I often think about the how I became a poet.
All those years of reading, when nobody
was nearly interested.

My father was a romantic.
He could read aloud poems by
Keats, Shelley and Byron.
I couldn’t understand any of it, I doubt he could.
But it sounded good.

I settled into a life,
evoked of love and steadfast promises.
And discovered Neruda and personal
colours of hope.

But in life
the dark mornings always come.
Just listen to the coughs,
and the blood stained phlegm of cancer
You will know what I mean.
Then I found Bukowski
and began to see
that being a fool is normal.
And **** happens in life.

“I am a writer” he said.
At least he endured trying.

So now….. I get out of bed
and I write poems.

Sometimes a painful submission of words,
that almost every poet thinks.
But that’s normal…..
at least for me.

It’s a day already.
And the morning sun
is wearing my face.
Half of a singing bird
Half the gentle sound
of a liuqin.
That comes from you.
The world is not silent
this morning.

“Do you write about love like Neruda?”

“Do you understand the nature of immortality
like Dickinson?”

“Have you read Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens?
“They are American you know?”

“What do you think of Dylan Thomas?”
“Oh…..but he is Welsh”

“And what about Sylvia Plath and the confessional
movement?”
“She a woman, but an American woman right”

“Of course we cannot not accept you,
unless you tell us about Whitman and the
American epic”.

“Oh yes… one more thing.
We don’t want any poems that
caustically indict bourgeois poetic values
or celebrate the desperate……
like that Bukowski fellow”.

OK?

Last night, I walked by the relics.
The last of the violent beasts.
Small and damaged now.
Filled with anxious, mounting fear.
The last know speakers of a dead language.

Now exquisite neon figurines,
talk slithering sounds, and horses sleep alone.
The raucous rivers lament the frivolous tunes
and silent broadcasts.

And the poets, who thought
that success followed desire.
Write to complain about the loss of poetic form.
And the death of odes to love.

The river Wei,
Autumn solitude
and a thousand eyes.
A moth-rich summer darkness
that warns the soul.

The slow fat queens,
cold-blooded, green and orange.
Spin and turn gasping for breath.
The last of their sins surrendered.

Flashlights and flasks,
a meditation on a fragile soul.
Chasing the silver fins,
the struggle and the toil.
Forty years of night fishing.

I met a married couple
in ** Chi Minh City.
He was 63, and claimed
he talked to God.

She was 28, heavily pregnant
and told me that God only
smiled at the unsurprised.
I was curious about them.

As we walked by
Saigon Notre-Dame Basilica,
she talked about Vietnamese men,
how they would hit her.
Make her ‘do things’.

She said this man was kind.
“He gets angry, but he does not hit me”.

The three of us spent most
of the day together.
Spinning words of wonder,
as we visited the Independence Palace
and the War Museum.

The man was interesting,
caught halfway between old age
and a new life.

We laughed about age
“**** Jagger had a baby in 2016,
and he is 75” he said.

So I told him “Keeping pace is all the rage these days”
This made him laugh.

I met two Vietnamese
men this morning,
just outside my hotel.
They invited me to drink tea
and flexed about philosophy.

One of them told me that
Le Quy Don was the greatest scholar
that Vietnam has produced.

The other one disagreed
and wanted to tell me about
Tran Duc Thao

“He’s a Marxist and traitor”
Said Le Quy Don’s man.
I just drank some tea and listened.

Now some say how can this be?
You cannot speak Vietnamese,
and their English is poor.

So I tell them I keep searching the streets
and I wonder about words.
And the next thing is that everything is still there.
A blast of colour is a silent world.