A musician tumbles bicycle handlebars
  on a sidewalk and makes jangling music;
a gardener prunes branches, then shakes
  the Japanese maple to drop a few

Take this pic—take this
newly minted plaque.

For plaque, read empire. Say—puff puff
pass. Say—Baba, please. Zip up. You and your dirty

One hundred and eighty-two pages spreads her story like disease.
They send me one false daughter—Dracula—
and then carefully erase the scene.

        She’s been erected out of thin air—with the thin air of money.
In Konya—I scream—in Ulus—I embrace her—
while these papers spread her story like disease.

What remains of you beloved

                                        to haunt Self
like the tangled script of an ancient king
                speaking
across time

Dr. Redacted will tell me not to tell you
this, like this,
in a poem: how it’s all right, love, that we don’t love
living.

We look at the map. When we arrive in France from King’s Cross the fields are striated with barbed wire and it is raining.

After I make my home dark
I wander through the few
quiet rooms and let
the bright blinking eyes
of the continuing electricity

Once I walked
through a forest.
It was high
in the mountains.
The air was clear and thin.
The stars shone brightly,
the outline of the forest canopy in sharp relief
like the background
to a stop-motion silhouette fairy tale.

Now is my turn to speak, if I
can claim it, tipping myself forward,
letting my tongue fall with a soft,
an inward, an almost inaudible click.

It is desirable that as little happen as possible.
An aristocrat said this, knowing (I hope) it was hopeless.
Inevitably,
sporadically (like clockwork,
unlike clockwork), something
goes thlunk into the pond of you,
and the normal expires.