There was blood and guts all over the road.
I said I’m sorry, darling, and rolled over,
expecting the slate to be clean; but she came,
she who was never alive became resurrected.
I saw her in a dream … a young girl in a qipao,
Bespectacled, forever lingering, thriving
on the other side of the world, walking in my soles
as I walked, crying in my voice as I cried. When
she arrived, I felt my knuckles in her knock,
her light looming over the city’s great hollows.

Hope lies within another country’s semaphores.
The Goddess of Liberty, the Statue of Mercy—
we have it all wrong—big boy, how we choose to love,
how we choose to destroy, says Zhuangzi, is written
in heaven—but leave the innocent ones alone,
those alive, yet stillborn, undead, yet waiting
in a fitful sleep undeserved of an awakening.