Poem by the Danish writer Peter Laugesen

What I want to write about

WHAT I want to write about

is small things to such an extent

that there aren’t any words for it

Words

only exist for things that are so big

that they don’t mean anything

Those on the other hand there are plenty of

But the small things what are they called

and how can I express them

It’s not nature I’m talking about

but our life

as it is

Nature is itself writing it can be read

The weather can be read

like a poem

It is not prose it is rhythm

the almanack narrates

It is poetry

But it’s not that I want to write about

It’s the small things

there aren’t any words for

or that all words are for since all words come

from small things from

them once having been big and

from everything turning opposite

that we grow smaller

The plan is for the umpteenth time

for me to combine all of it into ONE

LONG POEM for that’s what after all it

is

and not to separate it out

As long as it takes place it is like that but until now

it’s always fallen apart more and more

into some other typography

and it may well be

that’ll happen again

But you are to know that that’s not how it is

it’s ONE LONG POEM

and it says all sorts of things

in its own way

which is not different

and can’t be so

I don’t want to be intoxicated any more

or prevent anyone from anything

just be the person I am when I’m not influenced by anything else

than all that I once like everyone else then at that age

believed was death itself that sad bourgeois boredom

I now know that’s a lie and it was also a lie then

I now know there’s no way round

living one’s life

I’ve learnt from the old ones

as they are in my self

I have discovered them

there where they’re hiding

in thoughts there where they’re sitting

waiting for someone to hear

what they’re whispering inside beneath the scream

I have found them and listened to them

both the one and the other

and far from all of them

There are lots more in me

many I haven’t met yet

because I’ve looked the other way

and called it forwards

but they’re there

All of a sudden they’re sitting inside me writing

and I don’t know who they are

because they’re me and I don’t know who I myself am

They are a tired and yawning Good Friday

and the weather’s changing wildly here on the edge of the valley

I am everyone and none of them

know who I am and I don’t know myself

It’s like coming out on the other side with something intact

that despite everything hasn’t been smashed to pieces

And without words

and with far too many words

for nothing

and everything

Magazines newspapers periodicals books Easter again

Time says boo! and two unknown researchers have made fusion

with a school chemistry set

in a glass of salt water

Scepticism among the clever that would upset everything for Iran

and Norway

And natural gas pump it back into the earth again the balloon

is limp

Blackbirds on the lawn

The clouds are drifting and you look up through the holes between them

Perhaps

you can see

the eyes of the small meteorological cameras in the sky-blue depths

the small eyes in the cells the fight of the white blood corpuscles

in the wounds

the power plant of the lungs and pipelines of the heart station

The small things

for language

All the words that fall out it’s them now

that do not reach the door and

them that are kicked out with their head

in the silver cord

And somewhere else entirely they collect a new language for themselves

that is the expelled thing itself

that is the satan of the myth

falling in space like Michelangelo’s figures on the ceiling

where the light-rays of the street lamp pass through the open door

at night

and thoughts constantly circle round the sore point

where the body right now is being assembled

The rain begins

Use the images of the body

the wind at the window

the curtain and the papers on the wall

The skin

It’s not a question of evil or good

or beautiful and ugly

Write through

like the small devils in the blood and the doctors’ forceps and swab

Fly on rhetorical wind

It won’t come any nearer

What’s done is past the undone future

It’s not names but words

Keys

Open doors

Spacious time

Timely space

in the pictures of the body when they become words and the words of the body when they become pictures.