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The November Night

A dull machine-hum’s standing waves
hold the house in hypnosis
as they pass through matter with their geothermic infra,
leaking a drone
across millennia of unruly dreams,
and wrap our naked bodies
in their obstinate murmur;
their wordless night-bardo;
life heavy & horizontal,
Norrland white & wide,
the forests padlocked for the November night;
my face flickering in the dark
like the pale light of a smartphone

I am old,
hear the years downshift
and the days hesitate;
see visions in half-light;
words crawling across thresholds
like soldiers from trenches in Ukraine,
while a pair of cats encircle the essential

The bed’s base shrills
beneath the body’s torque;
the lamp quick to suck up all light
and make darkness blind:

This phase is utterly unsculpted
when I take hold, take over, rise,
grasp hammer & chisel, overshadow,
hewing coarse & wild at sleep’s outskirts,
let my face shine,
my eyes cut-torch
through the sand-blind fields of the humanless,
where I hear them sink
through the past’s bitter chamomile tales
as my chisel carves from our hardened truths,
freeing the glorious bedrock-monster
that bleeds the vile dandy-knights

I let my face shine its hard frost,
let the water rise high above the fences of the moment
and freeze bottomless;
hear the cowards gargle & drown
with ice & proverbs in their throats
as the chisel rises
over heaven’s black granite
and sings the corpses deaf
in their sealed burrows

Poetry by Ingvar Loco Nordin