You’ve run
here, you thought you
couldn’t.
    Here,
fruit gladly obliges your gullible throat;
drown your guise of amiability, in the long run.
It is a society: you have
honey cakes,
saffron, slightly cold like salad. You have to try
the – and the –
but the cold could be shared; it tastes like
hair caught between molars.

The wind will read your palm like a dessert menu.
Your blood will be determined, though not by
letter but by norm.

The local accent is rinsed
with tears of navel oranges. (You have to wash
them, after you, like many others, have
run your tender fingers across their skin,
like ploughing through the vanities
and chestnut palettes of
faces on sale, on offer, on shelves.)

Flip the
desire to be white as milk,
like a page that has soured
in the warmth of a human cheek.

Standing out is surely not your job.

You learn to invigilate
the shadows standing too close
in line
on shapeless shores, for punishment
is pulse for retrospection.
Shouldering the wretched games
of instruction, legislation,
the code of an oxbow lake,
you are mandarin, sunburnt in
your alien wants for
More.

Your matters buffered, engraved:
still it exerts,
still it redeems.

For a pear still dreams of standing on its head,
             for a coconut should never be ashamed of its tree.