Imitation of Peace

Frank Guan

Now that anything you know is everywhere
An abasement can no longer be avoided;
The little facts, the facts are little,
Scaled to your dimension
By an animal you generated
Wishing for it, only indirectly.
Meanwhile distance is a foster
Mother of technique, and the cleaner hands
Pursued in water once no more
Than before
But there is more liquid to be spread
Around. For everyone with it
Bubbles from the mouth.

You are not an actor. There
Are roles available that you refuse
And in these circumstances it
Is under stable that you blame the one
At night who can forgive. Yet to insist
On purity to excess has no
Touch of god; too long a vigil
Overlooks how close the one awaited,
Latent, already merges with the
Customary shore. No map is possible
For it: we keep
Trying. Still, the fingers on the keyboard
Are another's property.

And how is it now
To see the themes you introduced develop
As the Cape of Good Hope
Spills out into Afrikaans.
He spoke, not knowing whether the
Guides were clear about that being
Criminal, that safe. The wholly washed out,
Thieves of earth's variety, come
Home untouched, armored in
Their lenience and own. Meanwhile, years ago one read
How guilt is inconceivable
Without pain and the assumption of
A law that governs it, the punishment one,

Now, plans to return
To as an interest long abandoned,
More resilient than hopeful,
Sits beneath the tree that becomes it, as
Just can't believes the mess
The gloom that manufactures
White leaves and red ink littering the crooked axes.
It is impossible
To trust in promised daylight, but
The building web
Will see you now. So he
Said that—it could just
As well be a bathroom

Where the spiders spin and cast white characters, alone.
The I, the in, the the;
Pearls and diamonds of a dusk-hour reduction.
We see a film together, leave through separate doors:
One leads into the identical theater,
Another to a crime scene, broad daylight,
And the third pulls images apart
Like Dido, whose deceit the natives tolerated
From a sense of honor, perhaps misplaced...
But who are we to judge:
Paralyzed for now, the dream
Of law would still appeal to us
If love, impure and full, could just dissolve the light curse of our vision.