Michael Standaert is European Managing Editor for www.critiquemagazine.com.
Michael Standaert
Working
Smoothing the plaster on the wall
In the sun, his shadow does the same
Simple ritualized faith and superstition
Their bodies help distinguish one
From the other, which is far more brutal
To the officials and the businessmen
He did bestow to me this wonderful
Instrument, an emerging sound soon
Spreading like thunder and wild laughter
Rolling over mountains, it is new to us
But we don’t care, these inconsistencies reported
Back to where they belong, getting what we deserve
This narrowness of vision a distinct advantage
And will give a good death, better than
Playing the tambourine and the lute, hardly
Time to hasten the pace to care, when given
like legal process, taking the chairs off the tables
In the first fever of passion, the night ahead
With its little lights gleaming, the spotlight
On nostalgia and bliss, all the names you can
Think of, and what of the man himself
Wearing a veil spangled with speckled jewels
And a gold mask? Monsters of quite a different sort
Have now turned you yourselves into monsters
Allowing the days to forget you, lying in the darkness
A tantalizing guess, an unwanted Christmas gift
For those wove round the adornments of secular palace
A small version of what was brought you tonight, now
Showing symptoms of bursting from a heavy blow
To the head, while the coward sleeps so soundly
Comic characters that you can imagine yourself
Absurd, and at the same time vile and unpleasant
Drifting in your dreams, in the foyer a seedy interlude
Serenaded by rumba bands, morning, noon and night
When meditative his thoughts are mush, like airborne
Balloons, burying the treasure at the same time
they are stealing it, the smallest scarcely visible veins
Bleeding out upon the canvas, they want it now
but it takes so long, it takes so long
A nice pink color
she is reproached for her lack of seriousness
about the matter, all I could say from my own
observation, was that the vast increasing universe
was already and had always been expanding away
from her, this angered her until
comic foreigners jabbered and gesticulated
making her laugh, she lit up like a blast furnace
a major surgery to her mood
I expected her to open up suddenly
but she drifted, a soft pillow with inches of dust
upon it, resorting to rhetorical devices
figures, charms and graces
the slightest rain would turn her to mud
The tempo is quickening
Unseemly was the edifice that resulted
From the street down below
The girl on the roof urged terrible vengeance
And Jack made revolutionary movements
With his tongue, beckoning her to leap
He removed the chairs from the patio
There was no lyrical, exalted mood
Nor dramatic interest from a crowd
Just Jack and the woman on the roof
Anticlockwise, as a result of this horrible junction
At a standstill, choking the cesspool up
With disastrous results a growing band of shade
Slowly crept across the patio
From the woman up above
Across the face of Jack
He became a strange foreign creature
To himself in her shadow
Constantly pinching his arm
A wonderful surprise like a sweltering morning
In the middle of winter
He discovered how stupid he was
Being lured by this vampire, this witch
Becoming like the small population of men
Who eat every eatable thing
And burn every burnable thing
On the surface
Of the earth
Thinking if there is one more person gone
That there will be less famine
Guided by a perverse principle of revision
He could not restrain himself and looked
As she leapt, trying to get home
Another bit shatters and another bit gets lost
The only fuel is olive wood
But there are no trees for miles and miles
