For Trisha: whose heartbeat for her country, her people, and her past is the eternal ripple on a lake otherwise placid as glass.
THE CITY WHERE THINGS HANG
The city hums and bustles
Tall buildings fool and flashing lights glare
But from balconies above another truth hangs
Articles of life dangle in air...
Sausages in snaking links, pink sweaters, mops, bras, large fish split open wide...
A street of breakfast, a bridge honored by Mao
Gui Bei Lu and forgotten pagodas in quiet decay
But above it all swaying in the breeze slight
Hang things left to dry for use another day...
Chicken stretched unnaturally, mystery meat on rusty hooks, long underwear,
socks, rags a million shades of dingy....
An intense vegetarian with an agenda to share
Gives way to a museum: no psychopaths allowed
A story of musical understanding: Zhi Yin
And above things hand, damply, but proud...
Frayed jeans, empty plastic buckets, fatty pork, gloves, a hat, tan brooms made
of splintered sticks...
Dangling, Draping, Fluttering, Flapping... Hanging above the city.
GO
Warm soy milk and deep fried breakfast wrap: two hands full in a taxi go
A bus station, and a bus ride, and a city where things hang slip by a foggy
window
Tall buildings shrink to small ones space out like a gapped tooth grin
And a man sings: I moved heaven and earth
Why can't I move you?
Dirty ducks in a dirty dirty creek, women cleaning cotton on a broken sidewalk
go
Why doesn't she speak? Asks the aproned male chef to the Chinese girl with
foreign one in tow
Children giggle wildly, wooden chairs become their fort
And freshly killed fish swim in a spicy soup
Filling expectant stomachs
A walk through town past pebble piles in heaps to view a sludgy river go
Chinese couples in the grass and the unaccusing sunset watch the mucky river
flow
A boat, a bike, a man with fishing pole
A poem remembered and then
We become the scenery
In a clean home waits king baby and a tired grandmother quick we go
The baby night life has begun and we fear to miss the show
Endless high pitched children's songs, toys scattered on the floor
The baby entertains until
We can take no more
A TRIP BACK IN TIME TO A YELLOW DOOR
The taxi breaks we disembark
The present and the past collide
Thin dogs in crowded cages tight
Above them hangs their fate belied
Off the main street steps become mud
A peeling green door and metal latch locks
Out curious girls who hear whispers of pain
And through a small hole a family's history talks
A sideways glance: we were on your mother's side
Shouts a time puckered Nai nai shaking her cane
Her weathered face can count back the years
And memories and chickens appear in the lane
The sun shifts pale through a blue gray sky
A scroll of images revealed
Black cats and kettles and levees take rest
While carrots and cabbages sleep in the fields
Stories are told and a vision unfurls
Of a city which changes but some parts may never
The bicycle repair man has been there for years
But the weasels which hang are impermanent as weather
A walk near a river overflowing with trash
Proves relatives are always around the next bend
A raspberry allergy lovingly remembered
And a home where soybeans are ground to their end
And then...
Posted on a yellow door
A Chinese sign claims: For Rent
The broken dusty street outside
Speaks of lives all but spent
The house with the yellow door
What past could it hold tight?
The house with the yellow door
Dare future dreams alight?
TERMINATOR
Faded moldy photos in a worn album turn
A torn and yellowed slip of paper lists
Five birthdays but only four names labeled
The sister was given away: whispered
The swell of difficult decisions past crashes on the undulating shores of now
The dusty old bus away from the city shudders
Hotels and shops and street vendors fade
A slumped old man with holes for eyes in a broken chair sleeps
Outside fields and lakes appear and inside Terminator plays
The American movie like a phantom haunts the sparse Chinese countryside
Back in a cheap hotel room the word 'scuzzy' is defined
Old Chinese cartoons and theme songs remembered
La Ta Da Wang: Big King Scuzzy introduced
The coral colored room with shaking laughter fills
A history of sadness and joy like intersecting strokes of a Chinese character
THE ICE AGE COMETH
Black rice pudding in a thing plastic up
Cool instantly: chilled sweet sludge
The museum a prayer for warmth unanswered
Relics from tombs at home in the frosty museum air
Five sections reveal a rotten corpse forgotten
Surrounded by cambers of time destroyed riches
The east of ritual vessels; the mundane occupies the west
The north plays music; but the south screams for blood
Perched in a glass box awaiting curious onlookers
A tall bird with curved antlers grins
Stepped out of another world and froze to bronze in this one
Feet stamped, hands rubbed, the sky outside pregnant with snow
Snow falls and falls and falls and falls
The white silence descending brings hush to the city
Breath hands like low fog in a hotel room of ice
Snow drifts and sleep; dreams become vegefables
ASIAN SNOMAN ADVENTURE
There once was a girl
She walked out into cold
And onto a bus
The number unknown
Assuming circular routes
There once was a girl
Watched the city slip by
Piles of dirty snow
Soon alone on the bus
Driving into wilderness
There once was a girl
Soon alone on the street
Again in the cold
The driver walked away
And she found a new bus
There once was a girl
On another bus
All assumptions shattered
Watched a city appear
And a frosty lake fade
There once was a girl
On a strange warm bus
In a strange cold city
A stranger seeking heat
Only found in a Starbucks
There once was a girl
Observed the melting snow
Chinese snowmen
Being surprisingly distinct
From American ones
SICK: AN ODE TO HEAT
Hovering, shaking, shuddering over a porcelain hole
Your insides ooze out and your knees give way
Pondering reality as you stare at stained black and gray tiles
Outside frozen temperatures are matched by those within
Tension in all muscles and a numbing fatigue
Heat unable to hold
Every thought, every movement a vain effort of warmth
Remembering life before shivers a challenge
Mindful only of frozen fingers and cramped body
Insist on a room with heat
And the Sakura Castle looms majestically through discomfort
THE RIVERSIDE OF A DESPERATE WORLD
Mucky water shifts over dull mud like the haunting realization that your mother
has never complimented you.
A rusty boat glides into view like too many failures noted too frequently.
The gray sky above a paler version of the gray river below like a glance at
society that is dark becoming darker.
And a pink kite dances on the damp fishy air...
