It's the dryness that affects me
It's the smoke in the bar when the girls have gone home
It's the schools after the sun
It's a crossroad chasing its scissors through life
It's this tick that bores itself into the heart
It's a very long lean nearly invisible worm
and a window latch that never really closes
It's the ocean that sings in the telephone
It's like a leaky house by the highway black cat
the pastor in drizzle
It's the car that doesn't want to buy her the snow
that melts falling
It's the contract that won't get written
It's the sanatorium
It's the plug conducting current into the finger
It's an orphaned shepherd between two dialects
It's a phone book full of ones you knew
It's like not wanting to stand by the sign
that's parting ways
It's what we don't know
It's the paralysis when the conversation falls upon God
masking itself as destiny
It's small compensation
It's the verb forming beads upon the skin
It creeps across the rigor mortis
blooming on a corpse
It speaks of its own burial
like an injured child in the darkness
a bridal veil in the armoire
Is it the fool's skull
in the hand of the narcissist
who will die in a minute
Shield us with tomorrow
It's an economy somebody's freezing
Whip the spirit in alcohol
and him the one in black
beyond the door turns around and walks by again

Translated by Verne Moberg