1.

Unwritten is Best

Sitting

in a slowly cooling car

at Sunderby Hospital's large staff parking lot

September 21st at 07:27 AM

I am a ticking detail

in the vast machinery of the present,

with its branches rooted deeply

in future & past,

inserted between the boundaries of white lines

in the parking grid's distribution

of time & space,

in the endurance of waiting

in a here-and-now geometry

All vehicles

- except those just arriving or backing out to depart -

are silent, empty, still;

like tombstones in a cemetery

or an attentive chamber ensemble

before an endlessly raised conductor's baton

on the event horizon

Nothing happens

and everything weighs heavily

I am a kind of organic interior

in the car in which I arrived;

the temperature inside the bodywork

steadily dropping

towards the ideal +4 C° of the outside,

which it for sure can never reach

as long as my body heat resists it,

while the dashboard RPM and speed indicators

both rest at zero,

and time - which I keep enduring -

continues its steady descent through space;

thoughts rising like waste heat

from a district heating plant;

ink falling from the pen a reminder

of relativity & quantum states;

each poem proving that unwritten is best

2.

Atrium

The double pinging

of elevators up & down

in the building's central, longitudinal atrium,

running the full height & length of the complex,

in the whirring of kick scooter tires

and the spatial clicking of hard-soled shoes,

wrapped in the flocking right-left passages of voices,

creates an airy John Cage composition about itself

- much like ”Lecture On Nothing” -

in an exquisite meta mindfulness,

while my personal time,

as I'm sitting on a bench by the wall

with Michio Kaku's book ”Quantum Supremacy” at hand,

floats at eye level,

like a jellyfish in the North Sea,

confident in its stubbornness,

illusory independent of physical laws

and cultural taboos

Descending elevator counterweights rise

inside the elevator shafts like nuclear-armed missiles

out of Nebraska's monocultures

Tight teams of employees, moving from their meetings

to a common luncheon, rush past,

shoulder to shoulder,

marching like Roman cohorts in tight testudo formations;

ladies with round buttocks and men with sexual intent;

determined atrium movements at noon on a workday

The elevators continue to speak to deaf ears

about floor levels

in muffled mantras of remoteness,

without comprehensible meanings

or identifiable emotional states

Solitary, swift-footed figures in white attire float by

in silent stiffness

with gazes locked in hypnotic smartphone screens

3.

Afternoon

Heavy curtains of rain sweep in

over Sunderby's free parking lot

like the horsemen of the Apocalypse

at 1:30 PM,

the whole ruthlessness of a foreign power

over the fleet of parked cars in immeasurable numbers

in the gloom;

yes, like an army of stoned American draftees

on the shores of Da Nang,

the foam-ridden torrents swallow everything audible

Waiting in the car

on the outskirts of the patience narrative

on the rain-soaked asphalt

beyond the hospital's ominous shadows,

which resemble Manhattan's skyline

in a downgraded tropical storm coming up from the Gulf,

seen from the other side of the river, in New Jersey,

parts of my field of vision dissolve

into the numbness of a migraine aura,

while I think of myself

as waiting in the car

on the outskirts of the patience narrative

on the rain-soaked asphalt

beyond the hospital's ominous shadows

Occasionally, I hear the muffled thuds

of isolated car doors slamming shut

somewhere in the bumpy, tortoiseshell mass

of vehicles,

as someone arrives for work or an appointment,

or departs

I sit in the identity-alienating migraine aura

on the more roomy, steering-wheel-less passenger side

in the noise of the rain

and the broadsides of wind,

in the grip of the migraine,

the windshield nearly opaque in the cold,

irregular downpour,

when someone pulls in

and parks diagonally across from me, to the right,

without getting out,

intruding on my privacy, my personal sphere,

my comfort zone,

in the same way someone

entering an otherwise empty bus,

might sit down next to you,

and I immediately feel hostile

toward the unknown/unseen person

that I cannot even make out through the rain

and the wet windows,

and who certainly hasn't noticed me

in the darkness of my car,

behind windows that only let through distorted,

incomprehensible, constantly changing forms

in the rivulets trickling down the glass,

while my migraine attack slowly completes its undulation

through my brain,

and leaves behind a sense of depersonalization,

weakened cognitive coherence

and unsteady motor coordination,

while my personal integrity continues to be violated

for at least another hour,

though I, in the gradually receding phase

of the migraine incident - fortunately -

experience the situation in the car

out in the parking lot among hundreds of anonymous vehicles

and the few scattered thuds of car doors closing,

plus the sight of a few hunched shadows disappearing

into their disappearances,

as a long, sparse 1980's Morton Feldman composition,

at around 3 PM in the rain

in one of Sunderby Hospital's large parking lots