Arnold Jansen op de Haar poem for yesterday - congrats!

poem for my 49th birthday

the loneliness of objects

at evening in look-alike streets

the gnarled names

carved in trees

like the painted empty space

next to widows

in their twin beds

or think of the dark silence

of the musician at the wedding

the smell of dead furniture

in second-hand shops

the feeling that someone

on the shoulders of someone

is watching too over the wall

of years

anyone alive also knows

the horror of marriages

the days that come

the days that go

like sex on a sunday morning

and butter that’s good

for your cholesterol

the friend with his

all-of-a-sudden lesbian wife

then stays on nine more years

first love was there

then love was not there

then there was not love

thinking about

a face as of

a commercial the jingle

that sticks in your mind

suddenly along the

motionless river bank

my vigilant father walks

resistance is no virtue

but shows where the very own

storm is forming

I am the boy

say to those to come

that I will walk

in the dissembling present

towards the end

of the night

until the morning-red rain