My words are blind,

the letters secret clues,

that, left to themselves, are just like driftwood

on the shore,

or the cuneiforms of long-legged waterfowl

in the sand of the archipelago skerries,

swept away

by the swell from a distant rumble

under the horizon,

after a brief conjecture, spoken

and broken

Somebody, clearing the tables

in the hospital cafeteria,

involuntarily hits a metal lamp shade

with her elbow,

spreading a Stockhausenesque tam tam vibration

all across the pre-lunch void

I let my associations listen;

the tables hold up something,

be it a sense of time,

or a recollection of all the people

having been seated

I know there are mountains out there,

with mighty 45° screes

made up of Volkswagen-size rocks;

I've seen them, I've crept up them

with and without somebody,

but mostly they brood

by themselves,

heavy,

dressed in boulders

and steep angles,

sunlight treading cautiously

up the slopes,

as the news reports, tight spun, crawls

out of the radios,

setting the world on fire,

the rocks hot and heavy

- but at night the moonshine soothes,

covers all matter in bleak dreams

with the far-flung logic of Eastern thought;

Kuan-yin at the edge of everything,

the voices dance

around me through the lunch hour,

thud off the walls,

sail in the sunlight that echoes through the windows

off the snow cover in the hospital garden,

in the clatter of kitchenware, porcelain, forks

and knives,

as the white-clothed ballet of surgeons,

psychiatrists and nurses mix

with the happenstance patients and janitors

dressed in blue,

soaring across the indeterminate stage

of Sunderby Hospital

somewhere at the end of winter;

laughters and insisting high-pitch words

rising from far off a distant cafeteria area,

while close, just a table away,

and old couple talks intimately,

in low voices, kept to themselves

as it should be

at the far end of life

close by,

as the war drags on in The Ukraine

and my mountainbike is being serviced

at the bicycle workshop

in Luleå

Ah, all those animal tracks in the snow

deep in the forest,

known by nobody but fellow snow sneakers,

soon snowed over or melted away:
sign language seen but by firs, pines, birches

and clouds

Secrets are good untold;

truths are alive under your skin,

stories are never-ending

until told