Amber

Photo by Natalia Soto on Unsplash

when i first awoke it was this the stars humming softly under this endless sky and dashing into your streets like frozen amber forgetting one thing and remembering another

what you have is an accident a glitch in the matrix that the japanese surrendered before they could reach your broken shores but what they left you left in perfection or even perhaps more than perfection you have molded it into sublime sterility

you woke my boyhood dreams of memory pierced into my heart like stigmata what it must be like to have your roots so firmly in tact. in the baked brick of your heritage you birthed the greatest terror of this nation then worshiped him for it

you praise the memory of your ancestry housing revolt and safe haven for the ailing retreating republic you say you remember — what do you remember? that when it was your own scourging you threw fiestas then knelt at his corpse

keep your amber streets i can visit any other time — to spit at the monument what is nostalgia other than the flat memory of what the state decrees