The Warrior’s homecoming song by L.J. DeVries

The Warrior’s homecoming song

Stand down grimness comrades
Step aside the forsaken battleground

Mob to whom I sing here en masse behold
I reveal to you as individuals heaven is a common experience
Paradise masses share
Hell is however a personal thing

What I left you with before or later on
Is not on hand I do not recall
Sure there were scattered indications
On crossroads towards many places and destinations
Sin Death Habit Manliness Pride Joy and Happiness
Yet I obliged the lovely angel
Beckoning from a robe of light
To wear the garment of darkness (a suit of armor)

Stand down grimness comrades
Step aside the forsaken battleground

Ingnorant of the speed of things
The beast needed to be fed
Eating through the mask of manners good
Thus the swift transition into slow decay

Stand down grimness comrades
Step aside the forsaken battleground

Risen at present to reply you mob
Part
Lead me to the bonfire
To spit out life on the embers
Risen at present to reply you mob
Every man here is God
His soul is his body is himself is very deep things
Good things
Burning there in the bonfire
Deep and good
Illuminate enough to see a way to calm his guts

Mob you here
En masse fond of me
As heroes are in demand
Go
Leave
Travel home in solitude
My ether my evanescence

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.

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