Alone I was wondering
To the end of a narrow way
Back to my empty room
The tears of the Fen falling
Your beauty prefigured

Once we made fire in the air.
And after my intolerable self thrived
You saw through my disguise
And still loved me.
As if the moment will never pass.

A world of patterns and light
But I walked towards the silhouettes
Feeling unworthy of atonement,
And now I weep for the loss of you
No songs can ease my troubled insight.

I wanted words to drop on my head
"Topic sentences" he said
Last of the new poets
The last one on this side of the world
But he was speaking another language
I tried to conjure up words
Henry V at Agincourt
Dr King in Washington
'A Hard Rains Gonna Fall'
From some town hall
Words, words, words
I don't know what to write.
My brain has no way with words
Dylan says ' It's hard, it's hard and
it's hard...I know!
But he says 'I can'
He tells me about Sylvia Plath and
Ernest Hemingway
And Three Hundred Tang Poems
And something stared in my soul
A story of forgotten words
"Write" he said.
I began to make my own way.

Migu's Coffee Cafe
Just by Xinhua's Book Shop
Is a place I know well
A place to be seen for the ****
To loose yourself in a dream
When you leave your native road

Through the window I can see the faded
yellow paint of the buildings.
They are always darker in winter.
They remind me of leaves falling
on a cold Manchester Autumn morning.
Full of parting  and lingering pain.
Holding on to the last days of summer.

Now I see your face
In a nest broken by angry voices
Too afraid to tread on the flowers
I could not help you.

A life at 22 always looks different at 52 even in Taiyuan.
We once talked of babies and forever
Now I focus on the pain
The only thing that is real.

Where are they now
those Ravens of Wilmslow
Who turned the world upside down
refusing to live by artificial light.

Their flesh bitterly primed
On the damp dark Cheshire plains.
Red flags drawn across their eyes
Blood sputtering with disdain.

A moment of war

We showed the world what can be done
and how to fly through the sky
When the thin December gleam is
is driven out by those who stay silent
when the snow falls.

Now my heart beats faster at the
suffocating silence that is all around
me.