Johannes Jansen Poems

Pausing on the threshold. Cold from inside the building, a church or a production facility on a public holiday. I've taken just random samples, then withdrawn back to the threshold. The looking and the waiting. Altars or machines. It's that unclear. The lighting subdued.
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I'm walking along a street as though I were walking along a street with nothing more in my mind than thinking myself on this street. And yet it is a crossing of ways that's bothering me. This feeling of my own nakedness to everyone and above all to the depths of my own being,
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It is not me, but the machine in me in the course of becoming, against which I am defending myself with submissiveness. It is struggling with the nature that makes me what I am. Outbreaks of sweating, the shaking of the hands at the start of new acquaintance.
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That's how we ruined our minds with milestones of pointlessness. Savage mad minds that suspect Camorras everywhere and refuse to accept any reason.
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Incapable of retreating, arrival precedes us. Do you want to arrive or just be on the way, the intractable situation asks, without avoiding a smile. The latter, we say, because we don't want to be finished before shifting time has fulfilled itself. Everything is possible. Nothing is possible.
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