Singularitête-à-tête
Tired
like an anteroom lobby
in a repressed situation,
the body whispers
unintelligibly
The Toilet Man at Stockholm Central Station
looks at me
like an animal
that does not see who I am,
or does:
his gaze locks onto me
like a nervous weapon,
and follows my slightest movements
along the row of toilet doors
My head rests
in my cupped hands
between Vindeln and Bastuträsk;
the universe crackles in the skull-bowl,
the cosmos crackles
All humans are upstarts
in timelessness
and every leanness:
radio masts,
encoding genomes
through spiral galaxies
& conditional discharges:
flowing,
streaming,
fleeing
Beneath the setting
of the June clouds
the North Train lies
tight against its rails
and hums,
unnaturally still,
with faces
in its windowed body,
at long last,
at an indeterminate point
in space-time,
while the moment hovers
in the daylight
and the clocks lurch forward
on the spot,
like gymnasts
in the warm-up phase,
and human bodies carry on
inside their skin costumes,
one after another
or all at once,
as though radio-controlled,
decked out
in their summer preferences
on the third planet
of the system,
counted from
the average-sized central star
in the middle
of its statistical lifespan
The cloud base
feels like the roof
of a rolling mill
above the rascal train
when the day
is a think tank
and the standstill
of standing still
shrinks
into a singularitête-à-tête
as the train presses onward
and the speed increases,
and the distances
consume themselves,
like the magician
in the Land of India
who transformed himself
into a glass of juice,
which he gulped down...
The body installs itself
in the known world
to such a degree
that the handle
of the kitchen tap
does not quite fit the hand,
which recoils
from its metallic response
at the first renewed contact
in the north,
after the body's long absence,
in the hand's southern habit-grip
around another tap
with its bulkier handle,
in the proletarian kitchen
of the southern retreat
Yes, the body speaks up,
marks out changes
with small red flags
in the tactile realms
of perception
– but today I woke in the north
without that first moment
of uncertainty
about position
in time and space,
which so often startled me
fully awake in the south,
during my stay
Poetry by Ingvar Loco Nordin
Written on 2026-06-14 at 14:19
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