The Gospel According to Jacob Hiegentlich

In a bar forgotten by the calendar, where clocks had no tails and time knelt with its head bowed, a man of royal blood ordered a gin, and Jacob, bartender and poet, offered him both the gin — and his heart. There was no light in that place, but they lit up the dark. Like a birth beneath the earth, like two candles flickering in a sealed-off tabernacle. As Jesus once passed the bread and wine before betrayal, so Jacob passed his verse: a word, a sigh, a quiet “stay.” Back then, it rained without mercy. The canals whispered like unfinished sins, and past midnight, beneath the bridge at Prinsengracht, the sighs of poetry could be heard, the kind that never makes it to the Academy. a man loving a another man - what a sin?! Jacob poured gin into bottomless glasses, and in every drink he mixed his blood, his shame, and a poem he dared whisper only in his thoughts. His shoulders were cracked porcelain, his soul tied with a fraying string, for his love could not be displayed next to moldy cheese in the windows. “There are poets who never died, only because they were loved for a moment.” This was the line that stole Hendrik’s heart. Nights followed, dripping with silence and desire, in rented rooms by the hour, in sins written on fogged mirrors. They made love behind Rembrandt’s statue, on a bench in Vondelpark, beneath a sky that forgave, but did not redeem. And it was good. Until it wasn’t. The people found out. The newspapers filled with inked filth. The Church sighed theatrically. And Hendrik, with all his royal blood, remembered he had a wife. And children. And a throne. And tradition. And fear. So on a Thursday, while Jacob was writing a poem about a God too tired to speak, Hendrik signed the order: that Jacob be shackled, and taken to prison. Like Pilate, he washed his hands. Like Judas, he sold him with a kiss. And Jacob was taken, not to Golgotha, but to a cell that smelled of betrayal and had a rope already tied, like a sentence left unfinished. A few days later, in a palace with closed windows and paintings what did not dare to look into your eyes, a prince learned how to die slowly, day by day. His bed was made by strangers. His holy book hid a letter from a boy who no longer existed. In the cold cell, when the guard returned with the key, they found Jacob staring at the ceiling, strangled by the same scarf Hendrik once wore when he wanted to smell like poetry. And if you ask the prison walls, they’ll tell you he died smiling, like a Jesus of forbidden love, with an unfinished verse written in blood on the floor: “Love is not a crime, but the society needs their victims.” Days passed like empty trams through districts where poets no longer write. No one remembered Jacob. Only a poem, found in the pocket of a coat forgotten in a prison wardrobe, written in eyeliner pencil: “To love is to die but it’s more beautiful than living alone.” And thus, history remains: with a Judas who lives longer than Jesus, a prince who wears his father-mask after being a lover of the night, a poet who never finished his metaphor, and a love… …that, like all living things, ends too early, in a space too small, with a light too dim. Because life, like every good story, needs a traitor, a king, a beautiful mad soul, and a night that burns like a verse, so fiercely, that nothing remains, except a snuffed-out flame and a forbidden love etched on the cross in a forgotten bar.