Popo Wakes Up

Since you’ve never worn a prison uniform
made of Siberian tiger whiskers,
or drowsed resignedly
on your predecessor’s ramshackle bone splinters,
you don’t know what it’s like to be North Korean.
And if that’s true, you can’t imagine what it’s like to be no longer North Korean.

Probably you have never woken up to find that everyone who sees you falls asleep, but it should require no great bound of mind to imagine how distressing this would be. No? Do you think someone of soaring-but-wobbly ambition would find solace in possessing true novelty in a world where the absurd is commonplace? Put like that it seems like a gift. It’s actually sort of terrible.

Okay, imagine that on the morning you turn into a nap you learn that the woman you’ve seen in your dreams for years turns out to be real and that she’s just been abducted by North Koreans. You would feel horrible, right? Would you enlist the help of a family of immigrant smugglers and try to rescue her? Popo Wakes Up is the story of a man who would.