i'm sitting here writing a poem
(or at least pretending to) while
a photographer shoots me with
a wide-angle lens. of course it's
fake - this isn't even my office,
rather the media lab at yeonhui
in north-west seoul, a thousand
miles from home(s), months
ago, a million species of weird-
ness, like a bastardised poet-model
(po-mo) whoring myself out
for that fabled publicity shot.
the camera flashes, blips, whirrs,
a semblance of a shutter, a studied
pose, the stack of books as props,
the obligatory globe. looking
at the camera now, as i write,
is harder than it looks. somehow
it still feels fake ... especially
in close-up. can the viewer see
what i'm writing here and does
anybody really care? these are
the 'travails' of the modern writer
distilled into one single stream
of consciousness, etched in pencil.
the shoot is done, it's time to go
but fuck it - they'll just have to
wait until my final line is written:
#fml
