[I'm walking along a street...] Poem by Johannes Jansen

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, so that my search for forms is being drawn into a chaotic whirlpool. It's not me who finds or determines the form. It grows out of the wear and tear of my existence. Everything I encounter is there to make me sunken. And so I am on the open sea. The only thing that is holding me is the memory of that direction I have come from: the child with the joy in sad stories. Since then ensnared in this game, a sad juggling act. If there's little to see and if it was difficult, that is, if it brought much grief, then that is good. One could say that one does not grow with it.

Translated by Catherine Hales