A Few Things I am Working On

In the tradition of City Lights Books and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “I Am Waiting,”

I am working very slowly on a process

and I am working on re-acquiring the previously acquired

and I am working on the counter-offense, the protracted war, and the Kishi-inspired-insurgency that never ended

and I am working on my fingernails badged by reprints of Hamburg Fremdblatt and news of bombs over the Pacfic and the Manchukuo Wirtschaft

and I am working on my gumption such that a single text by a North Korean defector to Austria might bear attention, wielding as it does a hammer against eggs

and I am working on a trip to Lhasa by an old man in Beijing with visions of a wandering Panchen Lama in Nanjing long ago before those crimson robes became marked as possibly seditious

and I am working on tertiary traumas of Nanking as they spangle through pixels in cinemas once occupied by distant relatives of Iris Chang

and I am working on an incident tangled up in American MP bureaucratic speech and a military trial of nationaless men from Taiwan in Tokyo in 1946

and I am working on the possibly PTSD-inflected Japan-generated prose of a Dagongbao reporter in Shanghai in 1947 whose files in the Beijing archives of 1950 I have felt the span of white-out tape across, and felt across the back for signs like Braille and came to understand more tactically his thrashing received in 1957

and I am working on dead Koreans making other Koreans dead

and I am working on the fugitive Kanto army solider on the northern lip of a river called Yalu

and I am working on those books plundered from Yanbian

and I am working on keeping you interested

and I am working on interesting myself

and I am working on a sustainable identity involving the clef of bass and the style of Chicago

and I am working on working, the slabs of paper falling in great sheathes like the sound of a duel beginning in the tall grasses

and I am waiting for the ultimate translator to arrive as myself

and I am waiting to get the ultimate typewriter

and I am waiting for my edits to come in

and I am waiting for the semester to erupt

and I am waiting for my wrists to ache and for the open strings to thrum

and I am waiting for the sun to set

and I am waiting for the I-5 to vomit concrete

and I am waiting for the border to open

and I am waiting for this gate, this time, this guillotine of the clock to slow into sludge, as if a blowtorch of God had been applied to every dead factory in Detroit to make it living again