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.

BROODING UPON THE RAIN-SOAKED BELL

She brings a broom at dawn to my heart
For peach-petals open and blooming
After the moon shone from a palace beyond time
Dust fills my spirit’s halls from end to end
And, for all her jade-whiteness
My devotion cannot tell the Court of the Bright Sun

How I have been cleansed or have grown
The Yin Mountains are my cold resting place
The Moon goes back to the time of beginnings
Written to music, spoken to Spring
She brings a broom at sunsets to my soul
Placing a spark at the Pavilion of long twilight

I am about to linger awhile, and perhaps forever
As I think of my voyage through a thousand miles
Lovers have suffered since ancient times
The sorrows of parting, so how can I complain
I am not special, we are all capable
Of a thousand varieties of tender emotion
To Whom shall I impart them now?

字

The power to hurl words is a weapon
Language, invented so long ago
Tortured out of the season to be Silent
We witnessed destruction in this
That the body can speak with a Smile
We knew, how to evolve vocabulary
For the profit of any circumstance

But literature and poetry live on
Like music, affluent to the trends
The word the body couldn’t say
Brought us to a science of uniformity
Laws that all the Species knew
Some kind of order in the mathematics of space

Language evolved in sentient words
Likewise the empathy of our saving lives
Enlightenment, meant to heal with the
Power of words, the music of vibrations
The last energy to wield a shared reality
So next time you speak, think of this:
Everyone is equally innocent and guilty
In the metrics of language, the interview of sound.

鯨魚之歌 (Whale Songs)

You, we, I – were actors
You drew up narratives so you could
Tell yourself there was a Pattern
I was in that story, vulnerable muzzled
Like the Night on the coast
I’d walk into your purposeful longings

I knew I was a temporary comfort
You, whose eyes and hands I loved
And mouth, whose foreigness I wished
You, whose words and mind
Was dull, my name held too much compassion

For the role given, too wasted
By the irresponsible human stranger
I was declared obsolete by another
Or like an ancestor that gave no profit
Outcast, abandoned, made to flee the story

Aching for years after the city
Was but a memory, after your child had grown up
I cried sick days alone, in that terror
My heart reincarnated in grief
Your whale-songs were contagious.

熱

i

Enter high summer, longest day!
This higher summer we love will
Pour its liquid light and make us forget
Light-memory erases dark-fantasy
Straining against our veins
Of sunburnt epiphanies and
Skin-cancer worries, and wrinkles

ii

That climb the wrists of time like Dragons
Night frost that barely is brisk enough
To welcome Autumn’s strange roses
These fields have time to grow rich
Like a vibrant testament to our
Continuation among the weeds

iii

Ready to crash into the parade
You who think I find words for everything
Don’t know how loose I am from words
In the Indian Summer heat
You for whom I write, June Bugs…