Well into the Night

By Andreas Fleps

How does one write advertising copy for an emotional and spiritual odyssey?

Some writing is called positive because it ignores reality. This collection is positive because it helps us dig deep into our souls to encounter what is and from there to imagine what may be.

Well into the Night is a collection of poetry that will call to you from your own depths, and invite you to imagine new things. There is no whitewash here, no charming couplets describing who you'd be if you lived in an Edenic garden, and had never encountered the conflict of good and evil, joy and sadness, success and frustration. It does not call to you with the siren song of one who knows where you ought to go, how you ought to feel, or who has all the answers.

Rather, it will call you into an exploration, one that calls on all you are, one that leads somewhere only you can imagine. Andreas Fleps will shine a light for you, but it will lead you where he imagines.

If you want to take that odyssey, taste that experience, this collection is for you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Energion Publications
• Release date: Dec 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781631997402

Book preview

Table of Contents

Foreword ix

Mental Health Questionnaire 1

A Boy 4

From An Unknown Prophet 6

Hang In There 8

From Genesis 10

Tell Me A Story 12

A Song For The Breathless 14

Salvage 15

Music For Closed Ears 17

Psalm Of The Lost Sheep 19

Possibilities 23

A Dream Of Reversals 25

What Is The Body? 27

Transcendence 29

Show Me 30

Survival In Fragments 32

A Meditation On Feathers 35

Evergreen 37

Me, Myself, And I 39

Here 42

Flammable 45

Dust 47

Predator And Prey 49

The Carrying 50

A Necessary Lie 52

And 54

Notes 56

Acknowledgments 58

About Well into the Night 61

The whole creation groans and travels

in pain together.

—Romans 8:22

Without God, all is night, and with him

light is useless.

—E.M. Cioran

Where there is sorrow, there is

holy ground.

—Oscar Wilde

Well into the Night

Foreword

I met Andreas in Belfast years ago. I was speaking at a festival that he regularly attends. We got talking about poetry and we haven’t stopped since. For Andreas — and for me — poetry is a tool of survival, a necessary art. Form, metaphor, syntax... these skills are all serving the greater purpose: a page speaking of life to the doubting. The speaker in Andreas’ poems is brutal in describing the sharp edges of survival. This is not despair speaking, though, it is knowledge. Sometimes I think Andreas ate some of the fruit from the tree of life, and he’s spent his years writing about the complicated taste. 

In Well into the Night Andreas Fleps offers poems to catalogue survival: of depression, of despair, of doubts. I board up my brain; / the storm comes from the / inside he writes. These are essential poems, reaching for new meaning in old mythologies, damning the mythologies that fail. He calls himself the tortured and the torturer. In all these poems lurks a God — a disappointing God, a distant God, a strange God — a God who can’t fit into the word ever. Both the poet and the god have feet on the ground, a ground described in tangibles, metaphors, as solid and as it is moving. More than one thing is true at once, Andreas asserts, and in his poetry, he presents pluralities and possibilities for survival. As he writes in Me, Myself, And I:  Contradiction is in the contract of being human. 

Pádraig Ó Tuama

Mental Health Questionnaire

Have you ever had suicidal ideations, and/or when was the last time you had the inclination to kill yourself?

What do you do with time,

when seconds become a countdown

to your end, and nothing else?

What do you