mandooks

Flagey

by

I do not count the songs we sung
As wasted breath
Sitting with you
Lost in a crowded square

Icy splashes dampen your heavy jacket
Whoever thought it was a good idea
To have fountains running in November
Can come talk to me

My numb fingers close on yours
You make these moments
Some kind of magic

Brux-hell

by
Nightmares are made of your thick grey smoke and your gridlocked streets
Stinking of bloated rotting money
Paralyzed by white hypocrisy
Tarp-covered holes where windows roofs walls should be
Your genocidal kings adorn
Dark tunnels and deserted squares
Flickering flames honor
Forgotten men slaughtered for the crown
Under the stinging rain
The shivering rain
The beating rain
The heavy wind drowns out the memory
Of the flesh that haunts you
Grease running down the pavement
Old as sin
Fresh as the beer flooding your veins
Loud
Tongues and lips biting out guttural harmonies
Accented cries falling on tone-deaf ears
Ugly and scarred from a sprawling concrete cancer
Rising from the ashes of your splendid past
Poor like the dirt
Poor like a shriveled heart
Poor like a homeless man writing poems on scraps of paper
In the neon alleys of your swarming underbelly
Brux-hell

I fought with all the life left in my body to come back to you
Lost in a country that would never call itself mine
I balled up my last shreds of hope and hurled it at your swelling putrid heart
You took it, let me sink into you like molten copper
Lonely town
I took my first free breath in the middle of your labyrinth and was reborn
You are the strength in my limbs the breath in my lungs the sun in my smiles the despair in my soul

Brux-hell
I have missed you like I missed my skin

Brux-hell
Incomparable mess horrible hateful impossible city

I love you

Thaw

by
You’ve got to trust the burgeoning trees
To weather the storms
Take strength in the earth
And grow

Flowers are stronger than you think
They will still be there tomorrow
Do not be afraid
There’s probably a lesson there for you to grasp

But spring is barely born
And you have barely started to thaw
Trust the trees, the plants, the earth and the sky
To take you where you need to go

Hope is at the tip of your tongue
There is no black or white
No sweltering heat to blistering cold
It’s a scale made of notes you’ve come to know

Winter diaries

by

It feels like the tail end of winter, like the hard part is over. It feels. But it’s not true. Time is a circle and it’s barely mid-February. But two days of sun feel like more hope than I’ve got since the beginning of the year. People in parks, streets, squares, terraces. Making music, drinking, hanging. It’s like the outside’s in color again, like music is made of sounds. Polarize has meaning, infused directly into my bones. Brussels is my oyster.

Villo and Lime don’t want me but my legs will push me through. I sit cross-legged at the Vismet and drown my home-made pistolet au salami in unintelligible Flemish. Still in Vismet, I find a forceful bout of sunshine to help me draw Miles Morales. Brussels lives around me.

I rock out to my phone and walk and walk and walk and barely stop for coffee. It is gross how much I am one with this city. Lonely fucking town, I love your tourists and your hills and your hard edges and waiting eight minutes for a metro. The moon is out over the Cinquantenaire. Nothing scares me. 

Power

by
You say you aim to communicate
I say you aim to assert power over me
We’re both saying the same thing

It doesn’t matter,
There is no language that doesn’t hurt the both of us

I am made of fragility and books
You are a creature of pain and anger
You are a weapon
I am a bullseye

It doesn’t matter,
The only thing we will ever share is shame