You¹1 are born; you²2 wake in an alter-dream; you³3 inhabit
the middle photograph in a time lapse; you⁴4 are contingent
on era and event, their bubble; you⁵5 come dressed head

to toe in the dirt of a cultural substratum: a disguise,
a tarring, a meconium, which means the fresh shit
of a newborn; you⁶6 believe in a cousin of the word shit,

whose root means to cleave, thus conscious; you⁷7 learn
to believe as if to convince, convince as if to say: it is
different here; you⁸8 go to a shooting range here, launch

discs of orange to kill, clay pigeons cleav-
ing like roses; you⁹9 are meant to shoot; you¹⁰10 wonder,
from a formal perspective, if who shoots whom matters;

you¹¹11 watch the world violate and take any agent;
you¹²12 are unsurprised when you consent to be an agent,
that, as you¹³13 drop bodies into the trash, agent of enfolds

into a superstratum of language; you¹⁴14 believe the statute
whose beauty is violence; you¹⁵15 choose to put yourself
beneath its flag; you¹⁶16 sew your passport to your belly

just for reference; you¹⁷17 play the upright citizen in a dream;
you¹⁸18 believe in the common good not knowing common
nor good; your¹⁹19 hands clamp treacherous and intransitive

gerunds to your chest; you²⁰20 open your mouth: clay pigeons
exit; you²¹21 question what it means by open, if opening only
scratches deeper strata, subtracts blood by zero; you²²22 touch

your humanity and find it is an open set; you²³23 fumble
for the edges and discover only pauses, commas; you²⁴24
compass, being alive, an elaboration of immiscibility

against antithesis; you²⁵25 feel yourself near the inhuman,
yet in approach, gulp the unimaginable; you²⁶26 cover
your body with filth and down, glued with rice flour,

spit; you²⁷27 submerge one language in another; you²⁸28 enter
the river and do not drown; you²⁹29 grow out of soil; the dead
enrich you³⁰30; you³¹31 watch growings turn into growings,

drownings turn into drownings; you³²32 are the common you³³33;
you³⁴34 wake again as a citizen of the middle photograph;
you³⁵35 become a digit giving account of what is here,

in your stratum, not elsewhere; you³⁶36 situate your distance
from paradise; you³⁷37 clamp violence into beauty, which opens;
you³⁸38 open your mouth to the pigeons, who shyly understand.