The train is an insect
crawling across a rainy window
in the night-light of June

My northbound thought is a drop
of water
just arrived
from the gray cloud cover,
zigzagging slowly,
and in sudden leaps
down my mind

My body is a moist appearance
of minor aches
over the Northbothnian plains
on the 3 AM song of the rail

My organs hold a meeting
under my name,
deciding on hormones
and blood,
as my subconscious floats
inside the compartment
of a tattered train,
supplying northern mountains
with southerns bodies

In the distance
the hours look like dragon flies
Close up
the look like fire-breathing dragons

My past is a band of dwarfs
giving me directions
out of stacks and stacks
of diaries

The present is a counterfeit comfort,
spurting like an Icelandic geyser

The immediate future
flows down the windshield of the engine;
the body of the train whisking behind
like and alarmed snake in the grass

The center of space and time
may well be a sanitation truck
speeding across 3rd Avenue
on East 89th Street
past the ghost of Bob Goldman

The center of you might one day be
the tip of a surgeon's scalpel
right before a speedy demise
or a miraculous recovery

Me, I'll scrape down the last left-overs
of myself
into a cup of nothing,
letting go of the present moment;
it's claws opening
into empty space,
with the surprised expression
of a Kafka beetle
on his back on a piece of oil cloth,
nothing but nothing left
of the left-overs,
while smartphones left in coffee shops
and restaurants
keep talking to no one after everyone is gone,
short-wave static camouflaging
some kind of age-old urgency
out of the deep-sea night;
the people behind the Earth
turning
in their sleep
while whole generations
of DNA-carriers cough and drown