TROMPENBURG by Manuel Kneepkens

Poems

(Publication in Dutch by Uitgeverij De Contrabas - Utrecht 2016)

Manuel Kneepkens ( Heerlen, 26th February, 1942) is a poet, writer (on current affairs), painter, politician and jurist-criminologist. He lives in Rotterdam.

(The numbers above the poems are the page numbers of the Dutch publication)

7. Arboretum Trompenburg Outside it rains on the grounds of F.C. Excelsior above the fairy tale book of the grass a butterfly flutters on every page. around the square pond, constricted in a thin corset of flags, I stroll nude before the tongue of the wind and between beeches, reconciled with gold dust of the afternoon the other cheek of the universe Jasmine tea comfort me at Avenue Concordia there my afternoon will be an icon of autumn and my cautious slurping stained-glass-face below a hat of Jugendstil Fairy King Oberon passing through the Low Countries

10. Box This man has fallen for a woman on the grass the load of his desire rests on his belly an apple, flushing red falling upwards                                     Newton, Newton, how can that be ? The woman with the gold-blond eyes languor her summer-dress Look, she comes from behind the blue of the sky she kisses the cheeks of the bashful man (poor, poor blue-beard...) into box-hedge (in which two wag- tails are now cheerfully on the job...) Then free of worries she takes up residence in that (Garden of Olive) green Permanently

11.  Tulips                                Bygone the tulips kissed                                with lips. Marilyn Monroe's                                red                               They never heckled muslims on the street                               'The balls to your Allah'                               But they sang from 9 to 11                                'To the bulbs, to those lovely                               bulbs...'                               And now...how they conciliate now? Vondel Park, look how he goes, our VOC-man with his purple eye patch on his left eye and his scarlet coat the wrong way around for Spring's specul- ation to declare on the white of war of the swans Professor Tulip! What are you doing? Nightwatch's Golden Girl on your cut flower table? Oh, Rembrandt with your self-portrait with turban as from a Turquoise Non- native full of homesickness to the Bosphorus so light melancholic as the song, the nonexisting                      Tulips from Rotterdam

12. Daffodils Comedian Spring raises his straw hat: 'Daffodils, what is keeping your Brassband?' Listen, how they paint with their trumpets still life Swing How they blare in total silence                                      O, when the saints go marchin'in... Typical flowers, daffodils don't make music bright blue or red (hyacinths do that with their brothel smell, heavy with New Orleans...) but swinging cool pale yellow or dizzy white:                                       Pascha est!                                      Jazz man Jesus                                      ascends                                      out of                                      his saxophone

13. Crocuses                                                  A good man is hard to find...                                                  Blues singer Nessie Smith Foals of gold satin, frolic on the chessboard of spring bedazzle us with light How, how deep in your lap xylophones                     leap, half frozen                              Clown! Clown! Hallelujah- negro children's choirs:        Or will it now start snowing innocence...? Spring. This will be a chess season of new happiness on Grassy Meadows! Look, the filigree of hard frost on the lashes of winter already begins to thaw on TV!

14. Bruiseworts- Daisies Children offer you, mother Mary, at least, your statue, their freshly picked flowers and you observe it with your pottery smile I was also a fan of yours once, after all with in my tiny hands almost the same (bruised) daisies Mother of God, why is your Son dead as a doornail since I live north of the rivers? Madre de Dios Only the red May Day remains for me now that of the Leftwing Church- father Herman Gorter                               Marx, Lord of Saint-Aldegonde?

15. Lobelias                                               Bald- Baldy! - ruhest Du auch!                                                                                     Goethe Once old we will look like plucked poultry  to church you louts in nature Cackling corpses... But..the pebbles on our graves will be better raked / than during our lifetime our teeth... Let then grow tender on our stripped bones                   Lobelias Hear how they groan:                   'Goethe! Goethe!'

16. Snowdrop In the Snowdrop Queen's house the child soldier practises with her (whitewashed) little flame-thrower Hear, what Mr. World Peace Chief Pigeon of the UN coos through a blaring megaphone at the puny girl high above the stable of Bethlehem 'Snowdrop! Snowdrop! Do you see nothing yet coming from East Congo?' No answer.... Snowdrops are appallingly shy They blush by and large about nothing Like all premature born! All !

17. Fairy Wings The sun lounge of her doll's house on the coffee table the tea set cracked / antique porcelain / (glued again!) provides a view across a lawn close-cropped, impeccable jade as far as the little pond abandoned, except for one autumn-leaf                                       Timid hands                                       weave together around hoop                                       & stake Her decadent eyes will be vacant when she opens them I call out to her                                       Fairy wings! Fairy wings!

18. Strawberry Whoever eats a strawberry a sooty red one eats back his youth his mother, singing under the laundry of the clouds Songs of Darkness O, when the blackbirds got entangled in father's strawberry netting In the blackest of the Mijnstreek under the privet hedge you had to bury them And look, the gooseberry & the currant & the dogberry rustle & bend & wave as in the cloaks of the Three Kings, brocade of Adoration 'Thus, Mothers, kiss in my name on cheeks Nirwana the naked skin of your babies, strawberryful For I am the Strawberry who takes and eats me eats back his youth....' Thus the Strawberry kisses the earth- with juicy red lips!

19. Apricot My neighbour's apricot flowers a delicate shimmer of white & light orange is woven like candy floss around the little tree last night, totaly pissed a student to the bone                      // I pruned my neighbour's apricot Like teeny-nippels, staggeringly naked the blossoms now blush on my neighbour's lawn Now my neighbour threatens castration and death... But my neighbour's daughter, thanks to me, is now taking a course I ke ba na Apricots she calls tenderly                         the mat-golden testicles of the Buddha and my loony mushy soul:                         a sepia apricot

20. Clematis Clematis, thick as a fist, blue as a rectum crept up the fence. Beneath it daddy longlegs shelter, messengers from the Thousand Year Empire And around the drainpipe twisted St. Sebastian behind the garden white of his loincloth Oh, garden in the buzzing Nirvana of dawn I am the Vine! I am the Vine!

21. Elderberry - Sambucus nigra The Birthplace of Hans Christiaan Andersen you offered protection. The whole of Denmark schoolchild under your roof of foliage! But also further inland your mysterious rustle known in the summer evening, elderberry ''Wenn die weisse flieder wieder bluh'n!'' the soldiers' jackboots sung, every war again, in love Poor elderberry, once you cured Europe, you with your juicy dark berry eyes Later you turned Rotterdam and porcelain Dresden to flames!

22.  Ornamental onion - Allium The truth is...the truth is an onion-dzjinn a fairy tale onion with thickish tricks His father a citrus fruit as elongated as a ski. Very special! His mother: an Ottoman rose, on which one rose- hip, strongly smelling of the Fire of Troy In short, just like a hermetic text, the onion-dzjinn is to us at first sight absolutely inedible But essentially grafted on centuries of Crown of thorns  & bursting with blood-red sap In the Near East it is therefore called the onion-peach as onarguable energy-fruit, this fruit & inside so rotten as the nuclear programme of the state of Iran In short:       an onion-dzjinn is an onion-dzjinn- is an onion-dzjinn for theologians from Kampen as well as for muslims                             Fatwah! Fatwah! our Brothers!

23.  Ivy - Hedera Casinolaan. In the morning only the blackbirds were allowed to heal the cracks here between the kitchen & scullery of my parental home and all the Fairy Tales from my childhood look, they were revealed to me there, rustling out of that sooty forest under my window called: Ivy or ding-donged towards State Mine Wilhelmina (As well as Mary Magdalene's bedroom secret                              Jesus has risen! Oh, really? Also in Terwinselen- borough of Kerkrade?) Since then my senses are only allowed to rise like those of Lazarus Palestine's Tutankhamun with his eyes, carbon- rimmed: Miners were heroes, in those days... Because who else than they dared to toil like that in the pickaxe-line underground as if they, the black people there - of all places in the Borobudur of the Carboniferous could not die... little merula on an anthracite branch!

24.  Coins of Judas (Honesty)                             There is no crucifixion anymore                             That's progress                             But Coins of Judas still flower everywhere! Wonderful is the life of musicians in South-Limburg one Gobelin of olive-green fugues, towards Maastricht but the life of poets is blacker than carbon paper (B. Aafjes in Troy...) (P. Kemp on the Laura...) they constantly have to wipe out the Mining district  from within, with a handkerchief of ink as Jesus once wiped his forehead with a veronica from the Borinage on the way to Catalonia Hear, how the kiss of their word is paid, treacherously with a pay envelope (transparent) contents:                                    30 pieces of silver                              (miners' widows' pennies)                                              brown                                                lung                                               wages

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28. Geraniums Time for small things now, for raindrops sluggish down my window - silver degeneration as well as the withered light of sunset on my geraniums ( or are they pelargoniums?) as rust-coloured- red as the half decayed colour of Hollywood femme fatale dresses, low- cut during the Technicolor-Era in the Fifties  (and later the Eastmancolor-process...) But....what have I to complain about? Daily I still read my future in the Evening paper the Death notices Without Glasses!

29. Irises Look, how they amorously reflect the pupils of Provençal troubadours worshipping the stark nakedness of courtly, medieval Women (Husbands' clumsiness absent because on Crusade challenging the muslims in the Holy Land)              Dearest, how is your tongue on mine?                         As Abélard on Heloïse                                  or as Heloïse                                           on                                      Abélard? Oh, Irises, so heraldicly blue..... but in your with summer sun perfumed morning dresses oh, smelling so beneficent of adultery !

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31. Sansevieria ''Dutchie!'' the Sansevieria calls: ''Open the gate for me the naughtiest of your fantasies!'' So there she sits Comtesse Struyck of Flanders Countess Cul de Wallonie... With on her tonque - très pleasant an expensive Praline de Bruxelles With a lack of shame she sticks, Lady of Pleasure one of her hands under her secret calotte and with the other (on this Official Portrait in Gand / Ghent wisely not depicted...) she picks her groans black gold- tinted like Tintin en Congo not in the name of the Rhine or Rembrandt But in the name of the Scheldt of Rubens ànd Manneken (Tant) P i s !

32. Gardener Charitable I walk around with the harp of my rake with scooping shovel I send slugs back to their saunas chace wood lice escalator up                      escalator down into the basement- departments of their shadowy emporiums Because I'm on earth for this purpose to sculpture out of light with hoe, with garden-shears, with fork flower beds, lawns, arbours museums for the wind tolerant stillnesses as if suddenly from the darkeness of my pond, prince Frog plunges a sound aged with peace in this poem of a gardener very short

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34. Hortus concluses                                                   Peacock butterflies                                                  You who deny death                                               on your downy triangles                                                         PASCHA EST! I loved sunflowers even as a child I adored the Hydrangia also I walked regulary with the Invisible along the box hedges in my father's garden Between the scorzonera and the chicory happy great tit & wagtail hopped Bees were buzzing. Tomato plants, blushing happily, raised themselves towards us Oh well, it looked like summer for ever Off season for wasp & cherub! And He? Ivy entwined the antiquity of his T-shirt his dungarees of cumulus (couturier: Michelangelo) ''God, what will I become​?'' I asked ''Be like my Son Get off with Mary Magdalene!''

35. Butterfly bush - Buddleja In my garden a butterfly bush glitters loved by those who hang themselves Every morning at least one is swinging between the pubescence of the leaves Now I have built a high lattice around my garden against the urge of so many suicidals Sodium lamps are burning day and night But now they plunge all of a sudden into my little pond /the radial arteries cut/ they cloud my waterlilies purple they spray my plastic heron with blood And where I once planted daffodils the corpses of seventeen-year-old examinees are now decaying kissing with mouldy lips the hot favourite mouth of the Moon that licentious celestial body, that in the coach of the night - shaded and made of goldleaf - rolls by slowly, slowly without end, in the Milky Way onboard a High Mandarin, far away from the Court in Peiping his precious, ivory fan - a gift from the emperor! flapping in front of his doll's face of Ming porcelain as if in Venice a Swallowtail flutters high above a funeral in the Canal Grande.                          ''The Doge is dead!                        Long live the Dogessa!''

36. Whitethorn Because of you, princess Whitethorn through man-size bushes forcing and the gate of your former Pleasure Castle opening Look, how nettles cover there - hordes! hordes! - the cobbles of the inner court, gleaming from misty rain as do the wheels of your Glass Coach Rough Chervil - Socrates' killer - & Wolf's milk stretch there the hollow of their stems to the bones of your late coachman on his box of eternal shadow Look, how his top hat has fallen down between the Henbane of which the leaves are spotted like the poison-belly of (formerly) an adder To say nothing of Mandrake, the Horror plant in the language of Death ánd Rue, more of the same (black) medicine! And inside, in the Gothic dining-room the eye of the mantel clock blind there the Delft crockery blue with mildew And in the kitchen malicious chef, grunting, snoring, for a hundred years! & his lanky little cook's boy good-for-nothing! Both, oh, as stiff as wooden spoons! Princess, in your mossy shrine of glass in the forest toads already rout around between your legs.... Solely moonlight polishes up a snail there gnawing at your nipples Sorry, Princess, that I'm too late forever!

37. Roses - the rose painter The roses themselves, the red, the white, the golden oh, that's simple.... as the rose painter of roses says: Nothing more than the result of precocious light perfumed thoughts on late summer nights..... (''Blessed are the meek....'') but oh, oh, the rose leaves! that introverted chubbiness as from the hands of poets ''who only knew the pen...'' Not to mention the thorns I would rather keep quiet about them Ah, painting roses... it is as if an even more light-hearted person than me once, in a more light-footed era than ours wrote to his Mistress, Courtier to the Court of Versailles: Foolish little wig-wearer under your hoop skirt à la Watteau creased pink..... Remember:                       L’Ėté, c’est Moi!                       I'm the summer!

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40. Rhododendrons Now the rhododendrons bloom eye-intoxicating like Hollywood stars in the Fifties Esther Williams who dives elegantly from the High (pale-blue) Grace Kelly, gracefully Princess of Monaco (lipstick-rose) Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday (off-white) Thus bloom the Rhododendrons like Beauty Queens on the backs of Vespas in Rome And what about Marilyn Monroe? Marilyn blossoms all around!

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44. Tree of Heaven – Ailanthus altissima Tree of Heaven What a painful century, the Twentieth Genocide throughout! The shamans Wilburn and Orville Wright sent their bewitched insect into the air under your defoliated branches See, Hiroshima & Nagasaki lost in the shadow of your scorched crown As on Japan's blood-stained flag the red of the evening sun in the (last) snow on top of Mount Fuji On the moon, meanwhile, Josephine Baker kept pulling her banana-skirt off / on / off / on / off oh, like a neon sign on Alexanderplatz Berlin, in the late Twenties Furthermore Im Westen nicht neues As also in the East

45. Larix                                            Green, you are such a lovely green                                                                 Frederico Garcia Lorca If I had a piece of land, I would plant a larch because next to a larix or lork* belongs a Gooi's house in Laren or Blaricum with a vivid red-tiled roof - pure Thirties Where in the attic I would shack up like a very old-fashioned poet with a typewriter Sometimes I would hear the sound of pans from the kitchen or popular music on Hilversum radio (or a Remembrance of Guernica...who knows...) and / or bicycle bells of my children back from Spanderswoud But most of the time it would be quiet, mysteriously quiet as if an old Basque grandmother or a raven-haired Andalusian woman croaking like an old 78 record wearing an apron of Catalan clouds reads out loud from an old book of fairy-tales from long before the time of Franco And slowly, very slowly I would myself become a larix... or maybe.. if all my needles should fall below the terrific starry sky above the Alhambra in the Granada of the Interbellum period A green Lorca with a green laptop *Dutch word for larch, in sound akin to Lorca's name.

46. Pumpkins - Antibarbari                                                     What a rude mind!                                                       I suspect him                                                      of being a Dutchman                                                                             Erasmus Against the ticking of the rain on the caravan I cut a pumpkin / right across / through his rind of sun / Look, the cheeks of my children are shining And the rain, that drenching import from Holland Listen, how it cembalowes Plunk! Plunk! On the fields of Toscany Wherein shadows now suddenly appear, rust-coloured curly-haired, Etruscans as on their frescos - polaroid holiday snaps yellowed, dateless... Oh, Marx-brothers of the Antiquity oh, Groucho, oh, Harpo, oh, Chico, oh, Zeppo... how long is it since your laughing fell silent? To call the full moon with their panpipes that plump fruit from the tables of the gods thrown for comfort in the night to us, Olandesi, on our long, long way back to the north Pumpkin Obesitas / clashing orange

47. Waterlily - Song of the Water Manager                                                               30th April, 2013 My oar lifts a waterlily jade leaf after jade leaf Than it sinks again slowly into the Land of Nod, Nymphaea, queen of the canals & ditches of Holland Is he really still searching for the Grail (King Arthur's golden plumbing....?!) that fair country lad of yours or is he from all that (passing) water forever silly locked in the Royal Loony-Bin, a long time ago? Whose future royal hand rows nowadays your silver reflection up to the clouds?                  Is it the eternal other,            with his high lace collar of (faded) ideals                  of William of Nassau...                  Water Prince W.A. ter Lelie?

48. Hortensias Cauliflower-like crowns, faded to blue as pinafores, hung in Bruynzeel kitchens in the Fifties Not unlike great-aunt Hortense whose portret in oils (slightly damaged) rests in compulsory peace in our attic next to her Art Deco waterjug (broken...) (glued...) (en broken again...) & the desolation of great-uncle Eugéne’s cuspidor, her good-for-nothing husband but look, in Spring all of a sudden she is approachable again in her Sunday best raised from the dead... ma vieille tante Hortense and she speaks her dutchy French as if she just, from the chicest hairdresser in Paris,                               Maison Osiris boogie-woogied onto the Champs-Élysées (together with her lover Mondriaan...) Her coiffure blue, shocking, almost greenish un bleu emouvant se rejouir du vert... a highly frivolous tint for someone already years in the grave... As for her twin-sister, great-aunt Charlotte, the Needlework artist                              Get cooking, red dyke! another time, another meal!

49. Grass                             Summer, how do I keep the grass luxuriant?                             Lover, lie there with your sweetheart Midday. Midi. The shadowless hour Farmers turn the horizon, flashing with their mowing machines Look, sunlight rains on her smile She wears her sun necklace, and nothing else but the side of the ditch How shall I name the swarming of her freckles among the insects' dances copper-red duckweed? How the twinkling of her eyes diadems of turquoise? Hear, Dog Days, rough barking Dog Days at the gates of Hades She was my bride-in-the-grass And our Witnesses? The sweating crowns of the farmers on the centaurs of their tractors bumping between the ditches and the pollard willows!

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51. Oleander Oh, Oleander, to be fondled by you by your blood-curdling, with red nails decorated fingertips Oh, Oleander! Sensual Madonna of the mediterranean summer Oh, kissed, glorious to be kissed, forever by your blood-red Moorish lips Oh, Oleander, most fragrant of flowers for baby boomers on holiday...                        Olè! Olè! Oh, Oleander, I must measure udders for the bulls of Pamplona                    The Hell of Job!

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54. Ginkgo biloba - Maidenhair tree Who cuts the toenails of the Emperor of Japan the Exalted Ruler under his Exalted Tree? Me? Never in my life! Indeed I would prefer to give His Exaltedness because of World War II a firm Beating on his Exalted Buttocks qua form as similar as the dicotyledonous leaf of the Ginkgo tree But no. I bow & bow & smile like an outmoded Japanese and write a haiku for whom? Not for the Exalted One! For the Ginkgo!

55. Chrysanthemums                                                White chrysanthemums                                                by moonlight                                                save on grave-lamps November. Month, in which the mist changes father Redwine into reverend Whitebread and rabbi Kosher turns a cartwheel in the soul of imam Halal... Oh, like a roguish Walt Disney-piggy unstunned slaughtered Death rises grunting with pleasure out of his own grave (!) and dances waving with a large bouquet of chrysanthemums the Hornpipe! Death give us the Hiphop! Or the Breakdance! Don't be so ridiculously old-fashioned!

56. Bramble-bush I pedal into the afternoon on my autumn-bike hoping for a line of poetry for my part just from a chestnut fallen at the edge of the cycle path shining, still half in his shell Suddenly I hear out of a bramble-bush -Yes, from where else? the burning voice of nothingness Pinchy! Your poems: rotting shrooms Sickening comfort food none will sink in You dismount, bewildered (No one to be seen...) In gods name away from here quick And you step into the night, up- set / as a broken man Like once Marinus van der Lubbe in front of his Nazi-judges in Germany... Holy Moses! Afterall it is not the Reichstag burning here. It is only a bramble bush! A thorny angry one with Gilles de la Tourette syndrome:                                  Pluck me, clodhopper! Pluck my fire! Term of abuse: Yahweh                                         Pseudonym: ((( ))) Pet name: Death!

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58. Sunflower                                            Like an old dilapidated comedian                                            she lifts her straw hat                                            for the last time                                            Who applauds?                                            Only the rain How she stands there at the back of my autumnal garden slowly dying this Cosmos-flower with almost human disguise As if Max Ernst paints over a Van Gogh /queen Nefertiti on broken stem/ Now bowing even for the autumn-moon Formerly her eunuch...

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