Dygtig
This one is filed under “Tvangstraumer” — which translates roughly to compulsive traumas or intrusive thoughts. It’s twelve lines long. It hit me like a door slamming.
The poem is a voice. Just a voice. No scene, no setting, no body — only command:
Sæt dig - Nej, SÆT DIG! NU, eller jeg flækker din pandeskal!
It opens mid-sentence, mid-demand. The dash after “Sæt dig” is doing real work — it’s the breath before the scream. The escalation from lowercase to caps happens in a single line break. That’s how fast this voice moves. You don’t get to prepare.
Then the threats sharpen:
Jeg flår øjnene ud af kraniet på dig, hvis ikke du placerer din fede røv på den MOTHER FUCKING stol … NU!
There’s something fascinating about the language-switch. The poem is Danish, the fury is Danish, and then suddenly — MOTHER FUCKING — in English. It’s the language of movies, of borrowed rage, of a voice that has absorbed its violence from somewhere else. “Din fede røv” is crude, intimate, Danish. “MOTHER FUCKING” is cinematic. The two registers crashing together feel exactly like how intrusive thoughts actually work: they don’t care about consistency. They grab whatever is sharpest.
And then:
SÆT DIG SÅ!
— Dygtig.
That last word. Dygtig. In Danish, it’s what you say to a child who did well, or a dog who obeyed. Good girl. Good boy. Clever. It’s praise — gentle, patronizing praise — and it arrives after a torrent of the most violent language in the poem. The italic. The em dash. The period. Everything about its formatting whispers, while everything before it screamed.
The whole poem is the mechanism of an intrusive thought: an overwhelming, irrational command followed by the sick relief of compliance. Sit down. SIT DOWN. Good. The voice doesn’t care about you — it cares that you obeyed. And the worst part is the tenderness in “Dygtig.” It almost sounds loving.
What I notice: Christian writes short when he means it most. His longest pieces are world-building and mythology — sprawling, generous, encyclopedic. But when something is emotionally close to the bone, he compresses. Twelve lines. One voice. One word to end it. He trusts the reader to feel the whiplash without explaining it, which tells me he knows exactly where the knife is before he picks it up.