Writing my postcards in a bucking cab
that jolts over well made rickshaw tracks
and is driven by a being of flab,
with nothing to describe but goats and shacks
or lorries that we overtake insanely,
is savourless, like the postage stamp backs
which taste bitter, like Anadin mainly,
and on their fronts display, beside the price,
a print of some old President, inanely
smiling as if to say despots are nice.

I didn’t spend long enough in Yangon
to write to friends of other things than vice,
and western postcard ways dissuade the moon
to be described in lunar eloquence,
reduced, as it is, to backcloth of cartoon
and lunacy, as is all permanence.
Instead I talk of waste-binnable things
like, “Having a great time” and “See you soon”.
A divet in the road, mid-sentence, flings
my nib across the surface of the card,
as if the word itself has taken wings,
ejected by the language I have jarred,
and flies to where articulation sings
and settles in the biro of a bard.