Lo the ghetto lark puffs out a ditty in the cucumber glow
of the BP filling station sign tonight I should be in Taipei
with you I’m not in Taipei but isn’t it easier to adore you
for the fact you aren’t around like a bumper crop prefigured
in a blank field by the idle farmhand in winter alone
who is me now wheeling the Ford through this and every
adjacent county you aren’t resident in when you’re landed
at Pudong at Orly are in a railcar of the TGV these messages
you send I read and read again as if the letters made better
than a dumb phonics as if the slim brick of Gorilla Glass®
in the cup holder could make the vapor your mouth makes
the way a beached conch makes the rush of the sea
which is a myth and bad analogy though when I reply
you become the Aegean I sink my sheet music into
these notes I send jingle and fidget in your shirt pocket
or better your pants pocket! whatever time zone country
code you inhabit my dispatches ping into your couchette
your hushed museo your distant kabuki its audience lit up
sudden then hissing like flares sprung over the countryside
I traverse now knowing what the flare knows its only effort is
in arresting your attention these thumb–punched confessions
I transmit to you in Beirut in Khartoum or in San Sebastian
I should pull over to type them but I don’t pull over I go
faster past radar patrols and dashboard cams past local law
and local trooper and those sexless analysts at the NSA
who sit awake all night intercepting your reply
my love they couldn’t possibly apprehend it!