The Semiotician Abroad
                                   by John

When he found himself
washed onto strange shores,
the signs of the empire
were always already known to him.   

The foreign only an inventory
of reality effects and discrete incidents.
The whole world reflected
in each bowl of bright colored stew,
cranky pachinko parlor, or narrow stationery aisle.   

But how can the world have felt familiar
… when he saw his own unique being as an impossible science?
… when his own past was experienced by other selves so fleeting, so obfuscated?
… when his memories belonged to another in the dark, viewed through a lens obscured? 

He is left a text without a code
– a book that refused to allow itself be read –
leaving him, as he started,
– irreducibly –
alone.