on a starless, tsarless night,
a Japanese story was shrieked with real feeling,
in the Italian tongue, as was right.
I pondered, “Thank Christ and his thirteen disciples
for that big screen with the Russian subtitles,
or I would be totally fucking confused.”
Tumbling outside with my brain cells bruised
into the mid-August near-arctic heatwave,
I sweated in the midnight sun
like a marathon-running fat nun,
then had to flop down before my feet gave
way, with the groan, “We’re still too far south!”
and shovelling ice-cream into my mouth.
