Here’s… Johan!

While reading a book in midwinter,

Alone in the meadows that weave

Their rich and English tapestry

I felt a tugging at my sleeve.

My little daughter, Alice,

Was urging me to go

And meet the man who stood at the door,

So I went and said, “Hello?”

“Hello,” he said and smiled at me

And Alice smiled at him.

”I’m calling from IKEA,” he said,

“To assemble your homemade gym.”

Well, everyone knows IKEA,

The Swedish furniture mart,

That sell you things you put together

Which promptly fall apart.

“I didn’t order a gym,” I said,

“I know,” the man replied.

“But I have to use your lavatory

“So kindly step aside.”

He ran upstairs with frightful speed

And then we heard the chain

And then he called out, “I love your lav!

“I must come here again.”

The Ballad Of Steve Jobs & Lief Ericsson

Steve Jobs didn’t borrow,

He stole.

In fact, let’s not quibble,

He wouldn’t just nibble—

That just wasn’t Steve.

If he wanted to thieve

An idea with legs, he’d swallow

It whole,

Legs and all. Oh,

It’s often said,

You should never speak ill of the dead,

But nobody seems to have any obs

When people speak ill of Steve Jobs.

Nobody needs

To speak ill of the Swedes—

And they only speak ill of the Danes,

Who they think of as yobs—

Yes, Swedes can be snobs,

But they can’t be called whiners.

They’re brilliant designers—

A Swede never complains 

(pace the Danes)

Except if some swine

Steals a design

And in this case the swine was Steve Jobs.

In 2005,

(When Steve Jobs was still alive)

He badly needed a hit,

So he hired Motorola

To turn out the lolla-

palooza of phones,

But the Rokr E1 “iTunes” phone was shit.

(When he sees it he groans—

But Jobs still has a Jones 

For a phone as he sobs!

That’s Steve Jobs!)

Ericsson and Sony,

Sweden/Japan,

Had been working together for only

Four years when in 2005

They produced the revolutionary and elegant P900

(This was the year, you’ll remember, Jobs blundered,

When the miserable “iTunes” phone failed to thrive),

And the P900 was no flash in the pan.

Jobs hacked Ericsson’s emails

And poached Sony’s technical elite,

He stole their ideas and began

To develop a plan.

His intentions were clear;

The very next year

He presented a clone

Of the Ericsson phone

And called it his own.

Jobs said, “This is my phone—

I call it the iPhone.”

Friends said, “Lief, you must sue! It-

’s not fair! ”

No, Lief, don’t you dare!

Don’t grapple

With Apple!

If you do, you will rue it!

He has lawyers in mobs:

That’s Steve Jobs!

*     *     *

Steve Jobs is dead and gone,

His knell has been rung,

But his lawyers live on—

Apple’s now suing Samsung

For stealing the look

Of the iPhone Jobs took

From the Swede…

Traveller, take heed!

When you come

To Stockholm

Leave your iPhone at home! 

Möjligheter för alla I den svenska filmbranschen!

At the end of The Seventh Seal,

a film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman and rel-

eased in nineteen fifty-seven, Jof, the cheery

idiot actor cursed with second sight, wakes bleary

on a bright morning under a sky

so recently washed clean of the Black Death it’s not yet dry

and as he potters round his little caravan

preparing breakfast for his little family, the little man

sees - and calls Mia, his idiot wife blessed with bland

good sense, to see - Block the knight and Jöns the squire

and all their friends silhouetted against the fier-

y sky, holding hands and dancing up a distant hill-

side to the music of the piper (who was still,

as ever, bringing up the rear), drawn from the front

by a figure in a dark cloak, and tells her with a grunt,

“Their strict Lord Death bids them dance,”

to which she throws him a sideways glance

and replies with good-natured derision,

“Oh spare me, not another fucking vision!”

It’s a little-known fact that Max Von Sydow

and all the other actors on the show

had left for the day when cinematographer Gun-

nar Fischer caught sudden sight of the sun

as it fell behind the hill and its red glow started to suffuse

the sky and cried, “Ingmar! A light too good to lose!

Quick, get the actors!”, and when there was none

to be found, a man and wife out cycling with their son,

two lovers and three farmer’s-boys were bundled

quickly into costume and trundled

up the hill before the sun could go in

to create the most terrifying tableau in

all of cinematic history -

Sweden, land of opportunity!

Concerning Idaho

All smiles atop the ocean wave,

We leave the land behind,

I turn once more to scan the sky

With Idaho on my mind.

The time has come, the Captain said,

To break the ties that bind.

I nod, a trifle tearfully,

With Idaho on my mind.

The blizzards come, the blizzards go,

The blizzards make us blind:

We sail into uncertainty –

And this is what we find.

I hurl my clothes off on the deck

With one thought on my mind:

If only Idaho could see me now –

But that fucking dog is blind.

Oxenstierna Faces Down The Pessimi Exempli

The eminence grise that springs to mind

Is Richelieu, astute even at prayer,

But the Swedes boasted a contemporary

Who was, arguably, even greyer.

Axel Gustafsson Oxenstierna af Södermöre

(Whatever you do, don’t call him Gussy)

Was, when it came to politics,

Elaborate I’d say rather than fussy.

And in this regard he presided

Over Sweden’s victorious campaign

To bugger the burghers of Germany

And reduce the power of Spain.

Imagine what would have happened

When King Gustavus died

If God hadn’t had the wily

Oxenstierna on His side.

Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper

Is adamant about one thing:

The whiff of revolution

Threatened every Queen and King

In seventeenth-century Europe,

Where we set our tale:

The execution of Charles in England

Was but a preliminary nail

In feudalism’s coffin.

Thus threatened with the rise

Of the va-nu-pieds, Oxenstierna

Saved the throne with compromise.

Some say his legendary deftness

Was virtually unique,

Such that Sweden remains a kingdom

Even as we speak,

Though he felt that Queen Christina,

In spite of her fine regalia,

Might have made gains less exiguous

From the treaty of Westphalia,

Had she listened to him more carefully,

Like guitarists heed Bert Weedon,

But she never – and that’s why things are

The way they are in Sweden.

En Älskare Reser Norrut

If the weather gets any worse, I’ll spend the night in Skellefteå.

I can get snökedjor fitted in Umeå.

If a gloso with blazing eyes came out of the skog, 

And even if its borste were razor-sharp,

And if it chased me all the way to Gällivare,

It wouldn’t prevent me from returning to Gnarp.

When Hannes and Gunilla spent the summer in Harnosand,

They went fishing one day on Sundsvall Fjord.

A nordanvinden came down the Bottniska Viken,

And the lovers were both pitched overboard.

Iskristaller are the frozen tears of sjövættir;

The coast-road out of Ornsköldsvik is thick with spökyttare;

The dimma off the mörk havsvik bears drauge att skrömta—

Hannes and Gunilla are kärleksfulla strandvaskare.

If the weather gets any worse, I’ll spend the night in Skellefteå.
I can get snökedjor fitted in Umeå.

Report From The 2012 Seoul Conference On Dietary Illnesses In Horses

According to experts meeting in South Korea,

Inadequate forage, or forage of the wrong

Sort, can lead to incontinence and diarrhoea.

Seoul University’s Professor Kang-ho Song

Says horses are by nature foragers of hay,

Unafraid of forage poisoning,

And in the wild spend several hours a day

Foraging.  Dietary specialist Dr. Dong-hun Jing,

From the School of Veterinary Medicine in Suncheon,

Elaborates: “Vegetable matter spoils easily,

And a horse in search of a tasty luncheon,

Can find himself instead with a case of ludan-chi,

Which is Korean for botulism.”  Not everyone at the conference

Is Korean. Many attendees are not even Asian

And some have travelled half the world’s circumference -

So it is thoughtful of Dr. Jing to provide a translation.