The day comes toward me
on shaky legs, dim-eyed,
stepping into yesterday’s ski tracks
in the shape of a young bull reindeer.

I wake among all the dead,
who irritate me with their stubbornness.
They never have anything new to say,
locked into old patterns of thought & behaviour:

Runell comes driving in his old Citroën,
Ulla-Britt complains about her neighbours’ loud fucking,
Kjellström strikes fire with the same old match

The day wraps itself in drifting snow,
pours out a miserable spoonful of cream-light,
and already by half past one slips down into the evening darkness toward Norbäck,
rigged with dangerous forest tarns and suicidal thoughts

The living irritate me with their stupidity;
never anything new to say,
stuck in old thoughts, endlessly repeated behaviours

The electric light slaps me in the face
from the thermostatic paprika cultivation
in the window recess at 08:25,
and I hold up Solvej Balle’s dreary volume 6
of Calculations of Circumference
as a shield against the flood of photons