THE LAST CHRISTIAN by Manuel Kneepkens

Table of contents:

Annuntiation - 3, Ballad of the White Rabbit - 15, Cartoon - 1, Christmas 1963 - 5, Cold War - 16, God's memoirs - 17, Mary Ter Winselen - 2, Ode to the Limbourgeoisie - 11, Rommedou - 12, Rotter limbo - 18,Sunny Boy - 19, Supper - 8, The Bankers - 6, The Doppelgänger - 13, The Silly Mother Church - 14, The Son of Man - 7, The Star - 4, Thorn - 9, Wayside Cross - 10.

1. Cartoon How could we know that Goofy drawn (marked for life) by the late Walt Disney was the last christian! Hear him talk to his buddies at Golgotha the Good & the Bad Murderer Mickey Mouse & Donald Duck:           Christianity - a life that's lost for us           and for which we have           no substitute... Look, in the Bambi shorts - a remake was showed especially for us by the late Walt Disney of his (forgotten) cartoon           Lost Christianity (scenario: Zeke Midas the Big Bad Wolf) (music: the Three Little Pigs)           A naked figure descends out of his grave soldiers play dice for his herringbone- suit at Golgotha THE END (abrupt)		2. Mary Ter Winselen Hear her with the carpet-beater She helps my mother with the cleaning of the morning glow And the sheets of your simplicity, Mary? Look, they leave the clothesline blood-stained Flapping along the gateway of the State Mine Wilhelmina they hang themselves on the cooling towers the shafts... They keep you awake at night           Porquè, Porquè, Mary? You would not marry a Palestinian from the Gaza-strip but a miner from Terwinselen           Glück auf! Not Yousoef! but Jozef or Joep!
3. Annunciation In front of a background of gold leaf he balances on a shaky stepladder the angel Gabriel Look, he holds his message like a gigantic, purple butterfly flapping in front of him Below, looking pale around the gills, Mary sits on her kitchen stool her lap covered with roses, white ''Be pleased, Mary!'' says Gabriel: ''You will be pregnant....by God!'' ''Thank you very much, Archangel'' Mary says – always well-mannered but she thinks Where do I find in this Israel-from-the-year-dot an abortion clinic? If only I was in Hollywood           Madonna!		4. The star He sees a glowing supernova above Bethlehem oh, if only he knew why After all a plaster child will be born unto him and abandoned in a manger under his christmas-tree Poor Westerner? What should he do? Interrogate the quantum-theoreticians? Heisenberg? Bohr? Well, they only know about the nano-everything nano Nothing And long live the Majorana fermion! And the three Magicians from the East with their incense, gold & myrrh? Typical hipsters from the Sixties pot smokers from Big Sur, California who blindly belief in Tarot card and astrology... and that's for devout christians work of the Darkness and for us, devout atheists rubbish
5. Christmas 1963 It is snowing tinsel words from heaven Hosanna! Buy this! Buy that! A swarm of cardboard angels come down into the brightly-lit shop-windows of the city Does one still make gifts of frankincense and myrrh? Maybe but the Wise men keep their gold Also the shepherds in all their simplicity prefer to keep their sheep for themselves rather than in the crib. In their hearts it is for his geheimnis far to cold! Hosanna! Only ox & donkey - and those who wish to be like them find pleasure in standing in the cold for a child Who is actually more loved the purchasing power of the masses or the little Christ-child? Blessed then the country where Christ is born under a decorated spruce to rise again there between chocolate eggs for the benefit of tradespeople Merry Christmas! Joyeux Noël!		6. The Bankers They showed Him a coin with the emperor on it And He said: Give to the emperor what the emperor is entitled to And they said: What, Lord, what is the emperor entitled to? And He: What you are entitled to And they again: What, Lord, what are we entitled to? And He: To have the hell beaten out of you! And He thrashed them out of the Temple!
7. The Son of Man The Son of man finds no shelter anywhere Look, first he lodged himself in us, uninvited scrounges at public expense from the wretched & animals And see, on the lips of the night he presses then the cup of his despair but already the stars tinkle like 30 pieces of silver and He stays behind /cut off from each ear an amateur in Gethsemane           on Golgotha           crucified           for nothing!		8. Supper In case God pops in lay the table simply Plate, glass, cutlery.. Serve as an appetizer Dutch Herring The Most High is very fond of fish And as main course: Leg of lamb with rosemary God is not a vegetarian. There is a lot of misunderstanding about that As dessert: one of those pink puddings, reduced the weekly offer from the Cornershop He's crazy about them ('A whole load of calories, mind you, Almighty....!') Afterwards, God likes to light up a cigar preferably a Cohiba Esplendido Fidel Castro's favourite... No smoking inside, God! Go onto the balcony! To not to hear His Grumbling I close the balcony door God - locked out - sees us but... He does not hear us!! ''Until next Friday, God!'' ''What did you say?'' ''Then I will fry small sole with Hiroshima!'' ''What?'' ''Then I will make sushi's with Fukushima...!'' ''Man! I don't like Japanese food!! Just do like always lamb from the Shepherd-boys of Bethlehem let it simmer until it's well cooked!''
9. Thorn Here every white house is a petrified virgin Every roof tile a woman's frozen heart Every woman a noble embroidery Woman is Thorn, Christ is king and with the Bait, God the Father catches the Sunday fishermen along the Meuse Outside I see the White Women going to church the moneyed sisters of death singing like the rain of spring against the windows with big eyes of broken bread At night a rose is bleeding above Thorn Red Jesus covers his white brides with a mantle of Love & Death		10. Wayside cross Wayside cross too upset to divide too lonely you hang Son of Man Night falls. The stream freezes the pastures. Frost tortures my loins Imstenrade... Imstenrade... with your rooks aimless above the plough-land let me descend into your pitch-darkness near your late, pink baby God's fossil at Golgotha
11. Ode to the Limbourgeoisie In my youth in the South of Limburg God was a friendly kind of Big Bertha a constant picnic between the brocade hills, deafening full of plump aunts in fancy skirts & small, downy uncles Pierre Kemp*, the sun radiant, on a golden chain in the watch pocket of their black worsted Sunday suit and oh, oh, the glib, high-handed rainbows of their gobstopper tongues Saturday-night on the South Regional Radio! Sundays then were like Belgium chocolate truffles carefully wrapped in gold-bonbon-paper: provincial Governors and State Mine managers with eyes like Wieckse Witte beer And bishop Gulielmus 'Cognac-with-an-Egg' in Roermond still sat there waiting for A Yet Better Life! God's own cute pug-dog Who as if out of his groin, on nacreous wings his Angel raised himself flapping for a sepia Nature's Call the round, papist-guileless face planted in the cherry-flan thus disguising the Holy Ghost of his flatulence... And on weekdays on the Sphinx and the Mosa tiles the female workers bended, full of grace over tableaus of Charles Eyck & Edmund Bellefroid And during Shrove Tuesday - the moon pale as a sacred wafer - they were allowed a 'knees-up' amongst masked nudes drunk on semen going to Hell! *Catholic Dutch poet		12. Rommedou* Cheese from the Land of Autumn after Old-Trojan recipe smelling of the battlefield -  sweat of Hector & Achilles Oh, like the kisses of Helen's  blind randiness so the Rommedou tasted to us as if the prolonged ecstasy of Helen's embrace was suddenly Homeric on your tongue! A bite of Rommedou could heal in the South-Limburg of my youth Sadly, the Curia is browned off with all those wonders from the land of the Meuse Away with the Smell of Holiness! All power to the Formaggio! To the sacrosanct Mafia of the Mascarpone, the Mozzarella & the Bel Paese! Never, never more may we pray  from the Vatican's mighty cardinals il Monsignore Gorgonzola and il monsignore Parmezano:                Holy, holy Rommedou                thanks for the pious smell                of our Papist bottoms But contrary to the Edam God's own (hollow) (round) cheesy feet from Calvin's foggy Holland... Who prays the opposite: 1000 days indulgence! *Local name for Herve cheese
13. The Doppelgänger           For now we see through a glass,           darkly:           but then face           to face                          I. Corinthians 13:12 A swan can escape its pond I am too light for suicide... Thus I see in the mirror, constantly if He now finally turns to my emptiness... (the emptiness of my glass included...) And see, one night... sure enough, the mirror opens At last in the Other Empire! And I hear in my s h a t t e r i n g his v o i c e:          Don't dare to contradict           that I do not exist! God, let us be a pair of swans           delivered from all blasphemy... reflected in your Nothingness		14. The Silly Mother Church  or the last Catholic Devout God-fearing people say here: ''Hear them rejoice above the cornfields Larks are angels in disguise!'' I don't believe any of that! But what do you believe then, mister K.?           I'm actually the only real Catholic           I believe exclusively in Mary           And that She is made up           of           Three Persons           Mother Mary,           Mary Magdalene           &           Mary the Holy Ghost... And has been that since 13th March 2013, because since then           Habemus Papam           Argentinam           Franciscus 1! Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Pray for Him God's White Drag Queen on earth
15. Ballad of the White Rabbit The White Rabbit that believed himself Christ once climbed in Barcelona  the barricades Did he then read out loud to his comrades in the middle of the zinging bullets (''Revolution, compañeros, is in your head!'') the Poems of Garciá Lorca? Oh no, it sneered: ''Say that Sagrada Familia of yours will that ever be finished?'' Then suddenly the White Rabbit turns up in San Francisco It moans there on his blues guitar the Sermon on the Mount so deafening that Judas Iscariot drugged - with broken flowers in his hair - had to jump from the Golden Gate Bridge! Look, the water glitters there like 30 pieces of silver... And 12 hippies (12 times long-haired workshy riff-raff..) hear, how they shout: ''It's nothing to do with us! We'll beat it to Woodstock!'' It is said in a whisper, that since then the White Rabbit only mates with bunnies on every glamour page of the Playboy more apathetically... Certainly not! The White Rabbit, who thinks he is Christ still wants to safe the world... So it wants high above Hiroshima to put back the bomb Little Boy on board the Enola Gay... That's not possible, White Rabbit because you are not Christ the Magician but Icarus Humanity ready for His Fall!		16. Cold War How at night in a cold spell Joseph Stalin sneaked around our house How the shadow of his moustache quivered on the wallpaper.... Devilish man! (Didn't he erect a statue for Judas the Traitor in Odessa!) who in Yalta, the Spotter, had asked Sir Winston Churchill: ''How many divisions does that Pope have actually?'' Ah, how we sacrificed Dad's warn out, threadbare suits to the Bacon priest Werenfried van Straten With two huge lorries this Imam stood opposite the church of Mary's Immaculate Conception at Terwinselen, parish of Kerkrade, South-Limburg ready for the ride to the East front Because one day the Iron Curtain would fall that was certain! NATO waged the righteous war How after the Sunday high mass the late Father Spiertz casted himself flat on the ground, praying with a loud voice, 3 extra Hail Mary's for the Conversion of Russia! Don't say, that it did not help!
17. God's memoirs                  O, paradox of paradoxes:                            God is an atheist God lives in France, every child knows that in a fisherman's cottage on the Breton coast There He writes his Memoirs God has the Time... so that S c r i p t u r e goes on and on in Old-Hebrew! That's all we needed! So, God has as a hobby: Ziwoeg preferably in the Gaza-strip with underaged mermaids Yes, you heard it right! That's typical of the Almighty never an Amazon or a Zeeland Girl always lobsters, langoustes, cockles, peri- winkles.... Are those Memoirs not too salty ....? the pontifex maximus of my youth Pius XII once eel-white arose from the Sargasso Sea as Stellvertreter of Lou de Palingboer* once wrote about it in his most pungent of encyclical letters: that so-called Breton Manifesto, that so-called Newest Testament                            Poetry is religion           with still a lot of golden scales that is                         Tohoe wa-bohoe!                              Emptiness! No Nihil Obstat! Writer Present should be g u t t e d   l i k e   h e r r i n g s ! *Lou de Palingboer		18. Rotter limbo Oh, if only I could believe in reincarnation then perhaps I might once have been a prince in Troy, a close relative of Hector .. or perhaps in Egypt the foundling Moses with his silly rush basket landing up safely in the arms of the Pharaoh’s youngest daughter But I believe in almost nothing And certainly not in Rebirth Although I can conceive of Buddha's eightfold Path and I wish His Gentleness, The Dalai Lama, a well-meant safe return to his country, the holy Tibet! (will it ever happen?) Well, I was born too late, too late, much too late... Because who would ever, in future centuries, want to be my reincarnation in Rotterdam? A Rotter-Moroccan?
19. Sunny Boy I'm not the son of the gloomy god who snarls a reproach at you from a thundercloud above Mount Sinai: ''In the sweat of thy brow wilt thou set up thy tent in stormy weather on a totally desolated camping in the North of France And there in solitude wilt thou eat thy baguette - without beurre or Brie while I empty my bladder mercilessly on your tent roof pouring, thundering, flashing thus consecrating the night with my downpour'' Not the son of the god of bad weather am I, no but the son of the comical, cosmic god the belly-laughing one who lets the universe expand for ever until it snaps! the son of the like laughing gas giggler am I that of the Sancta Trinitas of good old Hollywood Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy and Charley Chaplin the God who now speaks to you Jan-Kees, go home! Go on the stairways to heaven!		20. Scrabble Translation in progress
21. The butchers Translation in progress		22. Christ in Hinnaard Translation in progress
23. Ejaculation Translation in progress		24. H. Anonyma - virgin and martyr Translation in progress
25. Los Angeles Translation in progress