Boogie Man Poem by Dirk van Bastelaere

Heart, the market square
is slashed with hail and swamped with floodlight.
In the Café du Commerce
the waiters roam around orphaned
in someone's play or phone,
now you feel the situation's fraught, their dealers
and the whole city falls ill.

For an instant it happens that you,
as if put through the wringer,
have eyes on stalks,
thundering like a cartoon, howling
in the sirens of Dresden,
unverfroren, an accomplished defence lawyer,
inedible at mass

For there she sits smoking beneath her red hair
vacant as the world in the jewishness of her first name,
and to begin with each gesture
is a happening that makes you clatter like a stork
in a documentary or natural reserve

But there she sits
and she cannot hear your boogie.

It is no bed of roses.
When she kisses
the secret story of the heart
kisses the slapstick of everyday

Translation by John Irons