To my great-grandfather who exists in me

as a ratio of nose-to-mouth, blueprints for which

lie within that withered photograph of the gaudy

bridal feast, full of buildings and no doors.
I am travelling back to you as a tragic mime at your nuptial

hour, to you I long to announce my recurring nightmare:

kind of like the dream of the haunted stage

but without the costumes, without feeling like Gilles, 
no sequence of embarrassments, no. I shall describe it for you.

Imagine writing a poem titled “Nostalgia” in a glass carriage

a hundred years into the future, and now imagine

the glass carriage as some kind of metaphor 
for the transparency of your hunger. And for what,

for whom? Plausibly it’s my desire for another great

memory machine, with flashing eyes, no snooze alarm,

runs only on steam and purple rice. And so here I am
along a road I presume is caked in dirt. Me, a dust mote

among the scrolling dragons on the tablecloth, the wall hangings

and the window shade, the textiles, the flags. You don’t know it

yet, how the recipients of your present’s future wait
at the end of a sentence, punchline of modernity’s

grand joke, the one that starts with the bar and ends

with a peace conference, tries again from the top and does the

pun with the ears in the cornfield, their uselessness.