My goal’s to write a poem

in a language I can’t write. It would be

an elevated form of action,

​

a postmodern mischief, an ode

to my mother who thinks

she knows me. It would be unfriendly

​

and filled with broken flowers

and inadequate conjunctions.

It would be faintly Paraguayan if

​

there’s such a thing as faintly

Paraguayan or faintly anything. But

of course you couldn’t know—

​

who could?—and I’d amass

a gathering of faithful readers

in a lauded magazine and be interviewed

​

twice in the Paris Review. Perhaps

the New York Times. The point is

I’d be very famous, a concern

​

of those critics who can’t decide

what a poem actually is, arbiter

of language, often needled and

​

even sometimes villified. But they

would’ve forgotten the poem itself,

brutal and a refuge both, star, chemical,

​

futile, and irreverent, which is what

I want to be tonight—hanged by them

on a tendril in a quiet, foreign place.