This text also appears in the photo captions, so if you want to skip right to those, it's mostly there for your enjoyment.

In Northeast, my most beloved of neighborhoods, stands the Wat Lao Buddhist Temple. I saw for sale signs on it recently. There's some fairly straightforward dragons on it. There's artist's information in Lao and in English:
Mpls Sept 9, 200_ Arted(?) ) BY The Monk VANXAY DAYSOMBATH.

In its state of post-for-sale abandonment someone has crudely decapitated the dragons The Monk Vaxnay created. This is on my route home, so I've seen these sad monuments a lot lately. I know it is not particularly Buddhist of me to be angered by this, to assert my attachment to mere objects so completely. Though I am not a Buddhist, I have affinity for the details of their faith and practice and I feel like I grasp some of the concepts. But I am saddened at what looks like vandalism. If this is the result of anything but some kind of ritualistic removal of the remnants of the temple after the departure of its monks, I am viciously outraged. And the shadow in me rises up in my anger at the thought of my people, my city, reaching out and whacking at this house of worship in the absence of its tenders.

Not knowing what else to do, I make self portraits. My angry shadow looms, hunched over the broken pieces of dragon. I imagine youths with sledge hammers. No. What savage vandal carries around a sledge? Not some kid, some vicious creature with an Agenda. Now I am the head, a shadow head upon the dragon, a temporary replacement, bearing my teeth or I have raised up on my haunches, my head swallowing and swallowed by the snake's, I am ouroboros I imagine myself as the fantastic creature itself, my own head in pieces upon the ground, my body tilting, tipping falling, about to join the debris upon the dry hot earth perhaps in breaking I can bring the promised rain.There we are, a lidless eye amid the undergrowth, our bones exposed to sunlight, my gilt adornments hold a memory of sunlight on a distant mountain I am spilled out, my body pushing out crumbling remnants of my former glory. I am Mogala the dragon I spew the memory of naga into the world. I am rubble now, my shoulders, my breast, all armored beautifully beneath my pondering head, a crown of daylilies my heart and spleen at the meeting place of red remnants and bitter dandelion greens my liver my living organs gray and white stones, a thatch of dry grass in the place my sex lies, sweet red drops of color upon my thigh, my leg, as from a bloody wound upon my heart, my head, my beautiful warriors shoulders. when will I rise from my broken beds, my seat of small white stones? when from the memory of myself in contemplation of no self? my shadow a mirror of the void, my loss of myself among the swiftly climbing grasses, not looked for not mourned?

Thank you for the vote earlier: I also tested the new "unsubmit" feature. So I don't know if your vote goes away or not when I re-submit. We'll see!