My copy.
Disco in China.
poems
Sunday Morning Moments.
My Hulusi.
For this Sunday morning, fate
has already brought me noise
and colour.
A wedding procession at 6:30 AM.
Two taxi drivers and a contentious
dispute.
And down the road
someone is practicing hulusi scales,
over and over again.
Music that is hard to grow to.
But from the clear morning sky,
and an unwrapped Sunday morning.
It is amusing to see how life,
past imperfect, spills out
and no longer screams of fear.
A Change of Habit
Angus Young (www,acdc.com)
A woman told me today that
I needed a girlfriend,
a Chinese girlfriend and that
she knew someone.
I ask her why?
“Some women like poets
and I think you are lonely”
I told her Bukowski said that
‘Love is a dog from hell’
“What has love got to do with it”
She said.
But then she told me she was not
sure about her friend.
I asked her why?
“Well, I don’t think she will like
AC/DC, and maybe she can’t
understand you”
So I asked her to tell her friend,
not to worry about how
we the fashion the future.
Or how many people come
together by slow degrees.
A Place of Solitude
It’s been fifty five years since this car dropped off Thích Quảng Đức in downtown Saigon, and now it’s sitting right along the Perfume River at the Thien Mu pagoda in Hue ( second picture, I took)
I took a boat trip to Thien Mu
in the ward of Hương Long in Huế,
to see a celestial lady.
The boat was run by a mother
and daughter, who offered me tea
and smiles that wanted us all.
Inside it was quite,
just the engine of the boat,
wet and gutted.
Another failed lung,
a small sound that was all sounds.
Always pleading with the perfumed
river and smiling seductively, the
daughter tried to sell me things.
T-shirts, postcards of old Vietnam
and oversized conical hats.
So I bought a t-shirt
with ‘Hue’ on the front.
Even though I knew it was too small,
it seemed the right thing to do.
There was no imitation of life,
just three people in a moment.
Awake to the filtered sunshine,
that occupies most of our days.
A Short Walk
My Picture: Taken Yesterday.
The feelings I get
when walking along
Da Dao Road
(Always for a purpose, usually
coffee and a place to write),
are the same as others
might have for more
important things.
Like meeting their girlfriend
or boyfriend.
Or just to be seen,
away from the barest of rooms.
I become quite inside,
as the beautiful Chinese girls
pass me by, always with a
smile, neither fanatic
nor mystic.
To note the beauty of the day,
is easy is this place.
A wide human spirit tinged
with the romance of it.
Just to feel better is good,
without needing a reason.
And by degrees
I continue my walk.
To Walk By Oneself
Early morning, I could not sleep.
A single moonbeam shot
through my window.
I listened to a podcast from the BBC,
about a 94 year old woman
living alone on Vancouver Island.
It was partly a choice, partly a
conspiracy of events that
brought no friends to her.
Now she is frail, with the seals and
wind flags as her only friends.
She talked about the pangs of the past,
the colours of the coast and thoughts of nothing.
And watching the belted kingfishers
solitary flights.
As I listened, I thought about my own loneliness.
Here, living in China.
And why there is no one here
to remember with me.
There was a sadness in her voice,
not caused by being lonely.
But by a sadness that is ordinary.
The smiles, the anger, the misunderstandings,
the feel and emotion of a single event.
And a sense of injustice and punishment
from the sky.
At the end I came to the conclusion
that my life has flickered indignantly.
And yet, the moments of languished loneliness
have often turned into a terrifying tenderness.
A human heart of hidden treasures, that
seeks a life and a world to come.
Vietnam Blues
Cafe Cong” Hanoi, Vietnam
My Pictures: Cong Coffee Cafe: Hanoi, Vietnam.
I searched for Ho Chi Minh
in Vietnam, four line quatrains
and the substance of a country.
I wondered why, there
are no rhythms of screaming
souls or nightmare firestorms.
Or mothers who still shed one
lonely tear of the night.
My heart was heavy
when I saw the pictures of Mỹ Lai.
The kindness answered
with foul wrong from gloomy
and angry men.
I walked the streets of Hanoi,
Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City.
And saw the beauty of human
love and struggle, pass the
threshold of moral grief.
I learnt of people
leaving behind nights of
terror, and leaping
wide over black oceans.
They brought gifts
from Nhat Hanh, Dang Thuy Tram
and Hồ Xuân Hương.
A gentle light that strays
and vanishes, but always returns.
And a wind that blows
a forgiving silence.
The Pain of Lost Love
My Picture: Personal Shadows in Taiyuan City: Shanxi Province, China
In a dark human forest
I swore
I would never
love or believe
again.
Anger, drink
and mistrust
was my daily life.
A new friend.
You ask me why I find
it hard to trust, to love
even after all these years.
Easy to forgive
and forget, right!
Because, I am haunted
more by her memories
than new Chinese dreams.
I am the distant drums
of a distant love lost.
Why Do I Write Poetry?
My Picture: Two friends: Xiahe: Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Gansu province, China
Writing poetry is not easy, at least not for me. It takes time, space, ideas, thoughts and usually something to happen to spur me to write. When some people ask me, and not too many do ‘why do I write poetry?’ my answer is usually consistent. I write poetry because I want to live forever.
Let me clarify what I mean by this.
My life has been eventful and has taken some unexpected turns. Five years ago for example, I was living, working and still playing rugby in the UK. Then my personal circumstances changed and now I live and work, but with no rugby in China. So how do I make sense of this and all the other events and moments in my life?
Well, one way is to write poetry.
A poem allows me to flush from the deep thickets of someplace within me the thoughts, feelings, questions and music, I knew was there and in the world, but didn’t know how to represent this?
More and more I think that my life and eventual death are a momentary flicker that will pass me by (if I let it) without me knowing the experience. I have three children, friends in different parts of the world and I want them to know what I am doing, what I see, what I learn and poetry helps characterize these experiences, opportunities and moments.
My Picture: Wilmslow Rugby Union Football Club
Whether my poetry is good or not does not concern me too much. I was once part of a writing forum, in which many people seemed more concerned with how many ‘likes’ or ‘followers’ they had, than the honesty and integrity of their writing. This was one of the reasons why I set up this blog.
So why do I write poetry?
Well, as I told a Chinese friend of mine yesterday, to rescue some portion of what has ‘fueled’ me in life, what continues to tell me that I am alive and to leave something of myself behind when I die. Others can then decide if they make something of this or not.
This for me is the nearest thing to being alive.
A State of Mind
Picture: China Daily
I met a man today with Parkinson’s disease,
his hands permanently clenched shut.
The power, once contagious at birth
no longer accepts the next morsel.
His wife, seemed spat from reshuffled pain,
and leading him into a known future.
I watched them closely.
They once dreamed of sweet genesis,
a life grown of man’s new strength.
They danced on the same floor,
touched in slow succession
on damp common ground.
Now, she takes him to the toilet and
wipes him clean again and again.
“Is it dirty
does it look dirty”
She asked
I held his hand.
And sitting softly, in my soul
I told him that his
life has not yet been cancelled.
Note
Statistics show that almost half of the ten million people affected by Parkinson’s Disease, or PD, worldwide are in China. The disease has become the third most deadly disease for elderly people in China. About 1.7% of the country’s population above 65 suffers from PD and nearly 100 thousand new cases emerge each year. The World Health Organization estimates China will see six million PD patients by 2030.
A Wandering Poet 