Temple of the Dog

remember both dog & deity                           hereafter Lord
agreed whilst all nations safely sedated
Creation would demonstrate itself
from corners afar in the Scripture
before the temple afterwards                          after the fact

the dog smells decline in Gospelparts

she begins to pray delicate                              feedback

on

sounding board
she hears the birth of distant volcanoes

she prays                                                         louder
in the temple square

she sees the dustcloud of defeat coming nearer on the horizon
she prays                                                         deeper
in the temple square

whilst on the edge of the holy pond
in regenerated sunlight
the crow of old dances

she asks                                                            review
in the temple square for salvation
only if Lord listens                                           yet
fellow!
never dog shy before Lord decides
looks away rather absent                                  ever
careless
the bumblebee thus dies no chance
on a lonely path cold morning early spring
after a laborious life for an idle Queen

the swan thus dies no chance
same early spring
murdered in her sleep for inevitable beauty

& trees
connected world over blanket the earth
thus struggle formidable upwards Heaven

without immediate blame or the original sin
afterwards
after the fact
these events
shall be                                                            indefinite
perhaps ever

L.J. DeVries about L.J. DeVries. Spawned in 1963 i tell them i am a ‘ flowerchild’. Honestly that is a two-bit lie. No hippie times for me at grammar-school and college. No, madam, sir. First it was punkrock, then heavy metal and grindcore and finally the ugliness of blackmetal. All with such intensity that music is one of my sources Tony Moffeit points out as necessary to become an outlaw poet. Another key source is the discovery at an early age that the answer about what the hell is going on can only be found in books. My timeline in that perspective travels from the Bible at sunday- and grammar-school via Steinbeck, Hemmingway and Amis at college and Dante, Milton, Hamsun, Saramago and Fante in adulthood (to name but a few). Mid-twenties the devil himself urged me to become a writer. Believing I could manage the short-story Lucifer led me into purgatory. I failed. Miserably. Had to. To learn. I quit writing.

Then came Allen Ginsberg. Around the 25th anniversary of Woodstock I zapped into a documentary about him. And with him came Kerouac. And other Beats. And more poetry, ancient and modern. And the devil again too. This time rather to my avail. This time not sending me into the flames of hell to devour my words. More a satisfactory companion. And I didn’t have to sell my soul. I had to change religion. So i read the Outlaw Bible. I got to know of Micheline, Patchen, Moffeit, Sandburg, Bodenheim and Whitman (amongst many many others).

My writing is not academic, is not learned, is not conform. It is about what is going on and going down. It’s about the next layer. To frighten them. Sometimes it’s full of shit. But who cares. As long as it feeds my obsession and the wildchild in me I am happy as a ‘one eyed cat in the fish store’.

Right, let’s conclude this intro. With a snippet about language.

My mother tongue is the ‘frisian’ language. A minority tongue from the North of the Netherlands. When I write I do so in the ‘frisian’ language. Poems are (sometimes) published via a frisian literary magazine; www.ensafh.nl. Then I translate the poems into english at the same time deconstructing and reconstructing the whole damn thing. And the horror the horror, it shoots off into a new dimension i.e. new universe as Moffeit calls it. The other way around I am challenged to translate Micheline and Whitman into my mother tongue.
So long you bums ! Signed; L.J. DeVries. Burgum/Friesland/Netherlands.