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You have sat at the edge of parties

Calling out the names of the various faces

That swaggered at you in their drunken haze

Fondling the passions of their hearts before you

Tossing them like dice carelessly

Letting them fall where they may

Taking chance for a blushing debutante

Ripe for the ramming

While you sat there with your passions

Held in your hands

Examining them like sacred saphires

Wanting to determine their every flow and crack

Before hewing them into preciousness

Wearing them upon your crown

As you went out upon the world

Praying that that moment

Would be your coronation.

A lot of people try to comment on my blog in an effort to inform the world about vicodin, viagra and naked women. There’s also a bunch of folks who continually leave comments in Russian. Their comments are always written something like this:

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Or something like this:

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They usually have links attached as well. I’ve received thousands of these types of comments. I delete them all.

Yesterday I received one that sounded kind of like a poem, and I feel compelled to post it:

what is better cialis or viagra
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I have the image of a drunken, wastrel playboy sitting on the edge of a hotel-room bed, uttering these words to himself. Three naked women are asleep on the bed behind him, locked together in a strange embrace from which he has just emerged – arms and legs and hands and feet all interlocked in a web of what was once lust and longing, but is now just an attempt to be comfortable and warm.

The playboy stands up suddenly, walks over to the mirror and inspects his naked body. He teases the hair on the slight paunch near his bellybutton. He recites his poem to himself again, as if it were some kind of incantation made to raise his spirit to new heights. He stumbles around the hotel-room looking for a pill box of vicodin. When he finds what he thinks is the pill box, he opens it and swallows a tablet quickly without water. He totters over to the thermostat by the bed and studies it for a minute trying to discern how it works through his stupor. When has succeeded in turning up the heat in the room several degrees, his eyes roll back in his head, and he falls to the floor. He passes out with a giant hard on after taking viagra which he thought was vicodin.

Give yourself to warmer nights that drizzle on your tounge

Feel the pavement scuff the soles of your shoes

As the taxis fly by with lulling passengers

And the construction workers toil through the night

Tunneling around, beneath, between your feet

And Huaihai Road never ends

***

Give your mind to the flashing-light shoptowns

Let your judgment slide with the icicle lights

As the bottle of booze in your hand grows lighter

And you feel like the street could become a runway

And Huaihai Road never ends

***

Give yourself to those thoughts of home

Where you once uttered words that meant more

Than the friction of two strangers passing

Comparing the marks on their hides

And Huaihai Road never ends, Huaihai Road never ends.

I hear there are no snakes in Ireland

Because St Paddy plowed them out.

+++

But where did they go? Into the sea?

Did they flit and swim happily through

Kelp as refugee eels, never trying

Never lying at God’s court of appeals

For displaced animals?

+++

Were their skins scattered in the sea,

Coating the coasts with an endless

Supply of translucent hides

Shuffled off in flight?

How were they used?

Did the weaver’s wind strange undergarments

For concubines and Catholic courtiers?

Did the skins sing in the lacquer of ornate lutes and fiddles?

Did they hang in the light of windows as kaleidoscopes?

This is the poem that filled a

coaster, but filled the world as

well. You know, the world –

that steaming, heaving mass of

shit and piss and blood and boiling

tempers and great unparalleled insights,

whispered on the lips of daydreamers

and bridge jumpers, pimps and

plagiarizing banshees, howling at

the moons of tragedy and unspoken

ecstasies, that sung from the

bowels of the universe, and imprinted

themselves upon this coaster, scrawled

in a backsliding hand, pleading forgiveness.

The lights of HK in the evening,

Flickering in all of their glory

Like a Christmas tree that

Fell into the South China Sea,

But somehow managed to

Continue to burn as the lights

And ornaments floated to the surface,

Which sprite-ly creatures used to adorn their homes

Rising towards the sky.

+++

I think of it fondly

As I would a nice dream,

A place that radiates in my memory

But whose reality I am loathe to declare.

Tonight was toothy.

Chinese New Year

The year of the tiger

And the tiger had come out of the mountains

So that I could catch him.

+++

I walked up to him

Breaking the cardinal rule

That you never walk up to a tiger

Unless you are mad or wise:

You either don’t know what you’re doing,

And your brains are already being biled by the beast

Or you know the tiger like footing on a paved street,

Sure of yourself, but prepared for the unexpected.

+++

His mouth was upon me

But I saw that he wasn’t biting.

He just rested his teeth there,

As if he could strike at any second

But would be content to just play for now.

+++

Would I be his master?

Or would he destroy me?

I thought on this, as

+++

I walked home in the big, flakey snow

That turned to slush all about my feet

And stuck on my jacket like tiger’s teeth

Not biting, but resting, just resting there.

“To answer transcendent questions in language made for immanent knowledge is bound to lead to contradictions.”

– Schopenhauer, “The Indestructability of Being – 8”

I’m sitting here at the airport in Pudong in the business class lounge,

Watching the suited salary slingers kicking back with newspapers

Fresh fruit salad, fried noodles, coffee and worldly conversation,

And I’m thinking about myself.

I’m here with them, but I’m not here with them.

+++

There is a part of me across the sea now

With the land that gave me life

That strange working of processes

Of East Coast winds and cities carrying the names

Of long forgotten indigenous tongues

That saw the birth of idealistic paradigms of governance

In the ricochet of gunshells and the wild whoop of riches

Desire, desire in its basest, most productive form

That brought my mother and father together

That brought their parents to prosperity

That instilled in me this spirit to move West

So far West it became East.

+++

Were you to ask me who I am,

I would say that I’m neither here nor there

Neither in the East nor in the West

Neither businessman nor poet

Neither a gun-toting rube

Nor a saintly charity worker.

And yet, much to my consternation

I must assert I’m all of them.

China will be the next great power.

The 21st century belongs to China.

Nothing can stop the rise of the Chinese juggernaut.

+++

I hear these pronouncements daily now

Like a mantra spoken religiously to this idol of the future

By pundits and publishers, financial wizards and frenzied technocrats

Doctors and drunks, politico-poets and pallid prosecutors

All of them gripped with expectation and envy.

+++

I still see China as the gangly son

Of some great althlete, whom everyone expects

To fill out in the course of a summer

And become a bone-jarring beast like his dad.

+++

I think more about this on the bus to Jing’An Temple

Shanghai’s newest city center with spindly skyscrapers

Popping up in dust and refuse like a bad case of acne

Unable to be restrained, a nuisance of development.

+++

The TV on the bus is playing the third report in my memory

About the newest talking magpie or parakeet that says:

Nihao, zaijian and byebye.

Although last time, it was nihao, zaijian and hello.

I guess people at the last featured bird spot

Were more fond of saying hello than byebye.

Maybe the shopkeeper was an asshole

And byebyes weren’t necessary.

+++

The segment ends and another begins:

A girl who’s become a balloon-animal wunderkind,

Twisting up swords and flower bouquets

Bridegrooms and cartoon characters

In an awe-inspiring display of carnival-styled genius.

They ask the girl if she’s afraid the balloons will pop,

And she says she’s used to it.

Then it dawns on me:

These are the real trappings of power.

I’ve seen it all before.

Cutesy animal shorts and children’s tricks

Soon give way to interventions

Escalations, assertions of economic dominance

In order to ensure their continued presence

On the TVs in buses and skyscrapers

Promising their viewers that their pets

And balloon gifted children

Might claw their way onto the screen too.

+++

When I get off the bus at Jing’An

I see a young man in a beauty salon

Feeling his flexed bicep.

Despite his apparent lankiness

I can tell he puts pride into this brawn

What little of it he has.

As if there’s much more to come

And soon the world will have to take note.

On a fairly frozen evening in November

As the Shanghai lowlands fell towards freezing

We stood there wating to cross the road

We off-workers, going-homers,

Bearing home hopes and hatreds

To the curtained corridors

That we’d haltingly call home.

And in that moment everything was so calm:

Just us, our crosswalk

The great obelisks of Pudong vaulting higher

The ocher reaches of neon,

The soft hush of the city surrounding us.

+++

I turned around to see this spectacle.

All of us quiet together now.

+++

I thought I saw a girl murmuring incantations under her breath.