for broghen on his birthday

past lives



Once a feral dog
Whose fangs coaxed
The juice of carnivore and berry
Root, and howled for
Strange things afoot
In thoroughgoing turbid
bush feverish
padded soft
an Indian
whose hair
in silken knots
fell on feather bows
kindred to the fox
maize in ample rows
kill hung in rafters
drip dried nude betrothed
or look across
a cold colossus
whose blinking eye’d
crunch in a cold frost
victims bloodied and besot
reviled the hand of man
their petty thoughts
and inbred lust
a sense of sylvan justice
the majesty of trees
he’d be crowned, august
and finally – freed
from mandates and decrees
who’d meet his fate laughing
hold the tears of a sister
in a broad-armed embrace
a year older
thicker and thicker his carapace
under humble shelter
stored the salt of lovers
viscous brine to remember
a centuries quarter
infinite time
by sidereal measure.

in unending equivocations
a promise lost in translation
the huddled homeless
expecting death below
a railway station
palimpsests
are open invitations
or less,
I'll drink to that
drunken humans
spent breath on
homonyms
boundaries we've relinquished
the declension of decisions
but what surgeon hadn't determined
more with his first
incision

introducing: the om-cake!

you had probably thought, like me, that all possible breakfast flour-egg combinations had long since been exhausted, but then, you probably hadn't thought to cook a pancake inside an omelette. the name is still not finalized, but om-cake won high merit for its subtle new-age overtones. any suggestions are welcome.

siddhi (I)

I was not long in that liminal captivity before the opportunity came to make for the hills. An hour's trainride north took us to a small buddhist monastery in a country laden with betel nut and tobacco plantations called Jia-yi. I was looking forward to the trip as I thought it would give me the opportunity to unravel some of my thoughts that had been knotted in the city's density.

I went under the auspices of a Taiwanese girl whose boyfriend rarely emerged from our old dorm: the often cooking, praying Pei, whose name can mean to spirit along, a name she quite often lives up to, as now. she reserved her chinese for punchlines and held to long disjointed english expositions. she came once a month, she told me, for the prostrations up and down a busy road. I thought this was not the brand of buddhism I had anticipated. her first time, before the callouses, the equanimity, the monk-like reserve had been difficult. her boyfriends mother had been at her side, looking hard, weighing her devotion. her knees had purpled from continuous impact, palms and nails encrusted with pavement and dirt. the praying, she said, helps me to clear my mind.

拜下去！拜起來！　

go down praying! rise up from prayer!

那無阿彌陀佛.

not without the fullness of the boddhisattva.

in prostrating, the knees give out in act of weakness first feigned and then, eventually, felt, internalized, believed. crouching head lowered, the forearms are overturned revealing the palm.

in regret, in sorrow. request the buddha's mercy.

then the fingers make a fist and turn over again to hoist the body back up. rising and falling ad infinitum. like the siddhi standing on fresh legs, later crumbling and decrepit, then rising again, in myriad lifetimes recapitulating the same devotion.

the nuns sang in droning perfect fifths of the buddha's travels:

"take one piece of each and all of the different kinds of vegetation - including grass, trees bushes rice hemp, bamboo and reeds - and one part of every kind of mountain, rock, and dust-mote. Then let us consider each piece and part to be a separate Ganges river. Then, again, take one grain of the sand in all those inconceivably great number of Ganges Rivers as one chiliocosm, and afterwards, take each mote of dust within each chiliocosm as one kalpa (lifetime). Finally, consider all the dust grains accumulated in each of these kalpas to be, themselves, converted to kalpas. Bodhisattva Ksitigarbha has endured one thousand times longer than this vast length of time since he realized the ten grades of accomplishment."

dogma and prayer: perhaps there is some resonance between the eye's dilation in fear and darkness and the dilation of time in the face of the inexplicable.

(牛) year

I sought some repreive from the city's insistence. the ox's epoch: air dense with the smoke of new years offerings, the streets plastered with totems of fortune and prosperity. he'd cast his bloodshot eye, dug his heel, bowed the coil of his horn. and now a foment roiled, you could hear the hiss of a million crackers from the rooftops. a city suspended in kitsch and confabulation. a week of projected shadows. but what good was all this to one who hadn't held the red envelope in his hand before he knew what all of it meant, hadn't passed below the spring banners first as an animal (child) on his mother's back? I could see the real world giving way to a latent redolence, but one for which I was blind and anosmic. on holiday, I suppose, the foreigner and the amnesiac become mutually indistinguishable.

winter baptism

There seems to be no darkness here that the luminescent sign posts of shops and hotels do not expose. No furthest extent, no haven in the trees, no center, no terminus. The city aggregates in all directions and the further one walks inside of it, the more one is convinced of its concrete infinitude. The maps here present a fantasy of mobility that the streets choke. The iterative swell of traffic from dawn to mid-morning intimidates. If only the grinning visages of the crouching locals would betray some secret - like the secret of their entrenchment, of all that they take to be mundane. A vacant stare is not but a mirror, and so we have only our reflections to see in the eyes of the oggling Taiwanese. A word of Mandarin is an entry, but it is Ta-Yu in muffled whispers, in close confidence, sung out in seven tones at the ancestral night markets.


I am certain of the edge of my map. Inland the street of my mind's eye and the memory of the still, color-coded grid whirl about in unruly concatenations. There is a reason why that bank of symbols is called a legend and not fact. But I am viscerally aware of the edge, and so, of late, I've endeavored to sniff it out. I head west with the sun and the diminishing line of buildings and the canal-fingers of the harbor. The best I can find on the first attempts are sparse liminal passageways. Fisherman's huts, graveyards, bridges to further landlocked settlements, listless dogs, vendors with no particular motivation to sell and shoppers with no money or desire to consume. A land of indecision, in-between, the vertigo of forboding, of a secret that I know lies somewhere near. I can smell it, brine, it's been on my mind since day-1 but no amount of searching has yielded its source.

So I assemble a small group to cast about with me. and we take a map. Still, we find nothing, just parks, not even an intimation of the ocean, it looms mythically in our minds, behind our words. We ask, is the beach far?
Oh yes, very far from here, and cold, too.
Could you show us on the map?
-inept fumbling, vague gestures-

We push on, on our own. Now we've found a tall bridge to further land, hopeless. As I crest the bridge however, I see that unmistakable shimmering. I race down as fast as my bike will take me. There is no sign welcoming, no entrance - just a shady waste of palm trees and would-be dunes, the smell of fire. The beach is deserted, it is winter for these people after all, but the sand is pristine and the waves are tall. The sun is setting so I take the opportunity to dive in: the water is refreshing and warm, I feel as refreshed and new as I have in months.

On the way back, riding along the canal, there is no rush, the city feels incredibly small and warm. For once, there is the distinct feeling of heading home.

Today is coldest day of the year in Taiwan, so today we eat starch balls.

I changed the name of my blog. The other was kind of a place holder until something less pedantic and more experience-based came along. Let me explain.

Today I made like a situationalist and endeavoured to get myself lost to find the "real city" at the heart of Tainan. I was actually too tired to even get lost let alone find my way back again - I went to a dance club in Kaohsiung last night and didn't get home until 6 in the morning - but I did find some interesting stuff. First I was biking around and I saw a sign that said "Beetle Store." Beetles and other insects are of personal significance to me for two reasons: first, Carl Jung was inspired to develop the theory of synchronicity based on an experience he had with a scarab beetle and then also Gretchen, whom you all may know, is farely enthralled with insects and has drawn my attention to them where before they were only good for crawling in my mouth while I slept 6 times out of a year on average. So of course I went in there and they had some really incredible beetles and grubworms that you hoped for the sake of the insect were in the larval stage of a much nicer looking creature. The beetles were all busily jamming their outsized probosci into these tubs of gelatinous goo that reminded me of the cheap grape jelly you can smear on your toast at a diner. They were all so stupidly big that I began to wonder if someone along the line hadn't just made a small mistake along the evolutionary chain. There's a lot of talk over here about what pet you're going to have when you get one and I think I decided right then and there that I would get a pair of the shiny-backed japanese beetles if the opportunity ever arose.

I was riding home along chenggong road, the road that leads to my university, and I kept seeing these prominently displayed banners hanging from lamp posts and street signs all up and down the road. I finally stopped to take a closer look at one of these banners and it said "2008 is the year of health and safety." It made me wonder if the previous year had focused more on senescence and violence, but it seemed to me a concept worth pursuing. It turns out that the mayor of Tainan has, of late become particulary worried about these two key issues and so has decided to make them the focus of his current tenure. He gave these comments to a local newspaper: " Mayor Hsu expressed that the 「Health Center」had to include physical and psychological advise, and emphasized that health was the most important for people.

Everyone should take good care and adjusted if any problem occurred in body and exercise more to maintain the better physical status. Meanwhile, he also hoped that every staff would be healthy because the biggest fortune is health. And 2008 is the year of health and safety in Tainan City, every staff in Tainan City Government would manage well to implement the concept of the healthy life and propagate for all the citizens.

Furthermore, Mayor Hsu said the high-density development especially in the industrialized cities would produce the social, sanitary and ecological problems which included high-density population, crowded traffic, tense life, unlicensed drinks and foods, polluted ecologic environment, violence and trauma…etc. These problems would progressively become the important factors that threatened the human health.It is settled up the milestone of the concept of the sustained city development in Tainan City to create the 「health, ecology, technology, culture」as the developmental objectives.

In the health aspect, we would promote the healthy life, improve the prophylaxis and health care, strengthen the sanitary education and propagation, and make effort in disease controlling as the objectives to check on the health status of the Tainan citizens."

I think I just found my new favorite public servant. It seemed a good omen to me rename my blog after Mayor Hsu's initiative - if I do nothing else, perhaps I can at least be healthy and safe.