Here’s a store with sugar decorations

and a 112-kilo heavy gel snake. Here’s

clothing designers and music creators

and authors and handicraftsmen, theaters

where you have to wear evening dress, operas

played to soaps, here’s the slums where

people are killed and robbed and raped,

where artists stand in large ateliers.

Here’s a cop on every corner. And a

surveillance camera. For our safety.

Here’s an almost dead man by a lamp-post,

begging for drugs. Here’s poor people

overcharging for false branded products.

Here’s a café with family size ice creams. Here’s

a museum with animal skeletons. Here’s

a museum with stolen objects. Here’s

a museum with art. Here on the sidewalk

is a piece of paper and pieces of meat.

Someone looking for their cat.

Someone looking for their children.

In a Buddhist temple a monk is meditating

and begs for mercy to see through the illusion

In a church the dead in a fire are honored

and the priest begs for mercy. In a synagogue

two scholars quarrel and begs for mercy. At an altar

consecrated to Kali a priest begs for annihilation and mercy.

In a mosque an imam begs for reconciliation and mercy.

Here’s a park with a zoo and a pond

with people who jog around. Every kilometer

there’s a new ice cream or candy stand. Here’s a

young man fulfilled by his ideas about

the city. Here’s a young woman who is fulfilled

by her ideas about the city. Here’s the Italian

blocks, here’s the Spanish, here’s the Russian,

here’s the African-American, here’s the South American, here’s

the financial district, here’s the whore district, here’s the blocks

for people with small dogs and large furs

or so it seems, here’s the historical, here’s the museum mile.

Someone says that it is the most integrated

city in the country, the most multicultural.

Here’s a bar where you can drink booze.

There too. And there. And there. And so on.

Here’s a sausage man that sells pretzels.

Here’s a savior that screams about hell. Here’s

a fat man without shirt who scratches his armpit.

And here’s the library with the vigilant lions

at the stairs. Here’s a bookstore over five

floors where everybody is welcome. Here’s

tea and coffee and pastry with cream which tastes

like bacon. Here’s the torch woman at the inlet. She

is going to be a big event for visitors.

Here’s the highest building in the world

but no more. Here Donald Trump lived.

Here Woody Allen lived. Here Nicolas Flamel

lived. Here I live in a hotel. Here’s a hockey rink

with rood-loft that take many thousands of people.

Here’s the department stores that could supply

an entire world. Here’s the photo opportunities,

here’s the family opportunities, here’s the beach,

here’s a man who eats 73 hot dogs in ten minutes,

here’s the carousels, here’s the park with an absolutely white head

that’s protruding from the ground. Here’s the t-shirts

and the mugs that say “I Heart the City”. Here’s

the quiet hotel rooms, here’s the messy young men,

here’s the messy young woman. Here’s the

night clubs, the jazz clubs, the blues clubs, the

discotheque and the cellar theatres.

And here, here are the dead under a large field.

Peter Nyberg Mollung, born 1974 in Skogstorp – Sweden, is poet, literary critic, essayist, translator and senior lecturer at Jönköping University. He funded and worked between 2009 and 2019 as editor in chief at Populär Poesi, a poetry magazine that in 2014 was honored as one of the best magazines about culture in Sweden. Peter Nyberg is a prized essayist who has been published in a wide range of papers and magazines. He has published twelve books and eight translations from English into Swedish primary of poets from Wales and Ireland. The poetry work is spread in a variety of journals and translated into Chinese, English, Bangla and Spanish for example. He currently lives and works in the society of Norrahammar.