LIST OF CIVIC SONGS Poem by Maarten van der Graaff

Tonight I want to talk to a fascist.
By soft light and beer, on Europe
and on bosses, the bosses of bosses.
It will be like we're in a saloon,
the food and drink of an underwater city.
And in the twilight, in each other's lust
we will see Europe and know that something old
has been taken from us.

I eat in front of the television. I am the citizen of a state,
eat a microwave meal, watch a rerun of Frasier.
It is my duty to eat the sausage and lick clean the gravy tray.
Online I read a polemic essay that I once wrote
and despise the petty style, the calculation.

Suddenly I understand I'm not waiting for the future
and that I left both God,
my family, the soul that housed inside me.
What do I register?
No longing or dreams of home,
but giddiness, rage, dead politics.
I hate this mutilation and I hate the future.
I am a mineral fact,
surrounded by brothers and sisters.

I am the parasite of a murky thing.
Brothers and sisters surround me
and I startle awake from a drunken sleep.
I sit on the night bus and see the moon
above the fields of Flakkee.
Agricultural sector, I worked in you
and now I am far away from your gruesome beauty,
which is accessible through workplace
romance on the night bus, but in no other way.

And yet I enjoyed the corporality
of husking bulbs and deadheading tulips.
Still, it isn't my job, I don't have to do it.
I have observed the biotopes of knowledge
and upwardly mobile is what I've become.
My body was my summer job,
and now I am creative.

From obliviousness I awake on Flakkee, gloomy island,
where first I was a religious masochist
and later sought the spirit of humanity.
Now the moon stands over the fields in its own gleaming
and I contemplate my ideas, that are dead.

My semblance in Stad aan ‘t Haringvliet.
What is going on here?
It is all cast in the glow of the private,
but the Haringvliet estuary speaks to me
in different ways.
Club life has stagnated.
Houses and lampposts cool down.
There is no one on the football field.
I take my place on the centre spot
and see the lines.
I wrote a poem about taking a shower
after the game.
About our white boyhood bodies,
our homophobia.
The bodies of my team members
were my source of information.
Memories of something collective.
And now what?