Tuesday 30 October 2012

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.

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