you arrived in kochani life-bruised and hung-over lucky to have escaped the clutches of bureaucracy the festival of mute poets barely a memory (lines nothing compared to roadside fields of rice (flags the evening's cool remedy: couples walking beside a tiny river (readings in a childrens' park where swings & miniature trains reminded you of certain times when a swing was all you needed those times before words took over the ends of which found you projecting your voice into darkness just a single бакнеж your only weapon in a war where disarming complete strangers was your only aim two girls in nosija dress were happy to pose for a photo or two but were too short for you to put your arms around them even though that was all you wanted to do (to shield these two girls who could be your daughters from all that the night drunk on itself could have thrown at them | there on the stage under arc-lights right in front of the camera while you stood there waiting for a flash to go off you felt a small arm curl itself around the small of your back & in that instant you wanted to bawl & missed your imaginary daughter so much she was almost real (the way flags make real the grand but obscure desires of nations or even towns that want to be nations (lonely like lost swallows in the dead season their flightpaths like tracer bullets in the soft but lonely sky (so you bawled your words at the tidy darkness anyway kissed the invisible city with your lips wide open then turned your back on the figments of applause only to be offered a bottle of cola by the girl in the nosija dress whose cheeks were as rouge as ads for products that no longer existed (like the cola which was a local brand you clearly weren't meant to recognise but which tasted sweeter even than that childhood you never thought you'd ever miss