Motif Without a Name

 

 

Xiao Wei, sometimes I think the life I lead is a lie

And there is nobody I can tell

Everywhere I go I am just another anonymous figure

Tell me, how did it get this way?

 

To be a man is a lonely road

That sometimes leads to no woman

No home, no hearth, no tribe, no faith

And what I once thought was righteous

 

No longer seems just or a cause of becoming

For in the end we are just a lifestyle

We are just a bombshell translated

Into someone contemporary, there’s no singular

 

We are the spirit of history reacting

A fate that can be so tender, so weak

Xiao Wei, in your strength I find homage

Even If I will never taste your food

 

I can run as fast as a rabbit through the forest

Having no destination to whom can I turn?

 

Author’s note:

I should be pleased if you follow me here:

Subservience to the Sun

 

 

Xiao Wei, when I feel your happiness

Radiate to me, I know it’s not something I can catch

It’s just your energy of action

 

That transforms me by extension of contact

With you, the midnight street of my life

Does not feel as lonely any more

 

Though I must accept my own darkness

In your life I see a part of the world’s truth

I am not young like your sturdy walk

 

I do not strive quite, like you stalk your future

Like a crouching tiger with long black hair

I study your posture and look for your mood

 

Xiao Wei, I will never know if it’s raining

In California, because when I think of you

I only can witness a golden orange sun

 

Hit me like fabulous lutes and peacocks

Of morning in the waves, of noon in the gardens

And if I seem too interested, then let it be my own lack.

I Thrum for News of You

 

Xiao Wei, since whomever

I did well by, I want to touch

The dewy blanket, the space between our lives

All night long, as if ~

The youth I can’t remember

Bid me farewell, they are the very ones

Who injure me most of all

That I long to hold most of all

Xiao Wei, if I cannot say your name

Then to whose voice shall I dispel

Come now, sing this, all of you

And add your voices for the ocean whales

And the life I would have loved

Had you been of my own culture

Had you been of my own care

The unmarried woman is, a prayer gone wild

For humankind, and maidens to keep a vigil for

The brides are gone, forever more

To the genes of old, they renew their force

In little faces, and mothering grace

But Xiao Wei, how much time is left?

Until you too walk the thorny veils

I won’t be able to hear your voice

Shaking inside my breast, for much too long

That I cannot speak any more,

When your tongue breaks down and you

Are silent, I thrum for news of you.

Life Armour

 

 

 

Xiao Wei, flee into the western horizon

I will not find you, I cannot

Go too far from where I am, my heart

 

Has no courage for risks or a sacred recess

Into the wild, I am a tame overshadowed thing

There is no goddess in my alley

 

Only the dark, and the damp

Upon the altars I’ll be the settled leaves

In graceful goblets of my fate

 

I’ll be, the one that watches you go

Through the glad festivities of a woman’s life

To build and caress and multiply

Xiao Wei, do we only desire normal lives

There is majesty in duty I suppose

 

Though as in the old days I have wept

For sameness, wept that I was different

Though all life is invocation

And one day I’ll have to finish innovation

Over being a role, a pillar, a nest.

The Western Seas

 

 

 

Xiao Wei, if the moon hath left the sky

Be it for you, lost in the Pleiads’ light

With such a soft sweet glow,

It is midnight here, but I wonder as

 

Time slips by, why you live in me

With the ache of breeze and infinity

How does the moon disappear

Into the sea, and how does she know?

 

That time lasts as long as fruit hungry

For the ground, to transport the seed

As if it was all fated long ago

Our ancestors met and moved

 

To new valleys and new shores

Only to result in our eyes looking

Reaching over oceans as such

Xiao Wei, where do the birds roam?

 

That they look not for fragments

But they feel the whole, the earth, wind and seas

From above, how lost I am in this digital world

Where the future is a simulation

 

And a woman is a dream, I guess

I will never truly visit California

It’s only an idea lost in your voice

Where memory is graft that outgrows itself

 

From reality and between fantasy

All summer kinship dispels the mortal rose

Xiao Wei, but I will remember thee.

Torchlight California

 

 

Xiao Wei, do you know that I

Wait on the bird of the wire for you

I have not heard one word from her

I will never leave that which translates me

Into braided rosebuds, sun sprinkled care

The choruses of us, the life-song notes

While no voices chant of the Seasons

I must a woodland homage pay homage to

The stars, and things eternally there

Xiao Wei, how I have been haunted

By the mandarin symbols of another time

As if my poems belonged to ancestors

You were the day purple ribbon kites blew for me

A day of fresh flowers and eternity translated

In the lyrics of nature’s kindness to me

It’s rare Xiao Wei, to feel all of this like the

Weight of the Pleiades looking down upon me

Don’t ask me why it is but you embroider

Life in me, like a lilac sunset and the silver dawn.

Being an Invisible Virgin

 

 

 

Xiao Wei, in the hours of our brief obstacles

Can you remember the smell of roses?

I have too many fragments of beauty

In my soul, I’m light as a feather

 

Without attachment, I dream of you today

I crave the brilliance of an embattled lifetime

The suffering of sleeping alone

And finding pause and dear companions

 

In the shallow night of superficial years

Xiao Wei, you have no idea ~

How much and love for the sun, you have brought me

I must lead an empty life to say it is so

 

But coming from heaven, I beg the universe

At times for little gestures, tiny signs

That I too have a place in existence

Xiao Wei, the giver of plenitude

 

I am a vessel as if filled by your water

Your tears, your sweat, your mind’s blood is my own

I inherit you by nearness to you

I mirror your kindness by being familiar to you

 

I love what you love by proximity

I ache what you ache for by shared identity

I am nothing and nobody without that

Xiao Wei, there are no friends that last forever

 

At least not for me, so as I am assaulted by

A glimpse into forever, I pause at the spring

At the fountain of you, at the purity

At the gestures of my lost youth

 

Xiao Wei, it does not matter who I loved or what I did

But did I rejoice in what was given?

Was I grateful for my innocence virginity

For the gifts of my character, that to others

 

Were a vice, my gifts of royalty that to others

Went invisible, farewell my friend

These times pass and go, but I linger in the middle

In the love of your imagined nearness

Like a broken hearted ghost.

 

 

 

Letters to Xiao Wei

 

 

 

Xiao Wei, it’s not unlike the gods to

Celebrate us without any idols

My organs dance to the design of time

 

My lips are streaked with silence

My heart is stained with flowers

My hopes are soft voices left unwhispered

 

My faith is a tenuous flame that gleams

Darkest in the adversity of the night

Xiao Wei, my spirit is hidden beneath

 

The miracles of our everyday duties

That pause and collapse like a winding universe

Whose goal is nothing, so how shall we

 

Feel the change, when spring arrives ~

When morning sends me a blanket of light

To roam, across your face, across hours

 

Where I must not desire too much

The ancient genes of ancestors

I can only linger with humility

 

I am not part of the loveliest, but

You are, I can see it in your strength

In the tilt of your hips to the stars

 

In the palpitant passion of your ray

In the seasonal angle for your inner sun

I feel it like a necklace of seashells

 

In the weight of your tired smile

In the fragrance of your voice

That rings like an emblem of consecration

 

For which I do not know the significance

I am only a bystander that happened

To look into your shinning parlour of fantastic peace

 

I know you by your gruelling song of radiance

By your fire of quality, your industry of creation.

Xiao Wei, stay close, entice me again with your wisdom.

Princess of the Sun

 

 

 

 

Xiao Wei, how could one indeed not

Repeatedly feel the wonder of this world

This cosmos, so green and so vast

With eyes like yours, with the twinkle of Shengyang

 

The sun from the honest world of the north

Xiao Wei, over whomever one really

Wanted to meet, I must give salute and bow low

This world is full of goodness, if we

 

Know how to find it, and sweat the

Speechless feverish fires of passion

That break our trembling months into

Golden prosperity, we are all ghosts and memories

 

Xiao Wei, how to find experience

The spring blooms of our native touch?

Until the seasons grant us some joy

So free and pure that our hearts are broken

 

Open, in the fields, beneath the stars

With children and the legacies of our minds

That ache and aspire to repeat the experience

You may not recall the Shen river

 

Where we once met, I had another form then

And you were the bride of the entire world.

Solace in the Sun

 

 

 

I received an envelope from the universe

It had your stamp in it, a sun within a cheek

Of the heart I never knew existed

And I wanted to please you like a burning star

 

But I could not reach you across

Distances or time, across the climes

Of fate and heights and wonderment

I woke to find my life had bled

 

Uncertainty and too much cowardice

I opened up the letter from my soul

To find my body had died long ago

And I knew you by your energy

 

I didn’t require eyes or breath or a brain

To know that somewhere our flames had mingled

Light with light, a hand with a hand

A home that never had a family to call my own

 

I was abandoned, brittle, and deformed

But I knew you existed, and that was a weird solace.