Dean Brink 包德樂 (Baudelaire) Taiwan Scooter Poet 台灣機車詩人

Harvest Light

2011-08-27T15:48:00.002+08:00

By August the corn patch was unflappable.
We'd weeded out litters of cats napping between stalks
but at what price? All polls ran against them
and we emerged hand in hand in the shade
of sycamores, auditing locusts for daily functions
of annual patterns. Their curse-resuscitated syndrome
drove in beehive clouds anticipating typhoons
then broken, rolled off like false eyelashes on natural beauty
to titillate the next superpower watching from a noisy café.
The board would like all the loose ends tied together,
no mess-ups this time; no prints nor random patchwork
in the apple eye of 7-11 cameras. As we speak
logistics are assembled in all consuming languages
buttoned up or barbequed according to folded instructions in fine print.

The key is steering clear of the same centre
like a jockey ducking in a tunnel that only the horse can see.
Children grow accustomed to the rules
as if they were DNA rather than a ploy
to extract what rises to the horizon each time one tries to outrun it,
always studious, as mothers still shoulder us,
translate mother tongues to ground our vocables
from the blood mists of warriors parting Euclidean flesh
in the rainy season--historically of course--all that’s all folks.
What can we do but build canoes and rafts
or face house arrest? The plum blossoms flower a code
across the land: the boy is king, mapping the land
in surprise emissions, a general strike in the clouds.
But there is no one to touch as the light wrinkles away
into the waves and we bid adieu, nestle in to man our stations.

Lofty Fog

2011-07-20T13:17:00.002+08:00

The whispers from below reach Midas (who just text-messaged)
tone-deaf or not, the balances play out
a prudent policy to let things slide,
despite talk of yesteryear.
Ah, yesteryear. We used to read poetry
about the rearrangement of the senses.
Now they download The Songs of Experience for Dummies
and in the city oracles crash on a dime, and it's normal.
Students don't blink at it. Everything dwindles
and no one wants to hear about
the narrow escapes, how grandparents
swam raging rivers (yawn), how all the bridges
were barricaded or blown to kingdom come (looking at watch),
or left breathing through straws heroically
in electronic swamps gurgling methane—
the settling of accounts long awaited
and all too common in the valley.
In the valley no one notices babies
left to cry off the devil inside
under soft neon stars inflated just beyond doorjambs,
fostered safely for the lofty fog to burn off.

Old Town Starbucks

2011-01-06T11:38:00.002+08:00

They cancelled the Americano—too Italian near Scandinavian docks.
Generations later pastors still call on decorum
to undo lavishly Vatican wallpaper zoomed out of focus.
How nice it would be to fold the coasts together
so the spare interior might grow to the water and light
breaking the strong silent types side by side Hollywood housewives,
just as Makahs on the northern tip of the Olympics
after 70 years of being endangered try their harpoons
at the latest swell of whales—
remembering how to skin a whale is not easy:
what to do with all the blubber on the beach?
Make a Makäh eau de cologne?
The toddlers enjoy training wheels
and the gathering sound effects of red bicycles
scraping the sides of double-parked Mercedes.

Yet here I am seeking caffeine sin extras, a modest tall Americano for here,
the cheapest item off the menu, I must want room for cream then?
as if I were my great grandfather, an immigrant miner
too old to shovel but sturdy enough to man the dusty elevator shaft.
Where is your accent? I say, from yon sticks, where everyone builds
along roads they just invent as they go along
to the peril of those walking their horses and salting roses to ward off the deer.
Sometimes roads will accidentally bump into one another
and if there’s no room for proper cul-de-sacs
or they are broken through with the right codes and lawyers
you end up with thoroughfares, and corners along crossing paths
where others apply to change the zoning to cash in on a gasoline stand or grocer.
But, I’m really from even further out, forest fast disappearing
like the spotted owl looking in through the out door, unruffling itself
and spreading its wings to fly back from the horizon.
Here in Old Town there are few trees.
The mills took the good ones long ago
during trade in rubella blankets clearing the land of locals
and planting others around the new boarders working literally for nickels.
The trees here had rings wide enough to remember more than anyone living
and making the newbies nervous, coming from the burbs,
here to vie for views of the bay, more reasons for pruning more
to finally begin to relax, circling on riding mowers with self-mulchers,
scattering whatever grows back, trimming the edges
keeping things from shifting
so we look forward to a bright day flowering.

(Appeared in Mannequin Envy)

Fashion Update

2011-01-06T00:00:00.002+08:00

Boys in Helsinki wear layers of wool
while on equatorial Galapagos they strut in ripstop trunks
with built-in liners, left untied for comfort
show off a swagger like soldiers in Kashmir
waiting in khaki and beige along rocky valleys.
Men in NYC’s hard waxed leather black out
in denim laps, the sprawling burlap smiles of country boys
near Bogota leave passersby breathing deep the odors run over
lazy hot days. Let Tel Aviv girls in green twill ankles
spray graffiti on the steps up Gonen near the occupied Golan.
Boys in pink knit terry drag slippery vinyl side bags down cliffs
scurrying to the bay to lose themselves in stories
with rough-and-tumble merchant marines
at the nudist beach near UBC.
Let manly girls in Barcelona and girly boys in Brazil
have shoulders exalted in duchess satin
have their faux-leopard-fur stilettos
as teens in Oklahoma City cling to their Harris tweed dinner jackets
on Saturdays while in the fields cheesecloth boys
run around in gauzy frayed and severed hems.
In the shadow of Mt. Shasta hippie girls
sew their mother’s hemp over holes torn in jean hems.
The disappointment of missed stitches, and raveling silk
tangles Shanghai boys fingering in the park.
Reversible boys in Berlin sport gingham hats and sail cloth shirts
by open windows on commuter carriages
while in Bombay girls bear patches of graffiti
on unbleached seersucker T-shirts
and boys alone in Westminster sleep in Thai silk boxers,
and boys in Antwerp prefer soft, crisp alpaca with cheap antung lining,
and flannel panty girls in Osaka are charmed
by gathering seams on the strapped chintz box with frog arms,
while polyurethane boys in Taipei pair giggling in white plastic glasses
and the magic touch of linens is surprisingly cool Jakarta summers.
Boys on San Francisco beaches
like fun snaps on synthetic batiste bikinis.
Retro girls in Bratislava tie home-dyed gauze at ankles,
the orange and red colors of sunset gurus.
Boys in Kafka’s Prague bear the reverse twill weave of herringbone to class
and a lone girl in Santiago dances
under the sheer swish of red and yellow organza
while polyester boys in St. Petersburg with camel hair sweaters
gather at the convenience store.
Boys in Hong Kong slide into the stainless steel tube
in quilted viscose jackets, no liners,
and West Side Latinos wear print boxers rumpling above the belt.
A boy in Winnipeg brushing the nap of his shoulder bag down sends signals.
On a chartered bus back from Crystal Mountain
couples doze in white nylon jump suits.
A Milan boy folds away his stiff gabardine raincoat,
and on Wall Street in lycra socks
it folds down a foulard bag flap, acetate and easily fraying.
Sicilian boys like sharp-shouldered blazer cloth
tailored soft to their waists, striped, the nap down.
Ladyboy legs are wrapped to the shins in the wet look of cire.
Paris girls tuck in the sheer, blue chiffon and yellow charmeuse blouses.
Boys in Tashkent go for loose tricots in basic colors.
Toronto teens space in flannelette pajamas
and blue pacifiers on transparent rose chains
while the boy in a looping boucle sweater
sidesteps not to snag the crowd on the Tokyo underground.

(Appeared in Going Down Swinging, Australia)

WikiLeaks shows how postmodern indifference has indeed functioned as an instrument of global capital

2010-12-22T08:42:00.006+08:00

One thing that can be gleaned from the WikiLeaks phenomenon is that the capitulation to postmodern vagaries (a position it seems stubbornly taken and reasserted most curiously by my former mentor Steven Shaviro), itself can be shaken when new revelations -- truths in the sense of undeniable historical enunciations -- shake the glamorous blandness of the postmodern. Indeed we see that the postmodern status quo -- "who knows what the truth is, let's have fun with it all" -- is broken, as is business as usual. This is new: usually corporate media tries to ignore any non-sanctioned information, yet it cannot brush aside such newsworthy tidbits and succeeding chaos that turn the wheels of the corporate media itself. Facts that shake markets are both intricately bound up in the mechanisms of global capital and can no longer glibly uphold pretensions of being removed from real economic concerns (a growing gap between rich and poor accompanying globalizing economies, including the US) and environmental destruction through global warming, dam construction, and general pollution, etc.

Typhoon Megi

2010-10-23T22:38:00.002+08:00

has nowhere to go: a focused holding
over last year’s losses, not to laugh at, a pattern
clearing the Sea of Taiwan, heading ashore
as a cold front at Okinawa condenses
the turbulence: more rain off the Pacific in a day
than in Carson City in a decade,
and you say the door has closed
too hard, answers too slow to come.
When the train stopped for the flooding you were right
not to take roads leading home, now covered in boulders and mud,
buses trapped or fallen off the coastal highway caved away…
Angry tourists from abroad complain in standard dialects clear and harsh.
The hot spring hotel has no hot water and you call to recall my faults,
my unbearable neglect. I want to go to bed early
before the day’s fatigue takes us down.
My cell phone is down to the last red line
after 2 a.m. I am difficult to get to know, granted –
forsaken by givens like the gods,
overwhelming happiness leftovers from old battles and empires
still divvying their grids of species in the present
folding the world away for a rainy day, living for a rainy day.
It is a pleasure to be stuck in the rain,
but please – spare me, clouds of mercy, storms I can’t see.

My friend says there’s a hot spring around the corner.
We soak, talk about how it’s not working.
He shrugs. We all want to be good, to go along.
Doors close in long accordion patterns
following us in another us for losing ourselves
though already taken, over the years, lost loves:
the older the more there’s just remainders remaining:
couples never broken from innocence into the light:
abandoned movies given in to their own automatic motions, leaving
habitually: a world so large now it crosses its fingers in series of series
so serious, politicians are already pushing for a new highway
to open up the last backwoods, where I live
and you will never return, for a door, some keys passed between us,
and a storm. I will try again tomorrow to go home to Hualien,
to let go, open my heart more, be lost again and taken down.

六月の川柳　Two senryu from my trip to Kyushu this June 六月の川柳

2010-08-26T15:53:00.003+08:00

Japanese originals　with English approximations.

込む駅をお洒落優先一歩一歩に
komu eki o oshare yuusen ippo ippo ni
[So slow stepping through the crowded station--all the fashion queens]

身がみられお腹をきつく仲良く気
mi ga mirare onaka o kitsuku nakayoku ki
[Given a looking over, I suck in my gut, hoping to make friends]

June 2010

Global Positioning

2010-08-07T21:55:00.000+08:00

The symphony gathers talk dying down.

The smell of bugs burning on dusty lamps
reaches the balcony.

Children speculate which came first:
peanuts or peanut butter.

To keep the water moving
cymbals opened to bassoons and cellos

and traffic stopped in a swoon…
and mommy released the brakes….

You wonder if you’re the only one
gone bananas with such gut precision.

Time to shake oneself up to a plate,
any place making your soul feel so big it swims out with the ball.

Mosquitoes

2010-08-07T21:51:00.001+08:00

—after Chen Chien-wu 陳千武

For now the standing water stands down.
It’s all over, in no one’s honor.
United, the buzzing charming,
divided, viral advertising.

The angelic hum no longer lulls us
all landings have been sprayed
and under control.
We put our souls to the wheels of motor cameras
and promise broadcasts across the land
as standing water stands down.

Sonnet

2010-07-25T01:45:00.001+08:00

We used to raise antennae like mold
taking flight from an alabaster landscape
then lean softly with the wind
as if history had been blown up.
It used to take us hours to wind down,
making winding up as much a surprise.
The day never ended.
Now all we do is wind up.

Who’d dare touch the earth again,
not the stony essence running through it?
We’ve been hacked, on suspension,
no one ever looking, always watched.

2010-05-29T19:43:00.001+08:00

The experimental video was designed as a video installation in protest of the media build-up to the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. It was shown at a cafe in Tacoma, Washington, and needs reediting, but here it is as is.

Slip and Drivel

2010-05-04T19:39:00.002+08:00

The letters sent up never arrive
though arms and legs wave about.
Please stop summarizing what you (think you) see
was only seen on TV.
Running in place builds up currency
and leaves leveled lots northeasterly,
possums flooding sprung diameters
burrowing and backing into factory relics,
tumbling under any rhododendron or stilted hedgerow
parceling the heartland.
The apples rolling on the floor are rocking on the floor
as the father recedes into his constitutive colors.
Unreal sister:
traveling salesmen sweep you off your feet.
If you like the idea, it's yours.
I prefer not having hanger-ons hanging.
I return to my unfolding mirrors opening into smoked florescence
all for my hair.
But it pulls away like the pinup in a crowded house
at the discretion of whoever does the dusting.
I ordered more photos from the firm holding our negatives
as if the digital age hadn't caved it all in escrow
to spores hammering into a very old age
recombinatory life making its way indefinitely.

Abstract

2010-03-24T20:56:00.002+08:00

The mechanisms are in place.
We order coffee to go and return to command centers by-the-minute
bank on the price range with smiles from another era.
The corruption is structural and the flower girl selling flowers is passed over.
Boys take out the garbage unable to see the ascendancy laying claim to them.
Tips for good service keep the arms market out of anyone’s hands
the game safely in automatic profits grandfathered in for home theatres
mobilized abroad where no one listens.
It's hard work inventing alien slime worthy of walling out,
uncircumcised enemies in hooded full-length suits.
The happiness seems almost ghoulish now,
one nation under Windows, emptied emptiness
unto others, backed up by loud, firm affirmations in low tones.

In Vietnam, Thinking of Iraq

2010-03-08T10:07:00.002+08:00

Is it enough to list specifics and lose ourselves
in the godlike complexity of broken microchips
as we screen our broadcasts walking along nature washing up?
It's one thing to throw up a slogan
and drag a population across a border, an ocean,
it's another to oust the invader—always in bad taste,
the proverbial imperialist oinker.

The details sprayed on the bricks are not sweet recollections
but convictions, a moral economy not bombable,
and to be paid off
or be reborn a fly or damaged squirrel or at best a deer to be hit by a Winnebago.

The functioning of parts is still bound to the beholder
in remote control. The spirits of the dead still fly just as far
and will seek out the controllers of drones and smart bombs.
The chain of command will not sleep well.
If wrong, we are doomed.

(Ho Chi Minh City, February 2010)

From One End

2010-03-08T09:59:00.001+08:00

I tell my friends, what you expect to find
at the end of a dead end road turning to dirt
along a crumbling beachhead?
Crushed glass of tossed beer-brown bottles.
Scraps of plastic and Styrofoam from fast-food beverages.
Thin plastic vendor bags of bones licked clean, tied in a knot—
heaped on upside-down steel barrels.
Dogs sniffing around can’t find them.
When a concrete hotel shell built itself off the beach
the interior vanished in insurance flames.
The retaining wall hollows out, the road is next,
lined with bald, bandanaed Norwegians loitering on Hoggs
with beer cans in hand and open carburetors
carrying them away. Most of the retirement colony is sedate,
lots of strolling husbands and wives and trailing maids or lovers.
Sometimes the lover rides with the husband on one scooter
and the wife takes chase on another, putting along to avoid collision.
I saw a pretty young American with a chubby gigolo in tow.
The rule of thumb: the escorts walk behind
(like servants, or wives in some cultures),
while those in love go hand in hand into old age.

(February 2010, Cha Am, Thailand)

Tableau

2010-01-24T00:01:00.009+08:00

Where did he go, the one willing to work our way
down the strip of cheap eats?
The other ones go for fads
with boys riding in top-down canopies
to Krispy Kreemes, where the theater stood
with cathedral chandeliers
and we saw 2001 as a family
at its opening and later grown
men smearing mud on their mugs,
crawling around in paranoid chiaroscuro
as if they lost their way in the legs of a Caravaggio painting
where a page boy is screaming for help
while the big-wigs have fallen.
Luckily angels have dispatched, light cracks open the corridors
enough to make our way to the water cooler
in the mall security of ready vending machines
and our linoleum sounds ricocheting
the penetration of fluorescence.

(Tacoma 2006; Taipei 2010)

In Spanaway I Walk a Country Road

2010-01-17T09:56:00.005+08:00

I walk with my neighbor who limps in inclement weather.
I limp beside him as if the world were a limping world
so we may not even notice his body breaking down.
Time is washing up again.
The first-growth taken away before even he can remember,
clearings left open to run-off, erosion
cut all the way into the foothills
where the Nisqually pours forth
through the shoulders of Rainier.
Weyerhaeuser left a moonscape of stumps
never replanted, "an honest mistake" overgrown
with buckling Himalayan blackberries
looping high and arching long
to wetlands to soak their dominion of fists
rooted in moist sunlight, vines releasing gnats and flies
worming from tart berries in their forest of thorns.
We talk of the road that leads all the way to the Mountain,
the road neighbors jogged on every afternoon
until passing cars picked them off—
swerved to fast in passing clipped one,
a mother twists backwards to hush kids takes one,
drunken golfers lose it … an ac-ci-dent. Very,
very sorry, they say in a whisper hard to record.

I walk with my neighbor who limps in inclement weather.
He's been around a San Francisco block and outlived it to tell,
says he believes in it, at least
has a hat to hang on, as they say on TV
what only family knew of neighbors:
cross-dressing boy goes on to fashion stardom,
horse-riding girls in love and lost in the mountains,
letters to an army buddy who couldn't let go—
discovered in the afterlife—
the wife left to sort his things, sharing
with us, dying within a year
to track him down for questioning.

We Are But Two in Our Circle

2009-12-04T09:30:00.004+08:00

The visitors are at Woodstock though the spaceship follows them,
interviews them to donate to the color of their vests.

Charisma is not free and the angle
of one's bow may be paid off

so that humility itself becomes a pastime
for cameras and beginners, to welcome them.

We hold onto the apples too long
and the gift is gone, uneaten.

We say more are orbiting
and there are Fig Newtons in the drawer.

The window facing the hill is covered in geckos
creeping you out.

You say the squeak of mosquitoes is landing,
we are surrounded, the neighboring cabins exhausted.

Friendly hellos shape our first words
and by noon we are checked out, as usual.

Our bodies have done their things,
now we watch the movie

as if we were the lost mother, god herself
come to bump up the ante and bury sadness in the rising energy of the day.

Passage from Allen Ginsberg's "Wichita Vortex Sutra" on War

2009-11-03T10:59:00.007+08:00

Different from a bad guess.
The war is language,
language abused
for Advertisement,
language used
like magic for power on the planet:
Black Magic language,
formulas for reality--
Communism [substitute Terrorism today] is a 9 letter word
used by inferior magicians with
the wrong alchemical formula for transforming earth into gold
--funky warlocks operating on guesswork,
handmedown mandrake terminology
...
Communion of bum magicians
congress of failures from Kansas & Missouri
working with the wrong equations
Sorcerer's Apprentices who lost control
of the simplest broomstick in the world:
Language
O longhaired magician come home take care of your dumb helper
before the radiation deluge floods your livingroom,
your magic errandboy's
just made a bad guess again
that's lasted a whole decade.

--Allen Ginsberg, "Wichita Vortex Sutra"

[Note: Line breaks and indentation lost in blog mode.]

The Anglos Dying

2009-10-02T13:55:00.003+08:00

(A reply to W. S. Merwin’s “The Asians Dying”)

They step out of the Atlantic front
hacking forests into long halls, setting
armories on one end, pentacles on their chests,
they roar in the fire-light forward at each other—
an abundance of beer jostling from tall mugs. The gold

of angels’ wings adorns the halls.
Daylight stirs them under shifting clouds,
and St. Peter’s silence soars until numbness,
the crucifix of arches leans to them; their wrists twitch,
their sides seem to bleed.
In the catacombs they remember, touch a skull
“shattered by a spiked club.”
They want to believe, to never lose the shape of this blessing,
to never move, and sense from each other
an undulation—without hesitation—

they try to take Asia—the missionaries
loaded with magic, fresh architecture,
myths of towers to heaven, of endless steps
to nowhere—the rage of languages and famine.
“The pain will vanish like this, this bread, this wine;
follow!” say the missionaries.

Others listen, answer softly, in the cadence of the living,
“nothing they will come to is real.”

The Anglos advance into the shadows
they cannot see; shoulder to shoulder into the clatter they cannot touch
and raise the barrel’s flash,
pierce the rain with a pointless sound,
poison farmlands and return from settling mists,
behind horizons muddying an ocean with sunsets.
Packing trinkets of brass, they come back to this.

(Seattle 1985)

First appeared in the University of Washington Daily.

As the Sun Abandons Us at Birth

2009-09-04T22:23:00.003+08:00

The moon's left its dents in all of us.
You say you belong on the vision-quest too
falling in place, focused on the arena
and phantasies of Rome in flames—
time for twittering against the grain,
no one to take note of the camphor
spinning the toy submarine in the bath,
fizzling quanta as if the big Bang hadn't been divvied,
its detritus cycling through us—filters
for the machines growing around us,
glowing as we plugged them,
new mirrors to mother us, tame us
in keeping us shaving—hanging on
to the proprieties of being us,
parking and delivery, staid coordinates.
Loveliness failed after the nth temper
evacuated all we rehearsed, raw this, raw that
touched me, leaving projections backing up,
dreams slow to wash up wasted mornings,
waiting, then leaving behind the fits believed in.

Land of the F

2009-08-21T00:35:00.004+08:00

These are the times we talked about in grade school,
picture books exchanged for a ruler
to hold its place on the shelf,
the biggest planes and payloads
spread out on our table—
rising suns uber alles—
dynasties of masses stocked
to bus minions in prattling formation,

now cameras and locators trace forms
closing in on
our word,
a word to
speak for
our word, weak
in might, speaking
here not there to own
skies there
tear empty here.

Speak out here,
our word lost,
America's mouth is crossed
in twists and plots
in footage no longer here
on the way, already
in the way

I am leaving,
cancelled cable, wireless
not to see the sky their sky
as nouns and satellites
service no threat to rally
after the salute fires off
our hearts
paid to divide
to take our place
in America's bubble
of bullets, charging into your sunset,
the sky breaking down on you in red is not yours.

(Tacoma 2004)

Poetics Today

2009-06-17T15:34:00.004+08:00

Each to her own, but a poem is just a poem,
no matter broken enough, detritus
stands out class to write his names
a hundred times, I will I will, I won't I won't
while wily ifs loop in no longer loopy and talking with one's others,
but a step on the tube in the wrong election
just short of Palestine and Guernica
and the intimate moments barricaded under
the clashing of gods that make you bob
under two roofs, man and wife,
portable, unfolding theism Americans pin their tails to
in nostalgic retrofitted retroviruses
uplifting lost causes in the grandeur of Rushmore filling the preemptive metropolis—
as if smiles for the latte meant more than good training—
ticks off the lonely widower, depending on that Joe.

Time to leave Joe and return to a bulletin of tunas fished to death—
may I recommend the marbled horse sushi
or holding out for Petri-grown chicken thighs on the horizon
along with body condoms to preserve sterility and perfect health.
May I recommend a man or a woman, but hey, it's your life.
The penguins imitate German nature and are taken. The “birds and bees”
are for the birds, more vulgar euphemisms to put off fucking.
Categories map us, chain us to ourselves.
Possums are liberated, leave little ones wound up on the back porch.
Goodbye Franco, goodbye Koizumi, goodbye Bush—
may the aerial bayonets of your visits find out your secret dyspepsia.
Imperialism is on automatic toilet.

Edward II

2009-05-27T13:31:00.004+08:00

I can't remember who left who . . and this angers you,
phone set to take . . souvenirs
for a day you'll . . lay out the cards
in a film documenting . . the anger
over the men who raised you into anger . . to drop
all the bluster . . no method
to get the gusto . . off ground
and the leveling river . . media
to plug . . show tunes a la Champs-Elysees
bays gulls holding . . hover off
blinding light deflected ... the turning air carrier
.
The last time . . we admitted
long enough . . grown away into others
until another pulls away again
—then lost—forced off—
a dynamo . . dropped
in the lap . . dead leaf
sitting . . sitting . . sitting

blown off . . tipped off . . held off

[Originally there were supposed to be three spaces where the modidified ellipses " . . " are now, but I kind of like them now.]

Shelters

2009-05-04T09:03:00.003+08:00

No one has the gumption to give them up,
but no more crackers and blankets
when we stick our heads in,
souvenirs of wars flown over to forget,
rebuild ruined schools, temples, cathedrals
as if no hatred had broken mornings,
just tiny domed ducking grounds
growing small and mossy out of soft pools
leaving them musty after iron doors go missing.
The dry ones make great getaways
for young early trials wedging walls.
Once tragedy falls we’ll all be scolded
just for holding candles, so hold me
as if the world were closing its skies
leaving us in our last desperate embrace.
No one will suffer this way, let alone
be left to repeat it, until genuine caring sinks in.
Common cause waits outside on camera,
a small price to take hearts to safety,
hesitant, generic gray souls.

The Sheep Has Landed

2009-05-01T08:45:00.002+08:00

The raucous of losing his way sprouted,
though the wisdom of the East pointed the Way
who would tell him the boat had taken its berth
and he was no longer native?
If only a Buddha would intervene
the hungry wanderer could return to the table
knowing the extinction of the self,
whether the waste land left shopping for wars
or the heavenly release from the haunted
beard and twitch of fighting the wind.

Snapshot

2009-04-29T12:47:00.007+08:00

By the time we gathered round the punchbowl,
exchanged our aches, passed through
spectral penetration and spin back
to our moment, picked clean -
the smaller denominations that held up in earlier decades
get traded away, in a manly way
bid down on the floor for bidding it up
so the spenditure can mature and time flag us down
one by one branded in blank awe, folding
into a détente of happy daily days on installment plans.

But what of the revolution within,
traces mounting cortical ladders of the reactive?
Calls grew far between edgewise.
There was no longer that tumbling
of universal love anyway, though no one stayed home
nor fell back on roll calls elsewhere.
Nothing was on sale.
* * *
By the time we gathered to pass through
our aches and spin back to our moment
picked clean, no longer that tumbling,
the sale edgewise bidding it up
anyway, no falling back, happy calls within.

Antidote #1: Twelve-Step Playaholics: The Lemonade Stand

2009-04-25T12:28:00.003+08:00

When a boy says it’s so deep you have him*
nibbling from your palm like a deer
in an open zoo. Everyone needs a niche,
ask my girlfriend. It’s all my kitsch, I fear
never having enough details to open a blog
and post pictures of my lemonade stand,
stuck waiting so long, no takers.
For me, and this is the problem, it’s not the sale,
but the funny things neighbors took the time to dream up
that keeps me here—
how to get a sassy young dare to
pee on an electric fence wire;
how a dog was so jealous of a fat cat
it could be induced to eat soap to keep it from her;
how a father was so violent the boy had to
get a gun to chase him off forever,
breaking his soft heart;
how even in penny-anny poker someone
serious as a heart attack would send signals;
how a true test of friendship is whether
they're close enough for buttfucking;
how when a neighbor breaks something
the father bans him from the premises, and how
they couldn't pay us enough to stay then;
how after his mother remarried
the boy next door needed a father, not a grandfather;
how the undersexed women of the neighborhood
were all ballooning out of control;
how the lady on the corner who couldn't have kids
would flag down our car to report to my mom
gas stuck here, poked there in it until we had to go;
how one boy was said to have affairs with his cows;
how when I grew up I'm going to have to shave my entire face;
how I not only couldn't get a date, but would screw up a wet dream.

*Inspired by a scene in Terminator 2.

Putting Bunnies in a Trance

2009-04-24T03:40:00.006+08:00

Drawn to the aroma of home-baked apple pie with clove and cinnamon
we lingered at the door like missionaries exemplifying emptiness—
not the clean-sleeved souls that get our feet in the door
but suddenly gaunt and pouty at the jaws.
Not a good start to a rainy day, out in the rain.
Later we were greeted by friendly wagging tails
and the aroma of barbecued ribs sweetly basting.
Luckily by dusk we had had our carrots and could see in the dark
long enough to rival the special forces scouring southern Afghanistan
for heroic figureheads that sent the other ships shipping
nocturnal goggles, making the world purpler—
but they do not like being disturbed the next day.
‘The technician moved the slickened transducer across the woman's abdomen
serving as guide’ to the suspended future, ‘pointing out landmarks,’
slowing the campaign making me long for Alexandria
and all we lost there. We do know the Babylonians
used a method for finding square roots
and replaced the Sumerians in Mesopotamia
and the Akkadians. The method involves dividing and averaging
the coordinate system of twelve zodiacal signs,
each 30° long. Policemen arrested a man in D.C.
with an archaeological piece dating back to the eleventh
tablet of the flood. Putting bunnies in a trance
was used in some parts to drive evil away.

[Note: This poem makes use of Google searching to experiment with collaging phrases found online, following Moore's example of mining miscellaneous ephemera.]

Exit

2009-04-21T10:43:00.004+08:00

It doesn’t take X-ray vision to see the videobomb
Of a cave’s quantum entanglements
With a desert spreading its deeds and constitution
Of wells raising the living into a hell of greed.

If I were a better person I would stand
In the middle of I-5 by a base
With a sign that says “brake for peace”
Until I was dead or arrested,
censored or not.

If I were to stay,
Had faith it could come around
I would try, sacrifice.
But I am like everyone else

And there are still places free of drones,
So before it all wakes from Hollywood
and all that hate, I'm on my way.

Coming of Posthuman Age

2008-12-04T21:09:00.003+08:00

Teen boys lilt along the boardwalk
blankly licking pink cones
to make their father feel better.
Though a quiet little lie
it waved so many arms away
setting its aim over the years.
Innocence is a long novel to settle into
like canoe in a lagoon.
The two of us, we, we bought it
and must be ourselves and be good.
Every temptation has its price
and I want to hold the Kilimanjaro I know
even if it's stopped snowing now.
No one is the enemy. Who wouldn’t duck trauma?
After the show is over you drop the other off
and going home alone—tighten the back of your fist
so a mosquito can't budge, then close in.

Faraway on Mt. Yoshino

2008-11-13T23:19:00.003+08:00

She felt each pedal of decay deeply.
We spent evenings ferrying snails and catepillars
off cycle paths in the arboretum.
Wherever we turned, the idea of gravity collected its props
but no one mentioned Bagdad;
even reruns of I Dream of Jeannie vanished
along with the space program itself.
Strands of daisies passed hands held for them.
The farther we thought ahead
visitors only folded the when and where
in homage to poets who’d prepared the landscape
not to worry about lumpiness on Mt. Yoshino
or objections from the audience
pushed faraway from any important gathering.
I made it in time with my string and paper cups to tug around
as long as the courtesy holds, the confusion of plum blossoms with falling snow
like the quiet theories of comings and goings,
points of light cratering, twinkling
until enough star-stuff gathers to fire up again
as ditches of eggs overflow in tadpoles
to gather in cups for the kids.

Wordsworthian Matrix

2008-10-28T21:41:00.006+08:00

The boys are bouncing basketballs in the foyer
at lunch. Mothers watch daddy twirl one, stepping out of the math
not to lose the Viagra mortgage over a long haul
spilling over into whatever disaster is left for arguments.

Before the slowdown everyone and their butcher
was frenetic for a connection, not just salables
who feed us frenergy, garnering what we might be
had we been handed more than silver linings to fall through with.

Now, no matter how many flavors I’ve tasted
It’s not the same. The end zone is made of lime,
the soil moist with tater-bugs and possum droppings yields little,
pallid sprouts leaking back to earth illegally laced
undoing the slow genetics of glory days
before the law kicked in, patents lifting bodies from selves.

Bag of Senryu 川柳袋

2008-10-17T22:11:00.002+08:00

Asaoka Shinji 浅丘真治 (Dean Brink 包德樂)

Japanese originals with English translations

　　雑題 miscellaneous topics

停電へ手を取り合ってお手洗い
The power out, holding hands going to the restroom.

背広着た今日は行かない喫茶店
Wearing a suit today, not going to the usual café.

張りの無い世に懐かしい雷親父
In a lackluster world, how nice to see a thundering old man again.

言い訳を捜しながらも爆弾し
While searching for excuses dropping bombs.

国と神いえども兵の民営化
Though saying “god and country”
privatizing the army.

アメリカも「暗い谷」への夢遊病
America can also sleepwalk into a “Dark Valley.”

砂原に掘った凹みにさくら植え
In gaping holes dug in the desert
planting cherry trees

眠れない夜に付き合う屋根のリス
Sleepless night
meeting the squirrel on the roof.

Topic:「軽い」light (adj.)
軽く屋根登る狸の手にブドウ
Nimbly climbing
on the roof, in the raccoons hands
grapes.

Topic:「迷う」 become confused
迷い込むカフェの出会いで恋芽ばえ
Meeting in the overflowing café, love blossoms.

　　Topic:「招待」 invitation
一人だけ招待されて板ばさみ
Stuck
with only one of us
invited.

(2003)

Bait and Switch Rhizomes

2008-10-12T15:07:00.004+08:00

Homer’s boss runs the reactor keeping us busy
while hiding hands one at a time in a washing motion,
a Dali machining into the firmament of landscape,
a slow, frazzled battle sleepwalked out of body.
Living gets old and lightheaded,
be the first to wave the white flag
boys off to compensate for better days and cheaper stuff.
Meanwhile, hunters fan out for greener pastures
in the circling food chain, and the sun
makes its getaway in the steady millions of miles.

The sawing by the café doesn’t bother me
as long as they are replacing rotted ties
on the public walk by the river.
I’m allergic to Genesis and cigarettes,
but they have a database I’ve always dreamt of.
I feel at home as long as tea is allowed.
Ongoing yard sales only go so far
and you turn to burning legs of tables
to roast marshmallows and other
comfort foods that are fun to say:
pork chops and applesauce, in the morning couscous.

(Appeared in November 3rd Club)

You Can Feel It Fluttering By

2008-10-09T14:12:00.004+08:00

A service worker at Mosburger
wears her cap low, undercover,
a temporary leg up from a friend
like my life at Fred Meyers
before I could be bonded to be a checker,
just a gopher: rushing pallets of Tampax
to Pharmacy, helping Barbara facing
Housewares, putting toys back in Variety
or gathering a steel dragon of shopping carts
to ride heavy and steady down the sloping parking lot after hours
scaring straggling customers almost getting my ass fired,
but always close to the beck and call of managers and a step behind their advances.

(October 9, 2008, Taipei and Hualian)

Genealogy

2008-08-23T13:15:00.002+08:00

In an earlier age immaculate wives iron sheets
and the hollowing process of laughter sets in to take on meaning
the way gravity is devoted to erosion, monitoring
and waiting for a common penetration, not of the heart
yet sniggering at some level beyond the residual
and found most fruitful or dependable remixed,
appended to us as natural as the edge of night.

Surrounding services are always on call,
whole blocks south of 38th street flagged for service,
flags decorating their homes and cars
foregoing the intricacies of generations for now
and the distance of things from each other.
Now at the cusp of our own foretold passing
the rising, warmer waters hold the earth
together like the hands of a god awash
with anger, the thick atmosphere focusing
the red sun colder and farther away
destroying its hydrogen, while we are always waiting
for the effortless increments of the out there
to wake us with more news to disperse us, going in fear.

(Tacoma, U.S., 2004)

Solo Linked Poetry (dokugin renga)

2008-07-10T20:55:00.004+08:00

The lawn boy frees them,
handfuls of dandelions
and a bucket

Waves leave lines on wet sand –
he pokes down pieces of glass

Soaring and diving
gulls hold flight overhead
drop mussels on rock

Walking through bunker ruins
an elderly couple took our picture

Fallen pine needles
between our toes on soft moss –
the orange moonlight

Edible mushrooms
hang from your hammock

Someone asked the time –
in the afterglow
thinking over your letter

When will you believe me when
I say they are only friends

Tender seeds airborne
weeds take root in damp cliffs
loosen slides

Mist harbors the coast for joggers—
a convoy passes on flatcars

Tossing last week’s bread
to wild ducks, after you left
for Bosnia

Mailman crossing the icy street –
out of coffee, I take the back door

Finally a letter
and grainy photograph—
such a nice haircut

Long nights up reading Whitman—
I’ll meet you at the station

Moon beams move over
the gray kitten by my feet—
crack in the window

Waving my flashlight in fog,
a possum sniffing closer

Tacoma billowing
chiaroscuro, turnover—
each breath around town

The smell of pavement after rain,
quietly draining into grass

Whiffleball batted
to the porch, a kid passes
it back down below

Talking with the former nun
a soap bubble floats in my eye

Camping on Sunmoon Lake

2008-07-06T17:15:00.007+08:00

He said it was all a test run,
next month friends would come for the real thing.
Our camp neighbored the clamor of cranes
dangling over a future gondola site
facing the hotel the dictator hand-picked long ago.
Guards still keep riffraff like us out except at teatime,
but there is talk of sending his long-interned body back
across the Strait. But talk is talk;
who knows, it might draw crowds,
squeeze a museum of tourists in our pockets.
It's the age-old dilemma—when is a friend driven
by necessity, when part of an automated grid
foisted on a polymorphous terrain
by sheer air power, having no bearing on willpower,
and that is where the others gets bogged down
on the periphery of advertised cities
while small shops with backroom launching pads
vie for a modest piece of the action.
The higher the prices the less convincing—
as if the wrong side had been propped up
and our suspicions turned on us before we knew it,
until...any moral fool could see...we had to get back
not only nature, with its solitary footprints
disappearing into another Green Island,
but to each other. Though hard to listen
with the gumption of paragraphs and connectives
interrupting the usual jingles with a smile—
lost in overrun territory drones seal the fate
of any wandering radar blip.
I tried to explain the humanizing wounds
throwing a wrench into the day,
but it was a script and it wouldn't take “no”—
forced me on a march in silence
on my own or find my own way home.

Poems for You (3) -- Long Summer

2008-07-03T13:23:00.002+08:00

Can a couple call it a day over a lack of cuddling, rolling away
and leaving the other end ringing?
Some days I’d like to fall in love again
just to sidestep the roundtable that binds us —
we’re as bad as doubles — get under our skins.
Even if we did roll on off
the push-pull magnetism of each trial run wouldn’t last
as more sheaths of bewilderment would be taken away

while we are down here waiting,
overhead the holiday of hands roams high in the sunshine.
Sure it’s not all silly romance in the sense of bouquets
of roses spiced with baby’s breath and peonies —
those come at an even prettier price away from the outskirts
riddled with dim neon and gravel parking lots announcing lone guests.
So many exile themselves to the orbiting Money-Tree
we all try to avoid, always just paying off another addition
like the neighbor’s Methadone, your McDonald’s, my recovering
seas of sadness. Luckily we reside along ear-to-ear spectrums of sadomasochism
come to interrogate our puttering about in involuntary removal of whatever is blocking
the illusion of a highway leading into a perfectly horizontal horizon
with only a haunted anomaly or signs of visitations to guide us,
towers from a taller earth, before the floods came to clear the slate,
new hope and rainbows that even you might like me,
of a mind, drawing nearer an earful at a time, sneaking up this way
with one of us to blame, leading the way or pushed along like a doggy on the moon.

July 3, 2008

As the Moon Sets

2008-07-03T13:08:00.001+08:00

Farmers stopped planting Brussel sprouts high in the new sunshine
and sandstone cliffs give way, a new glitch.
No one believes the current
letting us pass only one at a time
to the not-so-secret clothes-optional beach.
It’s not so sweet as is sounds there.
Near the wooded area, mostly men
drink Coca Cola and litter the logs loggers let drift ashore.
We must watch out for Mounties taking the trail
long into summer evenings
when the sun finally sets on the Pacific,
being part of a larger conglomerate
brought us here by way of the Hudson Bay Trading Co.
The locals left their totems standing on the beachhead deep in the park,
an excuse for long romantic walks.

Reportage Notes

2008-06-19T08:15:00.001+08:00

By design enjoyable and personal in steps, up-to-date—
a place for brainstorming out of any room
a non-native handshake gesture, fumbled joy,
asides beyond ideas mapping voices to download
to keep the center gratifyingly empty, an other
world nailed down and cauterized
by cicadas by day, bats by night—
things couldn’t be worse
for the influx of harmless ants
though students rarely pick them up
for verbal consultation or have a good excuse
like having a blood transfusion appointment.
No emotions, no purpose besides facts
thrown together to please the form of the event,
no heart as if to care and respond—
pre-witnessed preemptively more cosmopolitan
and distant, unable to voice but a semblance
of the happy wedding, the sad car accident
the tragedy of the poor rags-to-riches-and-back story,
good restaurants along the Riviera, Macao,
sponsors die for, words of important people
objective being through others
and the dust that settles things
in depth, interview all sorts of dire situations
to resist this style—go out and talk with elderly people
which is good for both us and the elderly.

Not a Year after My Mother’s Passing

2008-06-14T17:49:00.000+08:00

We are impervious to wormholes of rumor

carving seas, stormy minds adrift.

So many walk free in this state

terrified and posture. We are afraid

and garden. So many besieged

we are survivors. Our conversation

crosses the dead.

I am your eyes.

All is not well.

Send recipes.

(11-13-97)

逝水流年/Time Slip

2008-06-04T20:51:00.004+08:00

poem by Dean Brink 原文／包德樂
translation by Min-Jen Chiang 翻譯／江敏甄

逝水流年

誡碑被搗毀後（註1）總有人得將它們重新挖掘出土
隨後又席捲入所有千禧年的症候群中
並且在望遠鏡的演進史裡繼續前進
直到遠處的光解除了我們漫漫長夜的晦暗
不只成為一部電影，如柏拉圖所預測的那樣，
在眾所周知的那隧道盡頭的洞穴裡
偉大的神砸疼了牠的腳趾
搜尋引擎攤開手中的牌
稀釋了我們之中的我們如此疏離卻不至於崩解

如今我們唯一能寄望的僅剩美好品味的展現
但我們依然任三角旗標誌出地圖上的廉價旅館
在那裡，小鬼頭仰頭暢飲著從冰箱裡
噴出的涼水，別讓爸爸看見這一幕，
媽媽如是警告，認真點，不要冒犯了
打電話來的人，讓我們將性工作者重新打造成為女僕
畢竟，重點並不是做那回事
任何吐露真相的液體（註2）正蒐尋著
更多確實被禁制的一切——
沒辦法，我的手正被快樂地反綁著
等待有人來餵食我
投下硬幣點唱
然而沒有半首歌和一隻桶子我又能去哪兒
在褪去包裝的藉口裡尋找平衡——
那已經潰決的，距離心所在之處有多遙遠呢？
說到這裡，嘿，不如我們私通吧
趁著下載的同時。我知道，我說
雖然已經戒除
但雨天裡還是不能沒有她

註1.取自電影《十誡》之一幕，摩西搗毀了刻著十誡誡文的石碑。
註2.通俗電影如《蝙蝠俠》中常見的橋段，一種讓壞蛋喝了會說出真相或祕密的不知名的液體。

Time Slip

After smashing the tablets someone had to dig them up
later to scroll through all the millennial symptoms
and move on in the progress of our telescopes
until long-arriving light undid our darkness,
becoming more than just a movie,
the cave at the end of the proverbial tunnel
for a grand oneness to stub its toe
and the search engines to fan their cards
to dilute whatever us of us made it this far without collapsing.

All we can hope for now is a display of good taste.
But we still leave our toothpick flags on hostel maps
where the teen went down on a refrigerator
for chilled water. Don’t let father see that,
the mother warned. Trying harder, not to offend
callers, let’s recast the working girl a maid;
after all, it’s not about making that point,
any truth serum honing in on more
surely banned—my hands are happily tied
long as someone comes along and feeds me,
puts coins in to make me sing.
Without a song and a bucket where would I be
finding balance in the unwrapping of excuses—
what broke down, how distance is where the heart is?
Speaking of all that, hey, let’s fornicate
while we’re downloading. I know I said
it’s back on the wagon for me
but can’t live without her a rainy day.

誠如電視所見/ As Seen On TV

2008-05-25T15:31:00.004+08:00

誠如電視所見

打開書貓就來到你身邊
離開鏡頭就是即興時間
彷彿只要一會兒功夫訓練即已完成
然後你退居馬路無所不在的鏡頭之後
總是有許多罪惡潛藏角落
等待被彌補卻不知從何開始
彷如在以人為輪軸、抬轎前進的古代
我們依然活在操控之中直到身體在灌木叢裡舒展開來
盡其在我地熄燈行事
多年來我們豢養著一個癢，並且難耐地抓搔
直到她離去。現在且看我們成就了什麼……
不明就理地，那些精緻餐館紛紛插上了塑膠花
如今仍展示在成排的指甲沙龍裡
沿途都是販賣披薩的小店
而我們還能夠看著自動鋼琴裡
流洩出20年代的爵士樂聲

譯按：「誠如電視所見」（As Seen On TV）是美國電視節目上推銷商品常見的廣告用語，更有以此為名的連鎖商店，只要在電腦上鍵入這一串字，也可連結至購物網頁，裡面販售五花八門的日常用品，不少廉價劣質品充斥其中。
（翻譯／江敏甄）

As Seen On TV

The cat appears besides you as you open a book.
Off the camera it's off the cuff,
the training period seems complete for a moment.
Then you step back under the sweeping cameras of the boulevards
always around the corner, so many sins
to atone for, not knowing where to begin.
It is like in the ancient days, marching as the wheels to a palanquin,
it steers us until we’re rolled off in the shrubbery
and had our way with, lights off.
For years we had an itch and kept scratching it
until she left. Now look what we've done.
In the confusion, the fine restaurants
brought in plastic flowers.
There's only a row of nail salons to show for it,
and the pizza joint down the way
where we can always watch the automatic
piano and its rolls of ragtime.

香蕉共和國 / E Pluribus Bananas

2008-05-25T15:29:00.004+08:00

香蕉共和國

被對的事物所圍繞正成為一種負荷
當你成為你的朋友，你的家具也一定要成為你
代表著真實的你以及其他陳列在架上和牆上的事物
如此你的朋友才能感受到一股善意
然後很自然而然地擺出一種姿態
愛你，因為那是真正的你
所有的報紙和書籍也都支持這樣的說法
最新流行的是任誰都難以抗拒的斑駁金屬風
從勞動者堅硬如鋼鐵的鞋尖
到女孩們頭上精緻的白金髮夾
那曾在科幻電影中預示的乾淨未來錯過了我們
道德衝動正試圖力挽狂瀾
於樂趣的潮濕中，有如麇集的蝗蟲
然而我們的主力產品——那血肉分離的身體——
卻被檢測出含有奴隸的成分深植於大舉西進的篷車隊伍時代
逐一數算每一頭美洲野牛隆起的背脊、剷平，深入更深入的內陸
再從未被鏡頭獵取的記憶，轉而投向
攪拌著更多恐懼的歷史拼盤，超出自動偵測器所能忍受的瘋狂份量
我們的男人上個禮拜已被送出
讓我們計算一下交易和消費信心指數
而在第一個人被碾平之後，魔咒很快就會將它套牢
任何人的猜測都可能成真：誰引用了什麼話、什麼話不重要……
就像我們，到目前為止，總是能及時全身而退
聆聽著從高科技馬桶噴出喜愛的歌曲
如此一路行來，盡其一切可能地尋求一絲一毫的慰藉

譯按：原文之標題為E Pluribus Bananas，借自拉丁語E Pluribus Unum，意為「一來自於眾」（One out of many.），為美國政府立國之座右銘，自1782年起該字樣出現於美國國璽上，也普遍見於美元硬幣，除了宣示美國是由眾多州所組成的聯邦政府，也意指美國社會是一個種族和文化的大熔爐，每一個體對整體而言都同等重要。此處乃藉其原意諷喻美國意欲同一化世界的霸權思想，也對資本主義消費文化下所衍生的拜／戀物心理多所揶揄。
（翻譯／江敏甄）

E Pluribus Bananas

Choosing the right pieces to surround oneself is an ongoing burden.
As you become your friends your furniture must become you,
stand for the real you, and something on each shelf
and wall so the friends feel friendliness.
Then striking poses comes naturally too,
people love you for the real you
and all the clippings and bookmarks to back it up.
These days fashion is brushed metal bending over us
from the steel toes of laboring hours
on up to the finest platinum barrettes on daughters,
yet the clean future foretold in sci-fi misses us,
the very moral impulse to tweak the onrush lost
in a dampening of fun, as focused hording,
while our main product - simple, disembodied gore –
is censored courtesy of servants embedded in a Westward caravan
ticking off each peak of bison leveled to pass further
from memories off camera, tossed
into the much-feared salads of history, kooky beyond all bearings
of automated feelers our men sent out last week,
counting sales and consumer confidence
after the prototypes were rolled out and spells roped them back in.
It’s anyone’s guess who quoted what; what said not important as
we - so far - always duck in in time,
jets angling favorite songs from hi-tech heated toilet seats
so that steering down here finds a modicum of comfort in all the effort.

Disneyland Forests

2008-03-12T09:22:00.001+08:00

Rings abandoned the fishermen
as they rowed across the lake.
Soon there would be nowhere to go but home
where friends were hard to come by.
Commercials never mentioned how long
evergreens shadow residents in the season
walling out clear-cuts left high in the hills
to remember as they were,
cash to burn off others' repetitive motions,
seats of balance across climates
circulated over continents so that none of
the collecting plateaus in particular
opened to the winter sun.
Factories would have let some go
they said, so as to keep the keys
so no one thinking of reaching to sustain more
than contours on still waters
where surveyors measure the air
by how far we can see
and plant their galvanized Xs,
lay down the smiles, smiling for the day, divvying
as if the air were demonstrable and the sun was not landing.

Love, Play and Enjoy Yourself

2008-03-12T09:13:00.001+08:00

As boys we were quite good,
pooling our chemistry sets,
living up to the president’s idea of going to the moon
so no one notices anyone falling off rocking fears
and the humdrum comes on strong.
TV had just unfolded angels from thin air
in the presence of beehive minds,
aunts patiently waiting in horned-rimmed glasses
and all of California prepared to slide into the Pacific
as if everything were already entangled enough so no one would notice,
dulled by a plot ticking at the end like sparklers held over the bay from a dock,
waiting for daylight to kick open leaf prints on sidewalks
preemptively calling the whole thing off over an offhand cold spell
after Jupiter swung around in line with Saturn
bringing back the old spheres piercing us
as we pick apart the spectrums of stars
and seem to have it made, even those just learning
not to laugh at church with its elongated shadows
for every mouth harp and kazoos we pull from lapels.
But as if the tipsy pastor were a holy fool
working mysteriously with reverse psychology and a model libido
kept corked, his Bunsen burner’s feeble blue flames
were enough a cue to hobble together sulfur and iron filings
into little pellets dropped in test tubes, stashed away
as we gathered the hydrochloric for when the time came,
following the formula for century gases in the World Book Encyclopedia.

Colonialism

2008-02-17T10:42:00.000+08:00

In their minds rickshaws still toe mud,
salts tilt athletic for the gold drive
hardest at bottom highest—
flush to the blank
forging silhouettes in every step
for the blood to bloom again
for the burbs not budging,
blurbs taken curling, aloft
stay, why not… for the suite,
the slim man and window
—hey that's rent—
lights the fuselage
hollows the skies
for a leaven landing
folding down the wind sock
a knock out of brick and walker cartographies.

Ubud, Bali

2008-02-03T13:56:00.000+08:00

In Bali tourists overrun hideaways, beering each other in open-air gardens
then following us into empty cafes
as if one of us brought a badge of edibility to the mahogany.
They close in on our friendliness like lines of ants to breadcrumbs
in Hansel and Gretel; one says in a deep French accent
how the tiramisu is to die for,
how she would love to stick her tongue right down into the bowl
but for decorum—but the thought still slips out its crucible;
we’re all plagued by it now, tongues locked in mock hunger
given the high Euro. I hail from Taiwan now,
where we smile a tad more like locals,
barter to the last rupee and usually eat in local eateries.
An Aussie at the Internet café talks up his poverty (at home)
as an excuse for the frown motif, in charge, swiveling armor.
No one cares. The seriousness bursts
only in taxi drivers waiting too long for a gig.
A man my age in an azan cap eyes me
as if my friendliness meant I’d stolen something,
though I came with friends and have no interest in his women or men.
I want to be Moslem just to make him feel better,
but it is a Hindu island and I leave it to him to work it out—
maybe join me—in leaving America to the dogs,
lost causes, ideas that broke after too much petroleum,
old habits from bachelorhood and later nightmarish fads
like edible underwear, Pop Tarts,
or the convenience of quickie marriages
to make thinks all ok again
after Barbie walked by.
The world is smaller in the worst ways.
Laundry wires in from any hard drive.
The cameras have even made it into villages
with broken open sewer covers still to get to.
In the meantime, the general says now’s no time for elections.
Don’t worry; he is fine. Everyone should be so
important and watch the waiting,
build their gait up as well, more panic
and a gathering entourage to do things
while we work on our lists
when no one is at the nails.

Goodbye Old Friend

2008-01-06T13:15:00.001+08:00

Goodbye old friend. I’m faraway now
and you still reach out with words to clip me and steer me
like a father with no wisdom, only fears
yet prone to pontification, a faux pas these days of ridiculous men.
Try making a muscle of your biceps or standing on your head,
anything to turn things inside-out for laughs.

I’m tired of pretending to hold your mind together
as it leaks memories that would destroy everyone I love.
You don’t need my pity; you are full of it.
Like a bomb that has been diffused by the rain,
your voice no longer sings. Blame the world,
say I am older, out of touch, be grandiose,
more spite. Time is always waiting
like a father, but I am faraway
now, goodbye old friend.

Not to Wander

2008-01-03T10:38:00.000+08:00

If you breeze into a new town
new spirits breathe into you
and the longer you stay the deeper they burrow,
until you are praying at their altar
and find love after all.

If you turn it away and go on to the next town
the love will breathe you in
faster than the last,
quick to take the depths burrowed before
and yank an echo in the gut
pulling you back to the altar, vacated now,
all the demons soured
and pouring in.

追 (電影版) 張國榮電影《金枝玉葉》Zhui - Leslie Cheung

2007-12-26T07:45:00.000+08:00

Forms of Joy

2007-12-21T10:55:00.000+08:00

Transporting snails from the agate walk
one at a time to flowerbeds along the brick wall covered with leghorn ferns—
that was my last great love—
twisting my ear if I didn't listen,
and if I looked at another, holding me in a headlock:
a dream come true!
To see a sweet love fall:
wrong crowd: losing all lovely
to go into the storm again…
I miss the one others called crazy,
taking to drink, no home, no place to feel at home.
Suffering another taking you so young
and reliving it, beautifying the smoke of fireman rescue,
enshrining the diminutive vessel, offering
to be abandoned, taken.
No wonder we no longer long for anyone,
all the trials and conditional claims
cumulate in no one in particular—
but I'm still here! and enough of them now
to turn to now without calling
they bump into one another
in advertised illusions of remembering each other
—if not longing exactly—
magnifying possibilities
suspending the new ones and the latest movies
and criteria of shopping, dining, and more
so that the photos that really matter
seem from an earlier life
with the hairstyles and colognes all wrong.

My Station in Life

2007-12-17T16:01:00.000+08:00

I haven't hammered out all the glitches,
the pity quotient ranks rather high.
More colloquialisms creeping in's no help—
all 'n' all we hold out well
against the latest tides of upgrades
to tidy all aggressions into new nowheres to ignore
so bulldozers in Gaza can make themselves at home
and the heart can yearn for a better world, even skip a beat for it
yet let the body listen in quiet.
No one wants to hear about it, pay for the ads—
only snow broadcast and settled on boughs of Douglas fir
kneeled to the ground in forced obeisance
and crackling only as walls during earthquakes
or more common grindings of jaws, lost sleep.
When I was Bond I switched on my inventions
to ward off poison lips
and tried to talk the Little Mermaid out of coming
to kiss her prince each day
or be sent again into the Sea,
how she traded her voice to be with him
and how we all bought tickets, keeping it up, careless,
waiting for others to get around to it.

More Bad Ideas

2007-11-29T22:30:00.000+08:00

My excuses to get away keep canceling
so I'm left with the real thing to come back to,
yet here too are excuses and who wants to wait for the bell to sound
announcing the start of the next level. For now, running in place is my position
in the training room, catching glances of others trapped by the ratio
of delicious is to walking or jogging. While I get older
and you stay happily between body and soul for now, take it each day I say
and you wonder about a time I'd teach you Japanese
when we have all the time to wander into languages and cafes
faraway from water, always just friends and walking, aerobics,
weight training, swimming in one lane together,
sketching and losing ourselves in film festivals, later taking trains
and sea routes north and south along the coast and inland
as long as we return in time to sleep in our separate worlds,
shopping for DVDs by the minutes listed,
clothing by the layers tucking our bodies away
and letting be all the excuses, the library a circle of cafeterias
and restrooms, study rooms to filter the good parts to put to use.
Now I've forgotten hide and seek, hiding behind pillars
holding up the airport, watching pretty lone travelers
shooting themselves with cell cameras
the way open hands used to prop up waves of one's hair long ago
at the cusp of Leo and Virgo, an audience in the offing
eye contact from a turquoise fountain.
The let-downs never end. Why bother—
stuck in this too long too old, one says; too fast, another;
too musical, one; too sad, too sissy, too bouncy others
would hold me to my category, still me and save me, ensnare me
and market me just when I want to leave me, everyday have a new me
to talk it through, keep this up, postponing, excuses,
having all the time in a world of one day finally touching.

時事川柳 satirical ditty on current events

2007-11-19T07:56:00.000+08:00

北拉致が忘れられない歴史ボケ
[so forgetful of history, yet Japan will never forget those abducted to North Korea]

戲劇演出 Histrionics

2007-11-17T23:35:00.001+08:00

我的朋友活在獨裁政權底下
人們滿腦子只有他們自己以及從一數到十
孩童到君主，農奴到官僚
直至騷動蜂擁而起，就在你的指尖
恰恰是玩笑的成分改變了它自身，那諸般的可能
眾人議論紛紛但沒人知道將會往何處去
爾後更嚮往起美好的舊日時光
那時每個季節都在進步演化之中
而現在，你走進某些房間誓言保守祕密——
一種抑制效應緩和了突發的危機
將末日的傳染病控制在海灣附近
地平線上有第三黨的發言人指出了方向
有如走出抑鬱，翻到下一頁
一個新的誓約，莊嚴肅穆
為了那完善的標準，如此美好而安靜
我們越來越富有男子氣概
在無線對講機的護送下，興高采烈地
讓行李接受X光檢測出表裡不一
和任何被夾帶進入我們的故事的成分
彷彿我們無意中聽到的比我們原本知道的還多

原文／Dean Brink
翻譯／江敏甄

My friend's lived under a dictatorship,
men full of themselves and their countings to ten,
child to lord, serf to the bureaus
until a hubbub wells up and at your fingertips
the very sport of it alters it, possibilities
everyone talks about but nobody really knows where it will lead,
later longing for the good old days
evolving each season.
For now, you enter certain rooms sworn to secrecy—
a dampening effect lulling the interim crisis
to hold at bay a doomsday epidemic
over a horizon where third-party spokespersons point to it
as if to turn the page
out of the blue to a new oath, solemnity
for good measure, such quiet good
we grow more mannish
in walkie-talkie convoys, happy to have
our luggage x-rayed for inconsistencies,
anything piggy-backed to our story
as if we'd overheard more than we knew.

荒蕪 Waste

2007-11-17T23:18:00.001+08:00

以冰淇淋度日的冬季，在我母親的房子裡
風呼呼穿過窗玻璃針孔般的罅隙

任時光倒回，所有的衣服已不再合身——
新的重力牽引，日復一日
濕黏的碼頭船索慢慢浸蝕在熱氣裡——
科學終究比硫磺來得猛烈
迫於戰爭，乾硬的泥塊上滿佈皸裂的痕跡
沿著海岸，一路裂到門前的庭院——
足以讓妳用來作為蠟筆塗敷顏色
一次次的穿透老化了紙張
終至疲乏扭曲
失控的腫塊蔓延著
縫合在拼綴的表皮下繼續膨脹
妳屈身準備靠向一處淺灘，拋繩

上岸，將錨鏈留在低潮

原文／Dean Brink
翻譯／江敏甄

墜落的女人——記艾瑞克‧費雪銅雕被遮覆之日 Eric Fischl's Bronze Tumbling Woman Draped and Curtained Off

2007-11-17T22:53:00.003+08:00

墜落的女人——記艾瑞克‧費雪銅雕被遮覆之日

那麼多的墜落，以致無法睜眼看它
兀自縐成一團
依然喘息
攝影機蜂擁向另一扇窗

一個早年的榮光在遠處重複演練
鏡頭探入
而我們屏息以待
下一個堅定不移的低沈嗓音
被票選而出，雷厲風行
以狂熱，簇擁在窗台外的
一式的憤怒，慢慢溶解

在火烤的土地上
衛星遙遠的彼端
從天空下達命令
地表遂因那手術而發熱

譯按：「墜落的女人」（Tumbling Woman, 2001）為美國當代藝術家艾瑞克‧費雪（Eric Fischl , 1948~）的系列銅雕，作品傳神捕捉人體由高處墜地的剎那姿態，驚恐誇張的神情，極具震撼力。時值911恐怖攻擊事件發生後，展覽揭幕不久，官方認為有引發觀者創痛記憶之虞，致使該作隨即遭覆蓋。

二○○三年三月美國政府不顧聯合國反對，逕自出兵伊拉克。
——寫於二○○二年十月，美國決定攻擊伊拉克

原文／Dean Brink
翻譯／江敏甄

Eric Fischl's Bronze Tumbling Woman Draped and Curtained Off

Too much to view the falling
come in to its crumpling
still breathing
the video streams to another window,

an earlier glory repeated farther away
to zoom in
while we hold down
for the next unwavering drone
elected, doings-away-with
fever-pitched, crowded around ledges
all the same anger, dissolving

in fire-softened earth
the far side of satellites
reaching down from the sky,
surfaces warm from operations.

10/2002

彼日的寓言 Parable of the Day

2007-11-17T22:46:00.000+08:00

當時有人在你面前滑倒
在擦得晶亮的紅色大理石地板上

每個路過的人都留下一灘漫漶的水漬
早晨一場大雨過後的咖啡館湧進了泥濘

而你看見那人的提包掉落
當他奮力跳過潮濕發亮的地面

你想要幫他撿起提包
不過是一個關心的動作

原本將會是糟糕的一天
卻在意念和行動之間的鴻溝消失時

你趨前撿起提包交給那人
挽救了這一天，就像沒事發生一樣

原文／Dean Brink
翻譯／江敏甄

When someone before you slips
on polished cinnabar marble

everyone leaving a cumulative trail of puddles
after a morning shower muddied into the cafe,

and you see the man's valise landing
while he pushes himself off the heavy, shiny ground

you think of picking it up for him
a gesture of concern.

It was going to be a bad day
and as the gap between the idea and the act vanishes

and you approach the valise and hand it to him
it brings the day around, as if it never were.

Cut-up Poetry Scrabble

2007-10-31T20:09:00.000+08:00

CUT-UP POETRY SCRABBLE

“What a great game for creative writing classes. It’s so postmodern, too.”

1. Preparation:
Each player cuts up words from newspaper or magazine articles.
Some players may try to control the process by only selecting words they have an affection for or otherwise hold in high esteem. This is to their peril, since it is a competition and one finds (dare I say without exception) that such planting of preconceived contexts into a would-be unconscious cache of words leads to prose of a single context rather than lyric poetry, which one would hope echoes and entertains multiple contexts.
For instance, if a player thinks, "ah-ha, I'm only going to choose exotic-sounding words from an article on Rio de Janeiro," without plain words to diversely tether them in their exotic orbit, they may seem a bit silly altogether. If the language is entirely from an article on a crime investigation or a court trial, even in fragments the story will quickly show through. In this way, the cache of words must be sufficiently large and diverse. I recommend at minimum 60 words from diverse articles or sources.

2. Each player places the words in a paper bag or other container and shakes it up good, shuffling all the words.

3. Each player blindly selects 7 words and begins working on a poem from them.
The facilitator can go around policing the process player by player for fun and to remind them that there are no bad words or good words, that the process is random with a purpose of learning to appreciate the sparks provides by words from diverse areas.

4. By the time you have gone around the room focusing on each student's random selection of 7 words, the first player should have a poem ready and read it to the group.
If the facilitator is a teacher, perhaps make suggestions such as: "as an experiment, what if you switched these two words?" (I was able to coax a student into moving a cockroach nearby a satellite, drawing out amusing possibilities with all the waving antennae and all.) Marvel at the variety of contexts. One poem in the very first round had the dullest array of words one could imagine, but was perhaps the best poem in combination! Why? It included a wife surveying a bank, thus creating in a short space very condensed metonymical evocation of a troubled marriage or other worries.

5. Each player should record their poem in each round.
Later one can examine the changes and learn about the impact of having more words in a poem, connotations, and contexts. Most importantly, recording the poem liberates one to experiment more and let go of prior achievements and associations and move on to new ones.

6. After reading it, the player blindly selects 3 more words from their cache and reworks their poem.

7. This process of going around goes on until players get bored. We went on for 4 rounds, limited by class time (nearly two hours).

8. Players can present their best versions and vote on the top one (or three, etc.) if you like.

Suggestions and Rules for Cutting and Drawing Words and Phrases
Choose texts from a variety of sources. For dabbling prose-writers and others who may be drawn to foreshadowing and trying to maintain control of the range of available words, my advice is to mix in diction from diverse contexts into your word heap. The sack of words should become the compost for your surrogate memory or unconsciousness-in-a-bag. Toss all sorts of words into this bucket you'll be drawing on.

When cutting, you can leave articles and prepositions and any funny phrasing that carries an idiomatic ring, but avoid phrases that contain two primary parts of speech, such as a noun and verb or a verb and an object, unless such a pairing is within an obviously attachable clause from which you have cut it off. Part of the fun is in recombining such phrases in new contexts.

When drawing and arranging words:
• You don't have to use all your words.
• You can fold back words, prepositions, articles you don't want to use. You can tear words from phrases.
• You can add preposition and articles as needed for flow or fluency.
• You can use words on the front or back of the piece you draw, folding away whatever words or letters you don't want to use.
• You can change the tense and agreement of verbs so as to form continuous phrases.

In a way, this process mimics how we read and digest phrases and words and redistribute them in lines of poetry. Such poets and Ron Silliman seem to do this habitually, transferring overheard speech and other observations to notebooks and eventually to lines of verse.

Introduction
Teaching a creative writing course this semester, I wanted to try a new method for demonstrating to students—through active practice—lessons about combining words from different contexts as found in everyday language. In past Japanese literature courses I had spent a class indulging in linked poetry (renga), where students followed formal requirements for the placement of certain season words and such, drawing on a long bilingual Japanese-English lexicon arranged by season. Teaching in Taiwan and having no Japanese students in the class and no Chinese-English lexicon of this sort, I decided it might be too troublesome to introduce Japanese poetry as such. But, I still wanted to impart some similar lesson in combining fixed phrases and words somewhat randomly to create non-narrative, lyric poetry. Japanese linked poetry is structured to inhibit narrative continuity while indexing familiar categories. As such, it intimates jostling contexts and creates tensions that spark readers’ imaginations and often make for interesting lines of poetry. Moreover, by using contemporary newspapers as the primary source for the pools of words, one is virtually guaranteed to avoid the ahistorical tendencies prevalent in bourgeois poetry in this age of advanced consumerism (and militarism) in many English-speaking contexts.

Luckily, beside linked poetry there are other traditions of random word use that can provide points of reference:

• Surrealist poet-painter party activities such as drawing exquisite corpses: a body drawn on sections of a folded piece of paper so that each artist cannot see the other body part, and the resulting amusement comes from seeing the variety of possibilities for imagining a conventional thing, a body (for examples, please see the Surrealism exhibit in the permanent collection at the Chicago Art Institute Museum).

• Another example, much closer to our needs, is John Cage’s experimental poetry which employed I-ching fortunetelling methods or computers variously and systematically to randomize selected ranges of words from long prose works (such as a Joyce novel) and arrange the selections—the length of which would be randomly fixed by whichever instrument of selection he was using in the experimental writing process—on an anagrammatic axis. He called these "mesostics."

• The game of Scrabble, with its opening "seven tiles" is a good prime number to start with.

I wanted to combine the regulated randomness of Cage with an awareness of contextual (primarily seasonal and topical) connotations in linked poetry to liberate students from the narrow understanding of poetry as simple expressions of an "I" that we learn about in the course of studying literature. Maybe it is a way to wean us from the unconscious imitation of the posings of writers in the canon and sound fixated on our internal musings often presented in rather grandiose terms. In our world today, consciousness is particularly overrun with a broad range of items competing for our attention, and to write poetry fixed only on the snails crossing our paths as we ride our scooters through the graveyard at night may be too limited in focus. To write in a way engaged in contemporary life, anyways, I thought a good idea, and Cut-up Poetry Scrabble is the result that I wish to introduce.

Here is my first attempt at the game:

Already paid within the family,
social swans in the 1950s were trying to build
"a sense of soul" into second-term schools
in accordance with first-term nations of 2002.
Based on a fragrance empire of September
and commissioned by a heritage differing
from the unwillingness to hold a diploma, emotional
directors quoted schools within the legend.

P.S. Please let me know about your experiences with the game, how it goes. (interpoetics AT hotmail dot com)

As Seen On TV

2007-10-21T15:35:00.000+08:00

The cat appears besides you as you open a book.
Off the camera it's off the cuff,
the training period seems complete for a moment.
Then you step back under the sweeping cameras of the boulevards
always around the corner, so many sins
to atone for, not knowing where to begin.
It is like in the ancient days, marching as the wheels to a palanquin
it steers us until we are rolled off in the shrubbery
and had our way with, lights off.
For years we had an itch and kept scratching it
until she left. Now look what we've done.
In the confusion, the fine restaurants
brought in plastic flowers.
Now there's only a row of nail salons to show for it.
There's always the pizza joint down the way--
we can watch the automatic piano and its rolls of rags.

7 Tanka in English 英語の短歌

2007-10-03T21:24:00.000+08:00

1
Driving for hours,
made it to Seaside.
You ask if I’m alone,
if I know you moved
furniture closer for us.

2
You say let’s talk more
about weekends together
at Carson Hot Springs,
how they were good times,
and that I can see anyone too.

3
Even if we were
to stop calling each other
darling, walking home alone
in the dark, we’d see
the same moon all over town.

4
Returning from
our favorite café,
I hold you tight, when
you are cold,
as if neighbors could see.

5
As long as we can be here
let’s stay together
you say in our house,
while I go to work,
late grading at a café.

6
After a friend flew
back to Chicago, we went
to Port Townsend, taking
so many pictures in black and white
smiling in each one.

7
I was turning right
while you would go straight,
toward I-5 North
the last time I saw you
in the rearview mirror.

Notes on Colonialism

2007-09-15T21:12:00.000+08:00

And after they left they kept coming back,
the graffiti to go home long erased, they smile
and try to get them to speak the old language
of the shining goddess. But every year there are fewer
to reply in the old language, only ones hurt more by soldiers
hiding from the revolution waiting across the water
as if it were temporary and the world would bring it down.

The tea was no longer left raw at least.
Their wooden houses are all collapsing as tenants give up
or each timber is replaced as a virtual relic for antique restaurants.
There’s not much romance in it anymore.
A few habits, turned shoes at archways,
soaked fish cakes at 7-11, but the happy-go-lucky tourist
coming south finds only the same waiting.

What Brings Two Together?

2007-08-21T17:05:00.000+08:00

Sex is not enough. Though if it comes from deeper hurt,

actions less acting out tides of hormones

than drives settled in like colonies in the extremities

shadowing our mastermind waiting for a partner

worthy not of the mailbox but other procedures

to force into the open—that’s beauty in love,

the tearing open of wounds, the sparing of disappointments,

elements alone no more than the ongoing shedding

or frames destroying a museum.

Even children stuck in the rut of their golden spoons

grow out of their sugar daddies one day

seeking calm bliss and it all falls happily apart.

The dream lifts. It is insanity to survivors

in a hooded world. Guarded.

All designed to turn away, quiet

and mountainous. The frowns worn proudly.

Torn from mother or father.

The smiles through robotic voices

deaf to themselves,

sweetly following fashion, unloved

before it struck them for a reason for not to care for,

or a whim set aside over the long work weeks.

We wait, watching the dragonflies clean the air

where library lampposts go on, and bats veer through

specimens too large to gather like bones

steering through the dusk.

poems in progress - Losing Badly at Chess

2007-07-12T00:19:00.000+08:00

Losing Badly at Chess

———for K., who touched me

though I never touched her
and that’s why I’m here
to tell you my townspeople,
about advances being dealt in
less it fall through lost six o'clock frames and blurred pixels.

The very idea of it sends shivers down my associates.
It’s unnatural, with my vows and all.

Others like broken goods, distractions
this far into the game enough to forget it altogether —

just be, so anyone bothering to follow
eventually gives in to the winning level —

hits soulless notes — as if
not even liking whoever was listening
to teasers, not even stories — memories jogged from hints
to pass on reconstructions that never were
because always there in the back of the mind
idiomatic gatherings around the well
while horsemen enter the palace followed by these projections.

Some say her ex beat her, some say she beat her ex.
After the 007 reruns I’m good at dodging bullets,
keeping an ongoing distance as the game unfolds
jumping off at the nearest peak.

Higher ups live to be wheedled,
dashing for overtures tossed off a disaster set
pushed open when everyone tried to be by the hanging microphone
to be discovered by agents in the flashing hallway.

She tests their immunity with long tosses of hair dyed premature purple
forcing the lens to accommodate motions in any direction.
It was part of a game played even after we’d all gone
to the bathroom, checked scooters behind red lines,
played her hand like the fortune-telling machine on Sunmoon Lake,
solitary, self-contained, sending scrolls for whims to come and go

unrelated to anything but the tantrums and good restraint of gods
claiming her, while we chatted up and down the long table
experiencing the dillydallying of Hegel’s service dialectic
whereupon she blurted in vain, I have taken Him as my savior
and we all busted up — to hear it from her here
like hearing The Lord’s Prayer from the mouth of Batman —
gadget junkie under the wing of the Wayne Foundation,
direct line to the Gothem PD – set.

Even if the Penguin had him hog-tied and sending him into the fire
what would he do with such a prayer?
He would never need to say I am here
for a drawing of straws, all moving forward as planned.

poems in progress - Twilight of Good Graces

2007-07-11T23:48:00.000+08:00

from
Just Grow UP!

Twilight of Good Graces

Across the bay, helpless neighbors snarl the commute
and moodiness lowers the general bar
to shoulder-padded mumbles—
who rules, who shows who.
Air superiority is the talk of the town.
Waiting for them we head off
to see herring feed themselves to seals—
riveting kersplashes in a hierarchy unseen since
since ape stood up in the evolution to man,
only a bony tail there, a patch of fur here,
vegetarians and hawks—the idea of balance
indelible in the circus.
Wells dropped to hit-and-miss after the heat,
then summer showers kicked in minimally.
The only real hope lie in alien saucers
forming a holding pattern over Mt. Rainier,
smoke-signaling rain—
even my green Oma from the lovely Schwarzwald knew
days blue enough to send us to the lake in the foothills
and sit in the sun until a freckle spread
and we felt like a Nutty Buddy after the hard work of splashing around half naked.
The onslaught of cumulonimbus hardly crossed our minds,
was something cyclical, shapes in the sky barometric.

Dean Brink 包 德樂 (Baudelaire) Taiwan Scooter Poet 台灣機車詩人