ongevraagd talent en spreken met gejaagde stem: – was alles al gezegd, nog niet door hen. Ze waren laat. Aan geen belofte werd voldaan. De steden blonken zwart als kaviaar.
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Jeunesse Dorée
I saw the best minds of my generation bleeding for revolts that didn’t come. I saw them dreaming between the covers of books and waking in a twenty-two-town hell, ill-omened as the excised heart of Rotterdam. I saw them swearing by a newfound drunkenness and dancing on the sea-bed of the night. I saw them weeping for the cattle in the trams and praying under bright and glaring lights. I saw them suffering from unrequired talent and speaking in agitated voices – if it had all been said before, then not by them. They came too late. Their promise unredeemed. The cities gleamed as black as caviar.
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Bijna dertig
Nee, die juli bracht bepaald geen revolutie in mijn bed. Hoe de zomer zich ook gaf, het leek te laat om nog een nieuwe hartstocht op te lopen. Dus dook ik onder voor het zwermen van de lust en heulde vrolijk met de slaap. Bijna dertig, dacht ik, wordt mij toch iets helder. En ik zag hoe alle parken overbloeiden, hoe de hitte uit de hemel sloeg, hoe de horde joeg op ander bloed en zich vergrijpen wilde aan een nieuwe levensgloed. En ik zag af. Versliep de revolutie in mijn bed. Vergat alvast te leven.
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Almost Thirty
July had come and still no revolution in my bed. No matter how the summer gave itself, it seemed too late for me to still contract another passion. So underground I went, hiding from the swarms of lust, collaborating cheerfully with sleep. I’m almost thirty, I thought, and finally I’ve worked it out. I saw the parks all overflowering, the heat beating from the glaring sky, the coursing horde’s pursuit of blood and how they longed to violate the blush of life. And I gave in. Slept through the revolution in my bed, forgetting that I had a life to live.
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Bloedgang
Hier liet ik kevers in mijn handen kruipen, stak ze dood en kistte ze in doosjes zonder lucifers. De hele zomer was het oorlog, was het razen, was het jagen in een ramkoers door de wilde geuren van mijn tuin. Waar heesters mij vereerden als een heerser en de zon mijn kruin aanbad, zag ik door mijn wimpers merels, wilgen en wolken krimpen voor mijn blik. En langer dan het middaglicht was ik de prins van kikkers, vlinders en libellen, de Mengele van machteloze mieren, de Caligula van opgebaarde kevers. Dezelfde tuin. Hetzelfde huis. De boom van mijn skelet is uitgegroeid, mijn rijk gekrompen, mijn macht verjaard. Achter de tralies van mijn wimpers tel ik kevers zonder kruizen en betreed mijn oude huid. Met een bloedgang ben ik thuis.
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Blood-beat
This is where I captured beetles, made them scuttle in my hands, then stabbed them dead and coffined them in boxes rid of matches. All summer it was war, a rampant hunting headlong through the herby perfume of my garden. Shrubs and hedges venerated me, I was their overlord and sunlight warmed my crown in adoration, blackbirds, willows, clouds all shrank before my lash-veiled gaze. And longer than the midday sun, I was the prince of spiders, frogs and dragonflies, a Mengele to hosts of helpless ants, Caligula to beetles placed on biers. Back in the garden. Back at the house. The tree of bones inside me’s fully grown, my realm has shrunk, my power has expired. Behind the bars of my lashes I count the beetles without crosses and enter my old skin. In a blood-beat I’ve come home.
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Laura
Gelukkig, ze is weg. Nu zal ze helemaal en meer nog dan ze denkt de mijne zijn. Nu zal ze nogmaals, naakt en vol en onbeschaamd, voor mijn gesloten ogen staan. En zwanger van haar geuren speel ik snel haar glimlach af en spits me op haar gulle dijen, haar huid sneeuwt zachtjes op mijn witte doek, ze krijgt al stem, ze fleemt, ze vloekt, en dan, de laatste still, vang ik haar schoot en sneeuw haar uit. Gelukkig, ze is weg. Maar ik, ik ben haar hond, ik kwispel als zij komt. Meer nog dan ze denkt.
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Laura
Thank God, she’s gone. Now she’s completely mine, more so than she could ever guess, and it’s a certainty that she’ll return to stand here naked, full and unashamed before the eyes I’ve closed. And pregnant with her scent, I fast-forward her smile to get up to her lavish thighs, her skin snows softly on my silver screen, she finds a voice to coax, to curse, and then, the final still, I make her mine and snow her away. Thank God, she’s gone. But me, I’m her dog, I roll over when she comes. More than she could guess.
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Semper Eadem
Er wonen hoeren in je hoofd wanneer je dertig wordt. Een uur van scherp genot weegt zwaarder dan een woord. En toch, je ligt steeds dieper in je ongewassen graf te denken wie zij was en wie hier na haar sliepen. Waar blijft het staren en verbazen na een nacht van nieuw genot? Er wonen hoeren in je hoofd wanneer je dertig wordt.
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Semper Eadem
There are whores in your head when you turn thirty. An hour of keen delight outweighs each word you say. But sinking ever deeper into your unwashed grave you think of who she was and who has slept here since. What happened to the wide-eyed awe of mornings after new delight? There are whores in your head when you turn thirty.
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