I Audition to become Asian

I Audition to become Asian

I am white, but I love Asia
Mandarin is my second language
Korean dramas are my favourite media
I admire the rise of a people
Who are more industrious

Who age better and respect the collective
As noon every day I wonder
Why I live in a French City
When it’s Asia that I love
But, the truth is, I’ve a lot to learn

From Japan, India, Korean, China
I’m not Asian so there is so much
I do not understand, about the East
Being a western, I cannot pronounce
Their names or name their cities easily

I still have trouble differentiating faces
But the first step in becoming
A world citizen, is forgetting our last name
Forgetting where our ancestors happened
To breed and farm and fish

We are one people, but the Asian
Ones stand out to me, like a younger ambition
Born of ancient traditions
I recognize the future is Asian.

How Not to make a Career out of Poetry

How Not to make a Career out of Poetry

You say, our bodies will grow heavier when dead?
But how will they know the important
Things about us, how we stretched
Our limits like, death threats to failure?

The letters will melt on the tip
Of our lost selected works
That remained buried x number of years
After our passing, if nobody reads

Our poems, did anyone ever write them?
You can’t kill without kindness, you said
But what happens when we live
Our entire lives too kind and trampled

By the world we thought would protect us
Too altruistic, too dreamy, too invariably
In love with art, to make it in the real world?
What then, should we somehow survive

With community, interviews, teaching positions?
I don’t even have that, so perhaps
My fate is to remain an obscure hermit
And pretend I am a shaman of literature

Misunderstood with small tiger melon hands
With silver hair and broken genius
And scars on my brain from my love of poetry
Am I supposed to die not here

But somewhere else with someone else?
On a patch of land in Taiwan, speaking to
How I gave instructions for my funeral
Of how to be kind and how to forgive

The invisible podium where all cancer patients
Must wait for their doom, I know the feeling
It’s the flaming dandelion magic
Of when I catch myself in the act

Of writing a poem, or imagine the amethyst
Hues of the moment of wanting to be remembered by strangers
That is so ludicrous like gamification theory.