Did the world squat down & push out
a nation? Was it a nation before the world
called it a nation? Do they have customs?
Do they honor the power cats have over ice?
Is their nation-birthing being observed? Hello, I’m Hans.
Do they have a way of identifying their citizens?
Do they brand them? Give them a number?
Are they immune to certain diseases?
Are pharmaceutical operatives surreptitiously
lifting during the night skin samples from their shins?
Will they have a military to defend their borders?
Perhaps they are an island. Can they defend
themselves against the sea? Are their children
born with missing limbs, heads fused to armpits?
Do they consider such children Gods? Heads of state?
Beings who are born into pain and, as a result,
capable of sensing rogue cellular structures
from great distances, capable of dreaming
their way into a perfect world, capable of
feeling the future of an entire nation
in a phantom limb? Do they have
a national language? If someone says “crustacean”
will another think “well-armored vehicle”?
If someone says “soda jerk” will another think of a
large, possibly obese child
attacking a coke machine with a crowbar?
If someone says “spirit” will another start
choking, uncontrollably, to his death?
Do they speak in clicks & soft exploding accents?
Do they sound, at large gatherings, like a popcorn machine?
Do they communicate with their strangely powerful shoulders?
Do they articulate panic by squeezing air
through their tear ducts? Does this cleanse
the national language? Is it on the brink
of extinction? Is a dead language a body
that has consumed itself
to the point of having no point? Is a dead language
an empty stomach, growling? Is a dead language
capable of speaking beyond its own grave, late at night,
when a low moon drifts
through the banyan roots and a child wakes,
unable to wake, and begins whispering for the sake of
whispering, for the sake of keeping time with his pulse?
Do they incinerate their dead? Do they make soap from the ashes?
Is cleanliness a way of honoring the dead? Do they,
as a nation, have a genetic weakness
for alcohol? Are they predisposed to sudden defecation?
And is the measure of a nation how they dispose
of their waste? (If an island, how sad for the sea.)
Do they have a flag? Is it a thumbnail, a painted tooth, a tattoo
on the eyelid so that, at night, the nation sleeps
as one nation? And the colors? Lampblack
to celebrate their powers of night vision? Peach, for sensuality.
Neon mahogany to symbolize their love of wood products?
Would other nations refuse to fly such an ugly flag?
Do their children reach 300 lbs before the age of eight?
What is their relationship to pornography?
If it was declared a national holiday
would it be a more productive nation? Do they flay
their grapefruits section by section
or do they surrender to a total mess?
Do they teach their children the delicacy of inhaling
low-flying clouds? Do they worship herons, or long
to break their legs? Do they worship, upon waking,
the first object they see — even if it’s themselves —
or do they move through the day as if it were another day,
not the one they’re living, the one with cars
shining quietly in parking lots, an infant sleeping
in a chrome shopping cart, a man hurling
his cell phone against a brick wall
and the clouds opening up, draining the sky blue,
starlings unwrapping a sycamore tree,
the long migrations about to begin?