Feeding Hyenas by L.J. DeVries

Feeding Hyenas

look
she is there
you can still see her
faded fur the shy one
packdone packshunned
fringe feeding
you must look
she is there

never taught to be brave in the end
she shall not question nor doubt
or have any other capacity against it in the end
when she smells the inevitable outcome that one day
the great equalizer brings her to her knees too

coiled up and surrendered it asks nothing of her
nor of me for that matter it asks nothing
for nothing is known to both of us about death
a tough riddle in itself that goes back to the entrance (that is birth)

in this hour the cards are laid out on the table

we both wonder

why did we consent to common breathing each second?
our answer: as it serves life (and not death)

why did we not consent to the common innocence of young love?
our answer: as it was not of our life (and not of our death now)

why did I not consent to art?
my answer: I rather kept silent (and yet did celebrate life)

once she encircled us
packborn packraised
to killmurderterminate our young
but she changed
why
did she not warn me
why
breathing & art together can bring time & space
and the young should not be silenced & murdered
but get on
transporting posterity towards the next lair
so that we shall both return to the entrance (that is now our joyous death)

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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