My Picture: Wall poster, Xinxiang, Henan Province, China.
Words heard, and lost
Travel
Nothing, so lonely
My Picture: Coffee and Bukowski’.
The young girl said to me
“you look lonely”
I thought it was a strange way to say hello.
We looked around, at mind’s swirling with noise and nothing to say.
And street dogs
tailing with low self-esteem,
losing one-by-one.
With the red moon hanging low over a winter cityscape,
I told her
“go and ask them how lonely they feel in the cold of night”
And, “that beauty can be fake”.
Across the ridge
My Picture: Taken this evening Xinxiang Medical University, China.
Fog….. sitting here
without the trees.
A deserted basketball court,
wind weeping through the hoops.
And in the distance,
the train to Beijing picks up speed.
Dragging the night stars out
one by one
….. by one.
Unclaimed Territory
My Picture
By tree and blade of grass,
a cold breeze swept through the city.
A single beat, with histories mingling
from a netherworld.
A freezing fuzziness in my eyes and head
and darkness scattered.
I watch searchingly,
at the people walking in dead leaves.
Nothing seemed as it was, nothing felt new.
The girls had fireflies in their hair,
and the boys wrote
calligraphy in the clouds…..
a slow burning love.
The beat became louder,
quick frozen faces.
Snapshots of times before the ancestors,
before we sank into the dreams.
A cold swept through the city today.
First day of the year
My
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My Pictures
Waiting for the world to turn,
tree-by-tree.
I walked to the coffee cafe.
It claims…..
‘The Best Coffee’
A big claim in China.
A cat watched me across the road..
across our differences.
I thought the cat was familiar,
but I have been mistaken before.
Inside the coffee was good.
As the last rays of the day fell silent,
I listened to Fela Kuti.. “Opposite People”.
From another world, a soothing flatness hung from a distant shore.
On the winter horizon, I saw the cat again.
Death in his pocket and swaying to the afrobeat…. another body count.
It was time to go home.
Silence is also an answer… I thought.
Lights Out!
My Picture.
Darkness and gloom,
in a chattering street.
Everywhere glitter and stare,
sky blurred and nighttime stubborn.
Across a late December night,
a tired moon lifted in the east.
I thought everyone needs a place,
and casts a shadow of lingering strands.
Shadow King
My Picture: Christmas Day Fishing – River Wei , Xinxiang, China.
Shadows cast by the street lights,
and a world taken for granted.
Haunt time walking by the river,
and the lateness of the world.
This is one picture, a second
ripped from the concepts of a life.
But one that each morning
rises and sinks again.
Each moment cast, held together
by lingering strands of hope
as only harsh things can.
Recalled and revised for another gathering.
Bai Juyi’s Dream
My Picture: Taken on Christmas Day, Xinxiang , China
An icebox wind
clumping across the frozen
city streets.
Whipping across my face,
to let my memories go.
A guarded path,
no longer anchored.
Allow new melodies
to break from old tracks lost.
Christmas Eve
My Picture: Words have magic….
A messenger delivers
and everything I feel.
Big stories, with small bottom lines.
The quite boy with the simple smile.
He never knows what to say
to his mother, who is never satisfied.
The girl with the straight ‘A’s
who does not want to be a doctor,
and hides a dark family secret.
The old man hiding the pain
and fire inside,
consumed by ill-fate and
dragging himself from day-to-day.
A woman who told me
her husband had not kissed
her for eight years…….She
was beautiful.
A cautious loner
who once was a king.
Now he drinks each day,
and shouts at the moon.
Everybody’s searching for them,
everybody’s consumed by them
…and my story?
My eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul….
Sailing on the yellow river
My Picture: I held a small Christmas Party tonight….a gift from a students mother….
Before the winter fire
and shrill midnight cries.
I craved nothing.
Then the hunters silence
and fickle friends leaving,
surrounded my bones.
At the brink
an unseen bird sang
from the tree shadow.
I knew then of the road
not yet taken,
and some of the silence is me.
A Wandering Poet 