Believing In Men Like Santa And God

Picture by me. 

This morning the heavens turned into a dark emerald and a bright strike of light escaped from the sun, hiding behind a few clouds. Then hailstones, large as marbles, began to fall in our garden. The light was out of this world and the hailstones sparkled, and it was all so beautiful, almost as if a supernatural being was planning it. We walked outside with our girls, and we began to dance in our garden. We spun in circles, holding hands, bare feet, while the hailstones kept falling, turning the world into a white psychosomatic swamp.
Then we spoke about our friend M. who’s eighteen and dying of cancer. We were just dancing there, raising our arms to the sky, and asking the universe to have compassion for M.
Doubtless we were praying in our own way.
I felt the same kind of happiness and sadness this morning when we were dancing there, which I sometimes experienced when I was a child thinking of life as something enduring. When I still believed in magical men that brought me presents or eternity, like Santa and God.

I've Got The Door In My Suitcase

My dream looked something like this. 

I gazed outside my attic window and noticed that above the houses of Amsterdam, animals that looked like artificial dinosaurs hung stationary in the sky. Some of them had elongated necks and tails, others just protuberant bodies with heavy legs, that dangled above the trees. The creatures had dark colors, like purple and shadowy red. The sky grew darker and I thought the end of times began. Suddenly a bright streak of light fractured the sky. I saw a door in the heavens, made of clouds. While all the artificial animals started to move in circles, the door in the sky opened like a jaw and swallowed the earth. For some reason my house was still there, but outside my window was nothing but a thick blackness. I stretched my arms out of the window and touched the blackness, it felt like a never-ending emptiness.
I turned around and noticed my room was gone, changed into another place. In the middle of a hallway sat my mother on a throne, dressed in black old-fashioned clothes. A dress made of black velvet; a hat that looked like a bag. I looked at her face and noticed she was blind. I left the room and walked into another room. There was a man with a suitcase, who asked me or I knew a way out of this place.

"I’m lost myself," I said.

The man smiled at me mysteriously and his face came very close to mine when he said "I’ve got the door in my suitcase."

I tried to follow the man with the door in the suitcase but the faster I walked the further he went. I decided to go back to the room with the throne with my mother on it, but behind me was nothing but a blooming forest.
Suddenly I recognized the gardens of my youth. The trees surrounded me with white blossoms. I felt a huge happiness filling my mind. I had never seen the gardens so vivid and bright. I looked for the house where I was born, but the house was not there. Under one of the trees I saw the suitcase of the man and I wondered if the door to the house where I was born was inside it. I just stood there, wondering how another world behind a door could fit in that suitcase. After some time, I walked to the suitcase and opened it. Now the cover of the suitcase seemed to be a door itself, and behind it was my attic room. I walked inside and noticed that the dinosaurs were still soaring through the sky.

This flash was published in print magazine Sleeping Fish.

A Man Who Had Lost His Head

Picture by me. 

This morning my husband told me his dream. First he had been lost in a building. Next he lost his head in that building. There he was, a man who had lost his head, lost in a building.

Capitulate When I Arrive Into Your Bright Green Haunt

The other day I was thinking about T., and why he was murdered in Amsterdam some years ago. Vivid memories are haunting me lately. My life is a container of things that are no longer here. Like the night in this poem, vanished:

Capitulate When I Arrive Into Your Bright Green Haunt

The key unlocked the front door of your parents house.
I saved it in a locker many years, until one day
I lost it to the kids.

Yet our love affair took place in a dimmed attic room.
Cosmic expectations proved we were still young.
Rather I remember Cassius wrapped up in oil and satin;
On the wall – his penis grew from golden-haired moss

You spit a piece of tinsel in the mouth
of my wet hand.

Your parents slept next to your little brother
in a lonely land.
He looked so shy, a younger you.
His face a collection of bleached stamps.
A recollection.

I should have kissed the dried lips
Of your father to console the
Arctic future that was waiting as a whole,
but unaware I climbed the stair
to sweltering shadows
flaming powder,
anorexic in a steep jaunt
while spiders hid in silent laughter.

Capitulate when I arrive into your bright green haunt.

I’ll complain this time your skin
smells like our cat
who died soon after.
And that it was a sign
of the organic laws,
for all the shells and salt we ate
that night fell from a firmament
of pulverising jaws

Words make love
repugnant as the two of us.
Moonlight over dusk on top
of things we hissed.
And wavering shadows stalking
on the inside, too.

I know we both and not just you,
are dead and gone and fed to legends.

Conversations In Amsterdam

Conversations In Amsterdam
Artwork: Daphne Buter 

I was in a Pub and I walked to the bar to get a drink. A skinny man who had drank too much started to talk to me.

‘You don’t look happy. What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing’s wrong. I am happy,’ I answered a little annoyed.

That man shook his head very slowly, like he didn’t know how to shake it off his neck, and repeated, ‘You lie. You don’t look happy at all. No no no! You don’t look happy at all. You are a beautiful woman but an unhappy one…’

I tried to convince that man he was wrong, but it didn’t work. He kept stalking me, repeating I didn’t look happy. He even offered me his body. It would give me all kinds of magical pleasures, he assured me. I refused, while he was licking my neck.

After one hour of listening to his dizzy tongue in my ear, I had never felt more miserable in my whole life and I said to him, ‘I think you are right, man… I’m not happy at all. You made me feel like shit!’

Then that man gazed at me for a long time, like he had forgotten who I was, and he asked, ‘are you sure you feel that bad? You look incredibly happy to me…’

That’s what I dislike about Dutch Pubs. I understand zilch about the conversations.