3:AM Magazine

By Maarten Inghels.

The barking dogs have all gone

Boy, I’d like to know: what makes it worthwhile,
the navel-gazing quiet by the pilot light of your bathroom heater,
preaching love at every sneeze, fretting over the absurdity of
first names because today I spoke a baying albino dog in the street
that read the warts on its balls as braille and then still didn’t know
whether we were allowed to write poems about the moon.

Boy, I’d like to know: what makes it worthwhile to keep living
this life, to persist in anger and keep on writing;
letters, essays, poems, in which you recommend yourself and
revile the world, combat indifference, the days you digress.

Boy, I’d like to know: what makes it worthwhile to keep on
writing till people forget your debut when
our finger no longer serves to point at the moon but your four
readers would rather google huggable junkies.

All hope is in vain when from the farmette you warble chatter verses
into the world, compress your thoughts into a couple of status bars,
write an essay in one-hundred-and-forty characters. (I know a poet
who braids his beard into a noose – the barking dogs have all gone.)

Boy, my dream is both impossible and baleful, all the windbags are at it
in this feck-to-feck race and what remains is a ream of paper
with all that hopeless angling, but I promise:
I’ll lift up head from chest, to give the ribs some space and keep on
writing: letters, essays, poems etcetera.

That dog: do not forgive him.

Vigilant

The poet should be ever
vigilant, be especially tender.
Be willing to always fall from the sky for her,
take care the jazz loosens up his muscles.

He should be ever
vigilant, that there’s entertainment to our
heart’s content, that we can still mumble
the poet’s verses into a woman’s ear.

He should be ever
vigilant, to be weak sometimes.
So that the wind will win against his hearing, whisper
lines to him with which he’ll build a body

around his finger.
For then the poet can say: o, embrace me,
time has yet to pass me by.

If only we had a hat that could be made to fly

Everyone draws up lists at the end, also
when we, walking through the city by night, are boxers,
cry in the wind with crooked shoulders,
and have to ask where it went wrong:
the halt while we go by
never sounded so wry.

Are we swimmers on the beach,
while alertly shielding our eyes we
see the sad-eyed seals wash up,
loudly we seek our voice towards a better life.
Do we wonder whether it will all wash away
when the sea no longer knows its ebb.

Often we imitate the surly race walker
with a pamphlet of recommendations painted on
his breast, ready to intimidate anyone straying
from his path.
Where bile becomes an emotion
everyone is displeased.

If only we had a hat that could be made to fly
as if releasing in the rising storm
a balloon with a letter of complaint,
but all our limbs are on a leash.
Will we stay wary
or are we just scared?

Translations by Willem Groenewegen, 2011. http://www.willem-groenewegen.nl/

This is the first time Maarten Inghel’s has been translated into English and was only made possible by the generous support of the Flemish Literature Fund and of Patrick Peeters, and Willem Groenewegen himself.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maarten Inghels (Antwerp, 1988) writes poetry, columns and short stories for a variety of magazines and newspapers and regularly performs with his poetry and text-performances. Add to this his role as coordinator of ‘De Eenzame Uitvaart’ [the lonely funeral] in Antwerp (a project that creates and dedicates poems to people who died a lonely death). His debut collection Tumult was published in 2008 and Vigilant (De Bezige Bij Antwerpen) in 2011, both to a chorus of praise. The press calls him one of the most promising young voices.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Sunday, October 23rd, 2011.