Picture: http://www.news.com.au
Sunshine on my shoulder
Music
A voice within
My Picture: Helping a friend…..
The young woman asked me
“Why are you a poet?”
It was not a difficult question to answer.
I told her about the world being silent,
but for the gentle sound of a warming wind and the fluttering rain.
She looked confused.
Her eyes, so expressive
like a dangling drop of dew.
So I told her
“I am just glad to open-up and meet the thoughts of the past”
My Friends
My Picture: Terracotta Army, Lintong, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China.
.
This one lives with his mother,
and has never kissed a woman intending to please.
This one has no boyfriend
and thinks her legs are fat.
This one listens to Jay Chou,
on secret mornings driving back to his wife.
But at least his students are happy.
This one likes Micheal Jackson, and
practices moonwalking late at night,
alone and hidden from the outside world.
This one is a policeman
who thinks Britain is still great.
And the other, abandoned by wife after wife
finds hope in a cheap bottle of French wine.
This one wants be a professor,
but finds Charles Bukowski
rude and sexist.
And this one wants to be a poet
but is bored by the romantics,
and almost everyone is a poet anyway.
These are my friends
the poet, the teacher, the policeman, the professor… and me.
Romantic Interlude
My Picture: Xiahe, Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Gansu , China.
Romance has no part
in my life right now.
It can be cruel and merciless,
especially in another country.
Seasons have come and gone
and whatever the heart,
there seems no use for an aging poet.
There is an outside chance,
in this age of imagination.
At least, a will to love
and a survival to keep.
So, through me
with words that crash on the hard water
and dim lit backstreets,
I will find an answer to this stalled heart.
The thoughts that poets have
My Picture: Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, China.
It seems at times I can’t be older.
A white haired smile
and a fossil imprint,
infused with a hunters despair.
Exotic summers still remain,
and winter days without
a breeze are wildly wept on.
I still remember how the stillness dazed.
As night pushes into day,
I taste the fragrance of your flesh.
A flower soaked in persistent rain,
a tiny track in fallen snow.
Each step, and again is silent.
The tragedy of dreams
My Picture: Xinxiang, Henan Province, China.
Like most others
I have come through
sadness and
loves deep nights.
And let them have their moments.
Now I see through
the wasted landscape,
and broadcasts
that say nothing.
Lamenting only a
laugh and an echo passing by.
A grey cry of the future,
is enough to make things grow.
And suffer the castigation
of my thinning dreams,
now so quickly dispatched.
Of life and death
My Picture: Books I used today.
Arguments come and go,
but they are always
hidden in some place.
Cunning counterfeits
trying to make
their way home, to take
root…
I had an argument today,
about sub-health
and the cause of disease,
I think.
Nothing it seems is familiar,
and treatment
is always rearranged.
They told me the wisdom in the world,
I felt like a dizzy moth
confused by all the lights.
Staring at a diseased gift
that you have, you still have.
Putting in the Work
‘My Cafe’: Xinxiang, China.
We sat drinking coffee,
both making our way home.
He told me about a lost faith,
and working 17 hours a day.
No proof of skill or
dreams that keep time.
Only a red-eyed wake
each morning.
I thought some jobs you like.
Others are so dreary and pitiless,
they make you want to stay in bed.
And think about the
waitress you met last night.
And if God has a name.
Street Shadows
My Picture: Frozen River Fen, Taiyuan, Shanxi province , China.
Shadows cast by
neon lights, ripped plainly
from the future.
A world now
only of memory,
and frozen snapshots
of unclaimed territory.
Each moment experienced
more violently,
with every sleep
secured.
Some people
are never wrong,
and others yearn for love.
Idle comments are
left hanging,
on an empty white space.
I find myself watching
endlessly, searchingly
for whimsical lines
and a poet with all the answers.
But in the end, it is left to me
to tell it as it was.
Love Confronted
My Picture: Wall Painting: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
A Wandering Poet 