My Picture: New Membership Card
Days Like This
Children
Neon Wonderland
My Picture: Hue, Vietnam.
At last a time to write poetry,
pleasure in a few lines and
put way outside the neon glow of the city.
Embraced as timeless ancient rites
hovering impatiently, underneath
an ancient whining sky.
Each day, I deal with teachers
digging for reflection.
Medical students scratching
for remedies displayed.
And English majors who think
all poetry is sad.
Now is a good time to be a poet.
To talk about words at the end of life,
and the gentle kindness of the human touch.
To cry out against the streetlights,
that scream their words at night.
Shimmering greens, blues and reds that
blanket the earth like bees around a hive.
And weave a neon mesh that
kills the power and hope of words.
Now is a good time to be a poet.
Days into nights
My Picture: Sunset in the Gobi Desert. Dunhuang, China.
I live alone in a nice apartment
and read the news every day.
Most days I write poetry
and listen to music.
Rainbow dreams
and triviality are always present.
But I sleep alone in the dark,
a shady sadness.
And dream of you,
shining through the ages.
What I need to know
My Picture: Xinxiang, China.
Some jobs you like,
and others are so dreary and pitiless,
that you stay in bed.
Motionless in time and
watching the sun climb.
But then,
many who stay in bed
have a history of grief.
An empty doorway,
and a faded family photograph.
Nothing to do with their job,
just tricks of the mind.
Memory by memory,
it is easy to forget that what’s here isn’t life.
And nothing can ever happen unless you say so.
That Summer Feeling
My Picture: Bronze Sculpture, 798 Art Zone, Beijing, China
I met two Chinese professors today,
older than me and dressed warm.
Kindly, unmarked and tender.
A drift of rain on a grey sea dawning.
A few small thoughts, barely moving between us.
Waves of age and gentle laughter,
autumn and dark winter on the long journey.
It set me on to wondering how to deal
with age, and how the hell to make it.
How can I still breathe with the trees,
challenge the mountains and dance with the snakes?
And still remember the girl in the blue dress,
waiting for me by her bedside.
Beneath a poets pen,
I hold these thoughts, day-by-day.
Knowing is far from enough, and
new forms from secret harmonies
skim the early morning silence.
In the evening longing has its own quiet place,
the nearest thing to being alive .
A Poet’s Thoughts
My Picture: Bookshop: Hoi An, Vietnam
A late night,
or early morning
listening to Gill-Scott Heron
singing about prisons
and a sense of loss.
And the words keep coming.
I know about loss.
Each day I struggle with the
echoes of another world, imported
into dialogue.
A tired pen trying to catch an
errant voice passing by,
struggling to find the right words.
Now, suffering autumn’s castigation
lamenting in my awareness.
And Gill-Scott Heron, now he is
singing about no rain, no rain
and how to survive on sadness.
I get this…..
The strange death of poetry
My Picture: Bookworm Bookshop: Hanoi, Vietnam.
“Do you write about love like Neruda?”
“Do you understand the nature of immortality
like Dickinson?”
“Have you read Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens?
“They are American you know?”
“What do you think of Dylan Thomas?”
“Oh…..but he is Welsh”
“And what about Sylvia Plath and the confessional
movement?”
“She is a woman, but an American woman right”
“Of course we cannot not accept you,
unless you tell us about Whitman and the
American epic”.
“Oh yes… one more thing.
We don’t want any poems that
caustically indict bourgeois poetic values,
or celebrate the desperate……
like that Bukowski fellow”.
“OK?”
“Yes Sir….”
Especially Time
My Picture: Mỹ Sơn , Vietnam
I remember the loss,
streams of tears
mounted on elephants.
Pits of empty words.
No more roots to anchor me.
No one to lay with me.
Overseas and drifting forever.
But I’m not going to cry all the time.
A Journey Home
My Picture
Some bus journeys are ordinary,
open windows and traffic running by.
People chewing the food,
watching the world photographed
on giant hoardings, the junkies junk.
Here, it doesn’t matter what Trump does
or how much oil and blood there is in the desert.
You just watch disinterestedly, and ask for more coffee.
The weather stays mostly the same.
And who cares about the Whooping crane
or the Eskimo curlew, they’re probably dead anyway.
So I listened to a podcast, David Byrne
on a desert Island and watched the world go by.
Passing unknown homes and people
screaming at each other.
Nothing left to fight for
and yet angry about the repeats on TV.
Another Day
My Picture: Cafe, Ho An: Vietnam.
A Wandering Poet 