Instructions for Form 41-F

Down by the docks there’s a patch of weeds that blooms
into blue flowers smelling of rotting apples
and the wind that blew from your grandmother’s
rose garden through your bedroom window
on summer nights, after you were sent to bed early,
before it was dark outside.  Pick the flowers, give
them to the woman you love she’ll be gone before you
say you’re sorry for the terrible things you said to her
mother in the story you wrote—the one that was picked
up by a minor anthology even though it was little more
than a journal you kept after you graduated with a
degree from a prestigious institution, a raging case
of pubic lice, and an option to buy an early colonial house

for fifty cents on the dollar.
Go left at the bar with the broken mirror, find a
building with a child’s face preserved as a small smudge,
upstairs at the end of the hall there’s always a single bulb
humming work your way through a maze constructed
by slaves who carried stacks of magazines, purchased
from the corner, twenty-four hours a day for more than three

weeks.  At the center a short man wearing a hand-tailored silk

suit can sell you the papers proving you inhabit a nest for when
the tax-man comes running with a sack and a stick with a point
whittled into one end.  Slip him a five he’ll go after your neighbors

with the fury of  starving brown bear.