Four Poems

Pennies

Hong Kong, 2011

Seven million
wriggling tiny agonies
behind whose smiles
lies the trembling
of the lost.

I, as all the others,
clutch my past;
am like the outside:
too big,
too everywhere.

Seven million nobodies
for a nothing in this world,
we cry, cry, cry
for survival
from obscurity.

Nauseated looks
on bloated faces:
Seven million
dead skins that form
a sloughing flatness:

Regimented plant life,
hanging and swelling
with the
taste of pennies
in our mouths.

Honey and Ashes

Now I want you only more.
I need to go out; I’ve just come back in.
It is the season of something dying,
of something in-between.

Skin tingles.
And what one knows in one’s cheating heart,
and what one says, are two different things.

The word.
This universal solvent, freezedries, disintegrates
with an acrid smell of paralysis.

Clawed from the air, mid-flight,
as if I was a gift, you dropped me,
mound of mangled flesh and quill,
on the doorstep of fate.

You created me.
Now you slip from my hands.

I know. I know this:
Love’s a crisis of the soul and
the most exquisite thing is a sting to the heart.

Bite my knuckles, hands jerk open,
and among those thousand
kisses day in day out, this one is the last,
your wet cheek the taste of bitter walnuts.

Morning After

I had made love to him.
It felt like being sapped
and lulled by sunburn.

I felt seen. Then, I left.
We broke like sheets
of ice, drifted apart like

two comic strip panels
separated by
a jagged line.

No more lace.
No more
platitudes.

And nothing lost,
but everything
transformed

Panama City, 1933

Structures of the airport, newly-built, are draped with sweet and
Sickly heat that rears up silently, old and hot against the ceiling.

Three dusty, stubborn fans knead the viscous air; withhold themselves
From the waiting man, stout and wheezy, pressed into a plastic airport chair.

A languid, weary creature of large yet feeble composition; expanded,
Enormous, with a big, pale head and swollen legs, he sits and sweats

In veils of raw heat. Somewhere: the buzzing of a fly.
Its struggle is distant, small and unimportant. It does not reach him.

His damp linen suit feels alien to his amorphous thighs. Undignified, his body –
A soft brutality – spills into the neighbouring seat like a Daliesque

Clock. The fly’s oscillating buzz now finds its way into his consciousness:
A useless fussing of a tiny, energetic organism. He cannot see it. Under his

Enormous eyebrows, his eyes blink pathetically. His vast indolence finds
It difficult to tolerate any reminder of agility, sedulity, or lightness. He breaks out

In another noxious sweat, lifts his hat and dabs his forehead with a
Yellowed handkerchief. His hair, wet and salty, adorns his forehead like

An array of cut algae. He inhales flatly, puffs his cheeks. A drop of sweat
Plummets from the ridge above his brow and shatters on the tile

Beneath his leather shoe. Then the fly grows vague. Its drone, tinier now,
Is carried off into the halls above, cavernous and wide and indistinct.