Six Sixes by Peter Holm-Jensen

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‌took his breath, took his dignity, and laid his secret life to waste.

Six Sixes by

Peter Holm-Jensen


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CONTENTS

New Words …… 5 A Confession …… 6 World’s Most Beautiful Belly Button …… 8 Someone Out There for Her …… 10 The Second Man …… 12 They’re Gutting This Town …… 13

About the Author …… 15

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New Words

The black dogs are losing my scent; I hear one of them’s become a guide dog for the blind man down the street. I’ve started dreaming at night. In the old story (the only one he ever wrote) the idealist worked in the mortuary, prettifying corpses with chemicals. He worked with nervous attention to detail and afterwards sank into torpid reverie: a eunuch daydreamer on a stingy island. But this is real life, the wind is blowing the dust off my desk, and the island is budding with new words and images. I’ll drink from a different cup; I’ll run through any season’s weather.

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A Confession

My window gave on the river that wound through the town; I often stood watching it carry its grimy load seaward. Sometimes a kind of mental mist stole over me like a shiver and made me feel like a stranger in my own body. As evening fell, my reflection appeared in the window, slowly replacing the river; I examined my face (those empty unblinking eyes, those straight lips), and the harder I looked the harder it was to feel that it was mine; it seemed like a thing among things, untenanted. At times I even became afraid that my soul would detach itself altogether from my body and float away. This feeling usually came at dusk, and it was to escape it that I went out and did the things I did, that I summoned violence out of soul and body. To hurt or be hurt made me feel real; I wasn’t myself, I was nothing, I was a wordless thing in a cage, a beast, a caged beast, how am I supposed to feel responsible, to be judged, it’s the caged beast’s nature to break his cage, you

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don’t know what it is to be a nothing, to be a caged beast.

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World’s Most Beautiful Belly Button At night a hundred images of pretty women hovered in his mind, their bodies like a hundred dewy roses: women he had seen on the streets, in a store, turning a corner, boarding a train paraded through his secret self as his sex stretched in the night, seeking somewhere to put itself. A downy nape of neck, a milky way of freckles on a brown chest. Was it Love or Lust that visited him as he turned in bed, was it coy Bethlehem or brazen Babylon looking down on him? He asked Magic to unlock his loneliness and grant him a smooth open body. One day he met a girl who told him she had the world’s most beautiful belly button; her belly button she said was like the inside of a tiny seashell, did he want to see it? What he wanted was to be alone with this information, to guard these words spoken by the lips of a real girl that would have been enough to keep his fantasies churning for days, but she pulled him into a grove and showed him her tiny swirl and more besides, showed him her deep budding sixsentences.blogspot.com

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mysteries, took his breath, took his dignity, and laid his secret life to waste.

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Someone Out There for Her

She knew there was someone out there for her, someone just like her, and that she would find that someone eventually, but they told her that to find him she would have to go out and do things, make friends, maybe even travel, and she thought that if she went out and did these things, she might be taken out of herself, become a different person, and then she wouldn’t know what kind of someone she wanted because she wouldn’t know who she herself was, she would be a different person, and if then she met him, how would she know it was him? If she met him now, if he came to her door, or if he picked up her keys when she dropped them on the street, today, on the bridge, she would know, they would both instantly know, they would recognize it in each other’s eyes, that thing that made them different from the others, the thing the others couldn’t understand. But if she went out and did all those things that all the others did, she might become like them, and if she was like all the others, then any one of them would do and sixsentences.blogspot.com

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there would be no one special meant only for her. But, she thought, I’ve stayed here alone for so long my eyes look empty in the mirror, I can’t fill out my own eyes, I’m losing my eyes; and why else would I long for him if not to find my eyes? Maybe he’s living in the same way, thinking these thoughts at this moment, somewhere in this city, the one among millions, and maybe he too feels it’s getting late, that if he doesn’t find me soon it will be too late, he’ll have lost his eyes too and won’t be able to see them in mine if he sees me, and then maybe if we do meet we’ll think one another just another of the millions, just one of the others, and he’ll hand me my keys and give me a blank look and I’ll mumble thanks and we’ll go our opposite ways across the bridge over the dirty water, thinking the same thoughts as each other. Then we’ll both have to choose between going out or dying inside, we’ll be forced to give up the idea of each other, our idea of ourselves in each other, our idea of ourselves, and we’ll finally have to become like the others, we’ll lose the only beautiful thing in the world and disperse into the others, become like the dirty water, become like fish.

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The Second Man

You, who’ve watched me through my own eyes all my life: my brother, my enemy. You, standing on some abstract bank, witnessing: I imagined you tut-tutting at my histrionics, accusing me by your very presence of being incapable of reform, back there where I was armed and mad and ready to destroy you if it killed me, when I called you a coward and tried to scream you out of your silence. But you followed me. You live on behind the names I give you, like all the women I’ve berated myself for not winning and all the men who reached the courts of symmetry before me. On calm days I know we’re one but separate, I let you work out our destiny through me; on the happiest days I even see in you my perfect reflection, my self fulfilled through no move of my own. But last night I drank alone in a locked room, and today I belong back there where I came from, I don’t know why I’ve come all this way, I don’t know who you are; today I hate you, you who turn me against myself. sixsentences.blogspot.com

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They’re Gutting This Town

They’re gutting this town. A new corporation clad in steel and glass is moving in, buying up land and buildings, opening up the streets and making holes down to the underworld beneath our feet, where men in overalls are replacing the tangled old intestines, which not so long ago conveyed the future, with sleek new cables and pipes; they’re tearing out the old shops’ entrails and wiping all their different faces off – from the somber old jewelry facades to the smirks of hip young storefronts. On my street they’re demolishing a block of flats that was once appallingly modern, and today when the men climbed off their machines and swaggered home they left a wall that only last month was shared by four flats on either side. I can see it from my window now, with its patchwork of paint and wallpaper, even a mirror that still hangs from it; I can see it struggling to trace the shape of the structure it no longer occupies and to bear witness to the lives that have moved elsewhere. Old pipes stick out from its sides, dripping their last digestive juices onto the 13

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rubble below; past afternoons still cling to it, the smoke and dinners of many years, the pinch of nails, the knocks of annoyed neighbours, the sweet smell of babies, the pungent smell of the beds of adolescents. I’m waiting to see what forms the new entrails, faces, juices and smells will take under their new coat of blue glass and silvery steel: how will they ooze down through the new cracks, how will they assert themselves now, how will they outlast the image this time?

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Holm-Jensen is an ĂŠmigrĂŠ living in the UK. Full 6S Catalog: http://sixsentences.blogspot.com/search?q=peter+holm+jensen

Website: notesfromaroom.wordpress.com

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