Maybe
I should put my life
in boxes

It has gotten in over my head

Maybe
I should interpret Kuan Yin's advice thus;
the boxes stacked tight like quanta of life,
diaries in a moving van

I'm done with this life,
in the voice of Lucien Stryk's rendering
of the Chinese Death Poems

There's a division that Kuan Yin refers to,
between sudden sexual desire
and a love far beyond that,
'tween remote farm life and this city retreat

I hear a passenger jet shaking its shoulders
down the runway at Skavsta Airport,
up the skies, disappearing into the clouds
of my local silence

I place a towel underneath my chin
and sip a mug of strong, black coffee,
lying on my back
with too much unread
across these floor-to-ceiling bookshelves,
& these stacks by my bed

Done with this life

But there is a clarity
about all that;
a sweet nothing

I can satisfy my curiosity
with just a few letters,
hissing and burping
like Jaap Blonk
on the World Stage,
stars trembling
through the uncleanliness
of the atmosphere we keep breathing;
Stockhausen laid to rest
in his self-designed grave in Kürten,
copies of his massive oeuvre stored in caches
on all continents but Antarctica

I recall his sweaty hand
in the shake after KONTAKTE,
Stockhausen yelling to his assistant
Bryan J. Wolf:
”Play it again! I'm going home!”,
and his boyish appearance
a few years earlier
in the rest room space downstairs
in the German Embassy in Stockholm
before the mirror,
combing back his thin hair
before returning up the stairs with me
for dinner at the Polar Prize gathering;
a little German boy,
his eyes growing big & round in disbelief
in the bouts of surprise he sometimes suffered
at his state of celebrity,
grabbing him by neck and throat,
rubbing him against his own self-image,
grand and dubious

Aah, magnetic tape
represents a romantic age,
capstan, erase heads and copy effects all

But as of now (gone before you note it)
I'm done with this life,
diaries written, read, recorded and stored,
the books swarming with letters and words,
the body still at my service,
workmates reminiscing at Lisa Lidgren's vernissage