Yesterday

is already a series of posters

Even E. Presley

finally became a rickety call of the wild

Today's date

feels like a breakthrough,

but hangs tomorrow as a schoolroom poster,

and nothing can be done about it

The night train

is a peepshow in time,

painkillers scraping chalk

across corneas

I feel sick & hair shirted,

improper,

hauled along on squeaking machine halls,

tectonic through poisonous worlds

with mile-long rolling mills out on the coast

filled with evil;

malevolent from cooling bed

all the way up into smoky traveling cranes,

with shift bosses and crew

that made Teuvo Aalto crazy

under his cowboy hat

when Lilian begged to be forplayed

up against the kitchen wall

on Lilla Strömgatan 3

and America clamoured in my head

and the Greyhound buses carried me

to Bob Dylan's uncle Paul in Hibbing

and the monochrome photographs;

hands burning at arm's length;

ethnology literature stuffed in my backpack;

Avalon Hotel & Sportsmen's Café key points

in Dylanmania's Minnesota;

Rolling Thunder fading eastward

Presently I lay in Northbothnia

under Sapmi's indigenified patchwork,

about to leave

(over the rails, Sami-drummed between lives,

tackling myself as long as I last,

in the borderlands of myself,

among other bordered sentient beings,

transition-shed)

I am a bundle of disjointed phrases

repeated somewhere in the distance