Translated by Annie Prime

You have to imagine Sisyphos is happy.
Pushing along his baby buggy.
Writing his weekly review.
Hades is like Twitter: the other.
Hades is like Tinder: the same.
Hades is a never-ending haiku.
Where demographics meets demagogy.
Where TV series are the new novels.
Trapped in near-illegible diagrams.
From a market research study.
That they call you about at dinner time.
Is hell an animated GIF
that was hardly funny the first time round.
Is hell an open plan office.
A mailbox with no spam filter. Pling!
Are you a climate debate denier?
Test: Which Ensign Stål character are you?
It’s lucky I’m a genius.
It’s lucky the general public
has a perfect ear for irony.
In hell. Inferno. Well? Hell, no!
In hell there are debates on poetry
but nobody remembers any poetry.
All there is to read is editorials.
All there is to read is copy.
All there is to read is user licence agreements.
All there is to read is rejection letters.
All there is to read is milk cartons
with milk past the sell-by date
about a millennium ago,
when the tetrapack was first domesticated.
In hell they show a live feed from heaven
24/7 with quite poor picture.
All in all figurative language
not very good in hell.
However modern they might think they are.
Because hell is just a fad.
But what a fad it is!

About Malte Persson

Malte Persson is a Swedish author. His first book Livet på den här planeten "Life on this planet", a novel, was published in 2002. His subsequent two books are collections of poetry, Apolloprojektet "The Apollo Project" (2004) and Dikter "Poems" (2007). Persson has been said to belong to modernist group of LANGUAGE-poetry forming around the Swedish literary magazine OEI.

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Litro#152: World Series: Sweden print fiction print poetry