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