Land-grabbers drink to the health of the president of snails.
Snails’ president, a land-grabber himself, scoops up soot
from his purple liver & builds from it a nation that goes by
various names: Myanmar League, Terror of Laiza, Hepatitis B.

Himalayan tigers walk behind me. What do you think they got
to remind me? Now it’s raining in the middle of summer
& the rain tessellates People’s Square with road kill.
Something’s wrong if equestrian statues are still getting paid.

The flower-biting ogress, the first lady of snails,
puts a diamond-studded leash on her six-legged pit bull.
The dog eats looted gold. I wish it’d just explode,
its entrails shooting up against gravitational pull.

Every village is a shepherd, every villager a sheep.
Inside every sheep, a tombstone. Before you comb the hair
of one-hundred-year-old shadows, you’d better delouse them.
Would I want a house full of dead sparrows? No, I wouldn’t.