People, determined or given over,
float in human form,
with emotions surging or eroded,
smoked through
diagonally across the Main Square

I look like who I am,
at the outdoor café,
with necessary reservations

The sun speaks plainly over the cobblestones,
with my gaze lowered into the blackness of coffee,
while caffeine gilds the square café’s scattered idleness
with these letters
and the sharp twelve chimesfrom the Nicolai Church on the fifteenth of May,
a false hour from the solar system’s reality;
a peculiar pull in the human,
that no one pretends to notice

The basslines from a distant car
mark a heavy rhythm,
as if from the hidden heart of the town hall,
in Åke Hodell fashion

The carillon in the church tower plays a familiar tune,
which despite its modernity feels medieval
in a sitting at the intersection of ancient fantasy
and wind in the hair

Two beautiful ladies meet in an embrace
in front of my notes,
precisely between birth and death, reasonably,
unless something unforeseen...

At any moment a Dylan song passes,
preferably from Blonde On Blonde,
when suddenly a thin drizzle dissolves the ink
over the paper
I lift the tray, go back inside,
listen to the societal hum of the ventilation
and voices out in the entrance

A jackdaw flies by,
forgetful of its dinosaur background
Another jackdaw (or the same?) flies up
to the town hall’s gutter
with a morsel in its beak;
reaches a kind of lingering truth
in these notes

The sun regains the upper hand

I look out over the square,
idly fumbling with my death thoughts

Melancholy is sand in the pockets, dirt under the nails,
itch in the scalp

But I know that the coastline out there bathes
in wind and glitter
and the sharp splinters of terns

The walk home through the kilometers
insists my the body

I see people at the café, whose moments widen
like the calm before the storm, like an oil spill on the sea,
unintentional, causeless, held open

Life is a kind of virtual reality

I walk homeward in a replay of some kind of time,
in a kind of memory of the now
and its borderlands