THE FOURTH PERSON SINGULAR Poem by Henk van der Waal

why should they not be with you, those few words of a bequest that
make the mouth brackish: instead of you quietly chuckling at the
death of god and crying: look at me, how I am free and rebellious,
you are perhaps able to sound out reception on how
the female disrupter crumbles the future's wafer
on the tongue of those confined to themselves

those replacement seekers in lust and avoiders of

the fourth person singular

that neck-breaking, dissolute yes-woman

who gives the utmost and
for the benefit of the recoilers
from death lifts dominoes with
velvet hand from the row of seconds ticking
against each other till nothing more collapses and those
sensitive to time are held in the never of what becomes: pure hope


From the series ‘Nomenclatura'