Idag överlåter jag min plats här under pausträdet till sommarens andra gästskribent (Londi räknar jag inte som gäst, för vi lever ju så symbiotiskt att man ibland inte vet vems ord som är vems – eller vem som är hunden av oss) – min goda vän Michal Moskow:

“Shall We. . .?”

Shall we go to Petersburg,
somewhere north
of where I live?

Shall we go to Petersburg?
Cruises are cheap
in the bitter cold of winter.

And what if we don’t make it
all the way to Petersburg?
Get captured by an iceberg,

frozen to the sea?
Why, then we’ll live there
forever, caught in a moment

of bliss and ecstasy,
on the way to Petersburg,
a living ice sculpture in the dead of winter.

“On Surviving a Month in an American Suburb
Or: Environmentalism is Dead and Gone”

Trash trucks of the mind
empty my life every morning.

Four o’clock, and the rest
of the world sleeps

as the trash trucks lumber, roar,
stop, reverse with beep beep beeps

down the streets and alleys
between the houses and picket fences

emptying the cans where neighbors
have deposited their trash

picking up dumpsters at the
shop on the next street over

discharging them with clangs
that rattle against my head

emptying my bed of sleep
emptying my mind of thought

evacuating life so that finally
it will exist no more

buried under mounds of trash
compacted by the machines

crushed by what the perfect suburban
families have tossed away.

©Michal Moskow July 31, 2005

Michal Moskow lives in Göteborg, Sweden, and visits Minnesota in the U.S.A. often but doesn’t often stay in the suburbs.