The Balcony

 

National Day, June 6, 2020

 

Do not think it will be summer  

unless someone hurries up

Hi. All operations that are in Sweden

or called Swedish

All that is in its effect, in its

participation, collaboration, explosion, all

standing there on the balcony in inactivity

in the summer and making a little summery

because then the flowers will come soon

If I should now write a poem for National Day

I'm going to write it badly

fantasy gets to rhyme with comfort coterie

and the lines need not have brushed their teeth

and lie still, but with

whitewashed no washed hands

or quite clean I point out

  

summer and making a little summery

a marked distance or resistance or longing

internal crowding depth

at home, as I sink into the water,

bathing feels like a hug almost, like summer,

I fall asleep in the bath but wake up - Sweden!

I will not be cute in the National Day poem,

above all I will not be a good mother, I am going to be

an awful mother, I have so many children, they are everywhere,

the thing with children is that one

has to clean up so terribly much, it never ends, but the great thing

is that parenting gives a carte blanche to decide

because then the flowers will come soon

Wash your hands children, wash them until they bleed, you

can't get hardened fast enough, Sit still, I tell them, they swing

lackadaisically on the chair with their feet on the table, what

happened to you, I ask them,

weren't you going to be warriors, forget it the children laugh,

we're not going to be soldiers, we do not want to

shape our protests in line with the tradition of war

And the strawberries I give to the children

 

  Sweden! When a narcissist walks by

the birds quit their singing

would you have noticed?

because I think they can have it

 

Who dies on a regular day? Who is being sacrificed? 

 

Who is suddenly just gone?

It's such a weird togetherness

that spells being apart

Sweden do you want to be as usual again without covid-19 and

eat potatoes, a sausage from the pot in peace and quiet?

Sweden, this is just too stupid, Sweden, I can hardly even say it, 

I'll pick another name instead, Maria

for example, which is the first name of most Swedes according to 

the registry of the Statistic Central Bureau, Maria as mother 

or no-mother,

you are at least eighty-two thousand, I write to you

from the depths of statistics, I write

to you over a bowl of potatoes

and mosquitoes that swallows take

 Refrain reads the recommendation

refrain and sweep the issue of the poem, the nation,

the mandatory forms of family and resistance under the rug;

okay but then I'll lie myself down there too and write,

and I write to speak to a nation is to say something to a 

nothingness sworn by kings and murderers, with invisible boundaries

densely perforated by the taxpayers' coin tosses, with silent borders

in the form of bureaucratic inaccessibility, legal loopholes 

and habitual utility lingo

because then the flowers will come soon

We can sing and pretend that in the poem anything can happen

but it almost never happens

Sara Ahmed writes about the willful child, whose arm in 

the story of the Grimm brothers rises from the earth after death,

a willful child I think, and read on that

the power of the General Will can make it unbearable

not wanting what it wants. The General Will

where the kids can run around

 Well, says one of the children, but what does a generally 

healthly person cost

and a white one and a rich one? We calculate

in sacrifice currency, oppression capital and inequality 

bonus, the home schooling continues with grammar studies

The nation becomes a body that becomes a woman

Capitalism becomes a body whose blood is capital

which must circulate, at any price, otherwise

otherwise it will not get enough oxygen

Are we talking about a black body or a white, say the children, 

also explain the meaning in "going over corpses"

a Tuesday evening in June with

swallows flying

in the air we breathe

 

 

 You learn to read human bodies long before you later

can remember it

That is why it seems so natural then, I tell the children,

that does not make it right. Jean-Jacques Rousseau said

that the child must realize what it wants on its own because

the best submission is the one that maintains freedom

as a form. Like that the will itself is caught - and

the dream is being nurtured, to fully sink

into and be embraced by the General Will and the distance

is closed between how it feels and how it should feel

and you get to move into the familiar, into the Family

Happiness into the Family Will, the Family Company,

We'll take care of it says the Family, in the Family you know

exactly who you are with which assignment or at least who says so,

The general will of the Family is that you should voluntarily

wish as it wishes and the willfulness gets neutralized, as if by itself,

through a value-neutral force

if such a thing had existed

so that the flowers bloom

 

 The nation's roses sting. The nation's lilies of the valley.

Willfulness goes badly with the General Will

The willful steps out of herself as a symbol and muddles and

yaps with reality

you said

Svea said

Ulrike said as she maybe was about to put the children to bed,

she said addressing how to fight in the multi-frontiers war,

talking about trying to make it all work

Unheimlich schwer. Est ist unheimlich schwer
unless someone hurries up
Kids, humans are bacterial hearths, biological danger zones:

machines are not contagious besides computer viruses then

boomer, okay, okay, and all machines that people must touch

for them to work

One of the kids says Mom people too must touch each other

in order to work

then the flowers will come soon

 

 Children, I want you to work! Feel tenderly with your hands,

anything you may and can reach, feel stone and water, everything

that lives and gets warm, wood and wool and skin, and when

you wash your hands for twenty seconds that is as long

as you have to hug before your human bodies start to produce

happiness hormones
and I make such fun places

where the kids can run around

and walk as summer extensions of their mothers, out into

the everyday fires and jail of perception,

look there my little puppets go, they are so cute where they go,

with two meters in between, if I measure with my fingertips

from the balcony they are no more than two, three centimeters in size,

I myself am so unbelievably big in comparison, I sort of swell, this is normal

I tell them, that's sick, concepts of profit and mental horizon,

there is a line children, I tell them, you're crossing it,

the kids laugh and scream ice-cream-penalty,

the-ice-cream-penalty, I'm the one who instituted it, I

just don't know what leads to it yet, all this

 

 lack of order, I want to be steadfast but I only sound nagging,

they grin but inside them something is raging, they see,

of course they do, they notice, what is this world, what

kind of rulers are they, how can it be in order that everything

is not for everyone, that there is not as

much water in the stream
Water, I think when the kids have left home, soon we've washed

out on the water, how will it all turn out, I'm getting nowhere,

how am I going to provide for us in the future, I absolutely

cannot get sick

Do not think it will be summer  

When the General Will gets what the General Will wants the

distrust administration celebrates its triumphs, is this life, so

immensely futile, soon there are no other motives, soon we think

nothing of each other, but of our own gain, late capitalism means

mistrust, suspected poor food, suspected false marketing,

suspected hidden agenda, suspected rotten potato, you don't

hear what I'm saying because you think I'm speaking for my

own gain, for my own profit or profile,

 

 he said

I think what you're trying to say is

I said

I already say what I say

the children say

it easily

We'll get rid of the money

We don't need it, we can feed

the birds with money instead of feeding the General Will

unless someone hurries up 

later in the evening a tiny mischievous one comes sneaking, a drooping

fox under her arm though we already said good night she beeps

Mom why aren't you rich

if you are so smart?

I have a rich inner life, go to bed, I growl

so that it jumps and leaves

Maria, your name can mean the defiant,

it may mean bitter, from Hebrew Mar

or longed for, rebellious, from

arabian mr, mry, beloved, love 

makes the sky beautiful in the evening

but not everyone is allowed to breathe it

 Everyone is not allowed to breathe

this too is an order of nations

everyone must not breathe

not everyone has the same right to breathe

and the children come running in with the sun 

the children come in with strawberries and swallows and snow

but then they ask with worry 

Have you heard what the police did?

did the police press his knee against his neck and

he just lay there, pressed so he died?

Yes. And I think but don't say, "I can't

breathe" he said it over and over again for eight minutes,

"I can't breathe," and how is this phrase to be understood,

this phrase, which is heard everywhere, other than also 

as an expression of a general will's state-sanctioned 

murder of their own

We talk, the kids and I, then we hug a long, hard time