Jesus and Buddha duking it out
like a street market sideshow, duking it out
over a cardboard house.
Jesus, his refrigerator beard
dodging Buddha's fists,
his dirt-washed shorts,
hiding behind his Bermuda shirt
(where, once he took a holiday),
red with Buddha's stolen tomato.
Buddha, in his army coat and buzz,
taking off his sunglasses,
telling him he should have been
in Nam, 'cause there's salvation,
and I don't know what he means,
and the shoppers don't care what he means,
getting their fish for the day,
lunching on the Bành Mì Thit.

Buddha told me it was
in my mind.
If you think hard enough,
in your mind,
you can leapfrog over the maze,
as long as you're facing east.

If you're confused, running through the streets
with your empty ghosts,
if you see enough to not see them clearly,
there is a place that is not a place
where they spend their welfare checks,
where it is too dark to care that
Buddha speaks his language
and Jesus speaks his language
and the congregation understands only
the ritual clatter of two dollar pieces on the floor.
The sermon you will hear is the silent sermon,
yelling deep into the darkness,
then dying, a whisper.

When you run into Jesus
on your way back to the station,
this is what you do:
say "Không biet nói Tieng Anh"
and if he says back "Tôi nói Tieng Viet"
mutter something about the maze
and run.

It does no good.
The earth has lost its time.
There is no time
for a cracked hourglass, searching for
fragments of fragments, the dispossessed
are too busy possessing, the lost
search for drug money.
Somewhere, somehow, someone
is remembering to forget a world of forgetting,
as Jesus begs for fish 'n chips,
and Buddha rests cross-legged
below a statue lion, smoking a pipe,
laughing randomly at a joke nobody sees.