Not until I learned how to transform my childhood dreams into tomorrow’s crust of bread did I become truly successful at begging. Now I’m able to pick and choose, and there are only a few select areas I’ll work. Of primary importance is the presence of an electrical outlet. 

Sound rises. That is a law. I live in this law. I do not
                        want to make anything
                        that rises. These words

The truth is this bad been going on for a long time during
                                                                         which
they both wanted it to last.

  Is it because of history or is it because of matter,
mother Matter—the opposite of In-
  terpretation: his consort: (his purple body lies
shattered against terrible

It begins in blindness: taste of invisible ink;
black mouthful of discreet syllables,
punishable. Shrouded in touch, at the shut

When you wrote about Hotel Ikao to your mother,
eating rice and tea and tea and rice,
you were sitting again where tuners

He’s made her ordinary, spread her slim
seventeen years across this table,
measured her tight little head,

Monuments: They arrest the eye
like these twin tongues of ruddy stone
adorning Basel’s riverside.

Nothing melodramatic, it’s just when the sunlight
came in through the wired windows and laid itself
down on the green floor, it was nice, we liked it
there, then, playing our games. And like kids

I dreamt my love was lost, uncomforted.
He lay alone in Pavia, eclipsed
by fortune, by the catastrophic tides