When  profaned  like a country,  a lynch-mobbed | martyr who  sees his statue

and is moved | by it, as someone knifes herself into | her captor’s mouth, as doped-up

diplomats | bicker in line  for Holy  Communion | taken  so the  Lord is  within, hammer

| used to crack the skull, unlucky eggshell | the photographer snaps the night into

   its  known fiction, the country  slumps  inside | a tricycle  and  stares with  one

intact | eye, an exit  wound on his  scalp, let God | speak to  you  through  brandy  and

soda, let | Him reach the soul winking above itself | the planted grams the prayed-for

sign, our lives

   menaced by a dream

that like a sunset drops dead these bodies

float without mercy in idle gossip

The selves I’ve fabricated, dressed

.    in beach formals, slacks spattered with mud:

    we’re sending someone off, you know

who it is, and I’ve yet to learn the words

for grief, having until now coped

    only by drinking it away, I succeed

.    as a stale narrative; some have their heads

bowed, the others stare at a point

where the shadows on waves aren’t

.    distinguishable from the moving water,

    the sepia wind making the scene

as sad as a season finale, I’m my imagination,

    I’m whichever form I steal: to raise the stakes,

.    someone makes a speech

about children I’ll never have—I can no longer

.    rely on the torments I suffered through

    my childhood, too far back to elicit pity, the soul

forgetting where it sprang from,

of course it’s from the body, greatest

    source of unease, like heavy machinery

.    it backs away slowly, the motion beeper

rejects the sureness of disaster,

I’m willing to be seduced by it, therefore

.    this scene, this draft

    of what happens to me, deadline

imminent, and when the mourners amble back

    to the concrete road, you emerge from the reeds

.    and walk apart from the story on water.