New book

"Paper Bell Lesson / Papirklokkebelæringerne" is now available in print at CreateSpace eStore: https://www.createspace.com/4317382 

In a week's time it'll be available at Amazon too


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Issuu (flip book)

coins - a haibun

Coins

dans les bras de Morphée a kiss evaporates

While I'm looking for a camera that would enable me to film some living coins a hitherto unknown nephew starts building a house around me. It's not that I was out in the open before he began. I was going around my business following this idea of making this film of actually living coins, two I found in a drawer. They weren't alive when I put them there some 20 odd years ago, but apparently something happened in the meantime. My wife (she is my wife in this dream) is in a room I cannot see looking for a job. It's mandatory. She has to to get unemployment benefit. In the dream as in real life. Obviously it's not her dream.

closed ice-cream shop

we queue up

for nothing

It takes me quite a while to find the camera. I know what it looks like (and it's nothing like a camera, more like a cheap microphone from the 70's; that's dreams for ya) but I can't find it. It's that feeling: you know what the missing thing is, what it looks like, where you think you have seen it, where you put it the last time you used it, what the drawer/box/closet/cupboard smelled like. But it just isn't to be found. Gone, it is.

I began looking for it in my usual flat surrounded my the usual mess but as nephew X was building the flat became a house and the house was now in the city and not in the village I live in. More and more family members and friends I haven't seen for years began walking around in the house. They all wore summer clothes and drank their preferred drink from plastic glasses. At least my sense of season is in sync.

3.47

that's when

the blackbird

starts singing

At long last I find the damn camera but then the house is full of people I'd rather spend time with than with coins, alive or not. The dream-nephew finish his work by painting all the walls white.

hot morning

a couple splits up

beneath my window

chant/work song/mass-line - experiment

night train

from nothing a couple of shakes [seeing god on the train] […] the on/off existence of villages. flash. can I where your dog / a face lit by a phone [hush] your scent. a lonely-chair. the absence of sky at night |talk don't talk remind me don't remind me. hold | fructose. a flock of dolphins at the all night gas station. rain pass don't pass me by. this tree has leaves in summer [slept too long the day is broken] up my nostrils almond oil and your juices add me to the list of emigrants | your piece of the ground 25 dog-ends a crushed snail | a fable about the young earth and a dream of innocence some Chinese or whatever has woven the fabric we sit on [press “stop” and mind your luggage] down pressed down. a note with “sor ..” just readable

 

Slime Monday

a hatful

of head

discussing the significance of skid-marks in a self-proclaimed prophet's underwear theorists reach a point where for a king to be a certain and named king who died in a joust for him to be that king which is supposed to be the one mentioned in a certain prophesy he must have been someone else if we don't take into account that just by putting this vision onto a page and publishing it thus making it spread to thousand of living vibrating minds in itself will influence the future in such a way that the king wasn't king or even a human being but an apple with two cores ...

and

angelless

feathers

I zap on to another programme where a man back in the 1970's win 64.000 kroner by answering a question about rare stamps

I draw

the card

of the Fool

           slime Monday

          (not mentioned in the calendar)

           a lead snail sucks up

           the blue

           of the sky

one red aphid

in a cloud

They spend five and twenty years on all kinds of studies to predict what eternity might look like. Radio telescopes, giant stethoscopes, X-rays and plastering it over with ultrasound gel, sonar pings, paper aeroplanes, waxed swan’s wings, tin cans wrapped in tinfoil and ... you name it.

of
green
aphids

Having done what they could and assumed what was reasonable they reached only one point of agreement, one thing they could say with 75% certainty: eternity is pale green and has thick carpets. Two points on which they could agree.

my fave
is the red one

Thursday
I put my hammer to work
on Livjatan

some haiga

Published in Note from the Gean 21, July 2013

Published in Note from the Gean 21, July 2013

New book / Ny bog

 

My book of bilingual linked hariku: ”notes 10 11 -12 / noter 10 11 -12” has been published by Yet To Be Named Free Press.

”Here, at its best, is Bjerg's unique ability to jump effortlessly from mythology to everyday life. A book of haiku that modestly tips its cap to traditional Japanese literature, while remaining authentically Danish throughout.  It is the perfect companion for the imagist stranded on a desert island. ”

Brendan Slater, writer and publisher

--*--

Min bog med lænket haiku i to sprog: "notes 10 11 -12 / notes 10 11 -12" er blevet udgivet på Yet To Be Named Free Press.

"Her på sit bedste, er Bjergs unikke evne til at springe ubesværet fra mytologi til hverdag. En bog med haiku, der beskedent tipper sin kasket til traditionel japansk litteratur, men er ellers autentisk dansk. Det er den perfekte ledsager for en imaginist strandet på en øde ø. "

Brendan Slater, writer and publisher

http://www.yettobenamedfreepress.org/2013/07/notes-10-11-12-johannes-s-h-bjerg.html



My own Intro:

The poems in this book may have the outer appearance of the haikai linked forms “rengay” and “yotsumono” but they don't necessarily follow the “internal” rules of said forms and they are written by one person and not by several. I merely took the structure of these as a skeleton on which to hang these somewhat diary-like notes written during the months of October and November 2012. Reading them again I see the dynamism of outer reality in dialogue with my inner ditto - my mind processing impressions from various sources scattered across time. Said in another way: it's just me sitting in a couch in Kali Yuga jotting away ...

--*--

Digtene i denne bog fremstår måske som de lænkede haikia former ”rengay” og ”yotsumono” i den måde, de fremtræder på, men de følger nødvendigvis ikke de ”indre” regler, som ligger i disse, og de er skrevet af én person og ikke af flere. Jeg brugte blot strukturerne som et skelet, som disse dagbogs-agtige noter fra oktober og november 2012 kunne hænge på. Når jeg læser dem igen, kan jeg se dynamikken i min bevidsthed mellem den ydre virkelighed og den indre ditto - min bevidsthed, der behandler indtryk fra forskellige kilder spredt ud over tiden. Sagt på en anden måde: det er blot mig, der sidder i min sofa i Kali Yuga og skribler …

3 two line ku

Cheese Burger - haibun

homecoming swifts

you see! air-tunnels

do exist

There's a first time for everything. I guess the saying goes for ”things” in a human life. On a grander scale … I couldn't say. But for the first time in my life stretching for over half a century under the influence of American culture I buy a cheese-burger. I buy a cheese-burger and eat it. Some things happens just once in a lifetime. Like me buying and eating a cheese-burger.

still to the South a star I can't name

Ideally I'm a vegetarian but I get too air-headed if I don't once in a while devour some (supposed) muscles of an animal. Given the nature of modern food industry, I can't really be sure whether the meat hidden between the two halves of assumed bread really is bovine. All winter and spring a gigantic scam has rolled across Europe exposing horse meat in what was sold as cow. Well, if you buy cheap, you get mostly imitations of the real thing, and the real thing is really expensive these days.

for what it's worth we date in Plato's cave

Home again I make an Ayurvedic herbal cleansing drink.

Black and White Cat - haibun

I must be scary.

Returning from the super I set one foot (the right, I think) on the first step of the stairs to my flat, and a black and white cat gets utterly surprised and jumps straight out into the air barely avoiding a parked car (not mine, I don't have a car, it's the folks' downstairs) one story down and scurries off through the grass (standing very tall in that untended corner of the property which I could use for a vegetable garden if only the owner once and for all would see to that the weeds are removed and the soil planned I would tend the plot if only he'd see to those basic things but he won't I don't have the money for the tools needed I made him the offer when I moved here but he apparently doesn't think it's worthwhile he has been trying to sell it off since then but you can't really use plots of that size located in an odd place in the village for anything it's quite elongated and not very wide and a lot of lilac trees would be hidden if someone built a house there) and through the hedgerows (lilacs, you know).

day of silence

I put bits of potato

in the tobacco pouch

Why the cat was up there? I keep a bowl with dry cat food up there. It's a habit from the years when the couple downstairs (not the ones living there now they're different the former residents) had 7 cats at one time. Most of them were rather cuddly and sociable so I kept my front door open most of the summer so they could enter if they so wished) lived there. This black and white cat must have been hungry. The other wild cats now eating my food hears my steps in the gravel and runs down the stairs before I reach it. But not this one.

Kenyan coffee

the beginning of all things

could be alive

The Bore Monster - haibun

Was juuuuust about to go out for a walk in the sunshine when a guy came through the wall (the one facing the inn) and yelled:

”Don't go!”

”Why not?”, I heard myself ask in calm voice. Apparently I wasn't surprised.

”You simply have to stay in. He's out there, you know!”

”Who?”

”HIM!”

He reached into his pocket for smokes though his lungs sounded like a sick bagpipe.

“Who's HIM?”

“Him or her, what do I know? I won't go into a lengthy discussion about sexes in language. iIt's easier calling it him. The Bore Monster!”

“The Bore Monster? What's that? Some sort of pig demon with tusks?”

“Ah man, get real! He's in Singapore these days. No, the I'll bore-you-to-death monster. That there thing that jumps you when you go round the village where nothing happens and everything is so small and bland and dull and predictable and you don't meet any people and ...”

“Sorry to butt in, but did you have coffee yet?”

watched by a satellite

I carry Ben Webster

in my pocket

Legion - haibun

Legion

"So, there's all these people getting off on nature. Dreaming romantics, I'd say"

"What's wrong with that? It's fairly normal and nature is wonderful. To some"

"It's boring. Hellish boring!"

"You're nature, I'm nature. When it comes down to it everything you can think of is nature in some way or another"

"Yeah, and my shit is nature"

"Man, you're a cynic, you are"

night train

I'm a blind eye

in a glowworm

There's no point in taking this further. We never reach an agreement, Gerald O'Mudd and I. We live in the same house (with some other guys coming and going) and have settled for this unsettled friendship. He is me as I am him as is Giovanni Monte, Janez Gora and Karl Kornmutter. We're each others alter-egos, you could say; with me paying the rent.

flapping its wings

a bluebottle asks me

to open the window

Later:

humming fridge

just enough light around

to cast a shadow

"I mean, it's like religion: they like to picture that it's all beautiful. They don't see the down-sides like they don't consider giant centipedes eating your insides in a guano filled cave in New Guinea ... and they use it as an excuse not to deal with their immediate reality"

"What has that got to do with anything?!"

No answer. Gerald rolls another one of my cigarettes.

"Get your own", I say.

"Are you stupid or what? I'm imaginary, a figment of your inability to integrate all your different "tracks of mind", as you call 'em. Dick head! Anyway, there are no shops open in this shitty village, as you know, and even if there was, they don't carry our brand of tobacco, do they!?"

He's right, of course.

-*-

Legion

”Suk, alle de dér mennesker, der synes natur er såååå fantastisk. Drømmende romantikere, du”

”Hvad er der galt med dét? Det' rimeligt normalt og naturen er vidunderlig. For nogle”

”Den er kedelig. Ind i helvede kedelig”

”Du er natur, jeg er natur. Når det kommer til stykket er alt, du overhovedet kan komme i tanker om natur i én eller anden grad”

”Ja, selv min lort er natur”

”Mand, du' sgu da en kyniker”

nattog

jeg er et blindt øje

i en Skt. Hans orm

Der er ingen grund til at vade mere i det. Vi bli'r aldrig enige, Gerald O'Mudd og jeg. Vi bor i samme hus (sammen med nogle andre gutter, der kommer og går) og vi er enige om at være uenige i det her venskab, generelt. Han er mig, som jeg er ham ligesom Giovanni Monte, Janez Gora og Karl Kornmutter. Man kan sige, vi er hinandens alter-egoer; jeg er ham, der betaler huslejen.

flappende vinger

en spyflue spø'r mig

om jeg vil åbne vindue

Senere:

køleskabet brummer

lige lys nok her

til at kaste skygge

”Jeg mener, det er ligesom religion: de ser kun det, som de bilder sig ind er vidunderligt. De ser ikke bagsiden ligesom de ikke tager kæmpetusindben, der gnaver i dine indvolde i en guanofyldt hule i Ny Guinea i betragtning ...og de bruger den som en undskyldning for ikke at forholde sig til deres her-og-nu virkelighed”

”Hvad har det med noget som helst at gøre?”

Intet svar. Gerald ruller én af mine cigaretter.

”Køb dine egne” siger jeg.

”Er du dum eller hvad? Jeg er en indbildt person, en luftspejling af din manglende evne til at integrere alle dine forskellige ”bevidsthedsspor”, som du kalder dem. Nar! Der er sgu alligevel ingen åbne butikker i den her lortelandsby, og selvom der var, har de ikke vores mærke tobak, vel?”

Han har selvfølgelig ret.

Spanish Melons / Spanske meloner

Spanish Melons

Fumbling my radio in a new moon night I delete all the preset stations. "All" is a big word; I live in Denmark and we ain't got that many to choose from. Besides, I get more and more picky with music as I age. At least with the stuff the radio stations play. If it's not stupid, flat, mass-produced pop crap, it's stupid unmusical and monotonous rap or a narrow-minded choice of classical ... At least the jazz station gives me some joy once in a while.

Spanish melons

a girl I've forgotten

dressed for spring

I finally get my faves punched in again and go for a piss. On the way back to bed I decide to watch 8 1/2 instead. Fellini might give me better dreams .

after the Ascension

I play my worn

humdrum

-*-

Spanske meloner

På en nymånenat fumler jeg med min radio og kommer til at slette alle de stationer, jeg har lagt ind som faste. ”Alle” er et stort ord; jeg bor i Danmark og vi har ikke det store udvalg, og derudover bliver jeg mere og mere kræsen m.h.t. musik, efterhånden som jeg ældes. I hvert fald med hvad der kommer ud af radioen. Hvis det ikke er mudder-hjernet poplort, er det umusikalsk dumt rap eller et snæversynet udvalg af klassisk … I det mindst gi'r jazzkanalen mig en lille optur indimellem.

Spanske meloner

en pige jeg har glemt

i forårstøj

Jeg får dog lagt kanalerne ind igen og går ud for at pisse. På vej tilbage til sengen får jeg lyst til at se 8½ i stedet. Fellini kan måske give mig bedre drømme.

efter himmelfarten

flytter jeg stolen tilbage

til trummerummet

No Wind / Ingen vind

No Wind

like always the dandelions exploded into bloom overnight it's sort of limbo (like the catholic one totally imaginary) being stuck here between inner and outer reality and having no drive in applying romanticism I could say I'm a ship at sea with no wind but I won't instead I go to the super for milk and stuff as usual I say no to the receipt and joke that she could fold it into an airplane

day of ascension

my yawns get

still longer

-*-

Ingen vind

som altid eksploderede mælkebøtterne i blomst over natten det' en slags limbo (ligesom den katolske version aldeles imaginær) at være kørt fast her mellem den indre og den ydre virkelighed uden drive hvis jeg skulle udtrykke det romantisk kunne jeg sige at jeg var et skib til havs i vindstille men det gør jeg ikke i stedet går jeg til supermarkedet efter mælk og diverse som sædvanlig takker jeg nej til kvitteringen og spøger med at hun kan folde en flyver

kristi himmelfart

mine gab bliver

stadigt længere