a sleepy place

It's a noisy world beyond my window, and the sounds that filter through are an apt montage of the greater city. The foreman outside got a translated copy of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and now all the laborists are acting out "eternal return," caught with the same jackhammer and the same dust in perpetuity. Or is it that when I awake in the mirk of early morning these sounds are indistinguishable from yesterdays. In this city of repetitions, I often fumble for a point of reference.

In the rising tide of voices at 5pm there is a comfort like the creakings of a house on an early monday morning as parents prepare for work, its a passive sound that you let in unguarded because it's as familiar as your own heartbeat. so what is this feeling of dissonance, this animal moment of cold regard? It dawns upon me that the fuzz of chatter below is composed of tiny little inscrutabilities, the chinese of schoolgirls in sincere blue skirts bussed in from the countryside - a current that is both mine and beyond my imagination. I remember on new year's eve in Providence the explosion of fireworks and the concise movement of their soundwaves through the city in the aftermath - I pictured it like the shadow of a high cloud bounding from road to rooftop in quick successions. Here is the dull thud of firecrackers richocheting in alleyways like a tired voice in your head, latent as the word you reach for in the darkest recesses of your memory. the slow walk of youth in brightly lit nightmarkets, or in circumscriptions of small bare parks where the elderly assume blank stares and the middlers chew a nut wrapped in a leaf coated in lime which turns their teeth red as vampires. on odd days the humid density of the tropics is a contagion, people looking cross-eyed and confused, you're bound to see little girls on teetering bicycle fugues, and three or four seconds into the blare of a scooter horn, a grown man snapping to in a crosswalk. germany has its zeitgeist, taiwan's is sleeping beneath a palm tree.

the pied piper of hamelin is a phantom who appeared before historians and mythologists on a stained glass pane in the middle of the last millenium. the pane succumbed to some or other unlikely catachlysm, but the image of those sullen-faced white-cloaked children following an unhinged flautist through the hinterlands of german imagination persisted and a story gathered around it. a young dishevelled looking foreigner enters a small village named Hamlin with nothing but a flute in hand. the foreigner casts about for jobs in the local farms and markets but finds nothing save for the hoards of rats skittering under crates, in the drippy shadows and refuse of sick homes. they were growing in number every day, one felt the slow crescendo of their collective sqeakings, the manifold twitching of noses and the blood red eyes - it was enough to strike a kind of fear, no, mania into Hamelin's youth, the moral fibre of the community gradually unwound, dogs howling, a conflagration. to all this, the flautist brought his panacea, a song so beautiful it would entice the snittering masses from their hollows and down, eventually, to the river where they would meet their demise. having secured the townspeople's approval and the promise of a fee upon his success, the flautist commenced his song. rising and falling in imploring thirds and compound asymmetries, the melody communicated a kind of protracted longing that became manifest in the sea of rats trailing behind the foreigner as he made his way down to the water. this the profound and tragic innocence of their animal torpor, like the snake and his prey sleeping away the winter in the same lair, a matter of the mind relinquishing its individual nature. then, with the litter of rats floating inanimate at his back, the stranger made recourse to the hills where he was owed a debt.

the vigor of his sweaty climb, the joyful anticipation of his reward well-earned, all of this gave way in a moment: the silence in the streets and blank stares of the attending indicated what he would have feared. there would be no money forthcoming for his pains.

one traces back through the drift of particulars to the nebulous Fact of ancient history, a frayed document with the words, "it is 10 years since our children left," what gruesome details succeed these words, the frail, hollow-cheekbone endurance of the child caravan drawn on by the music in unending verses, along ridgelines and swampy pits destinationless. what of all this can be recovered? the structuralist would say look to the immediate, the facts unravel in the mythic present. and sun-ra in long-drawn improvisations sought the precise moment of his forefathers, those floating sarcophagi, the horrid stacks of cotton picked from long rows, the feel of the blistering sun and the whip, his attainment. the locals say the garbage truck song that unfolds beyond my window in daily repetitions is the very same that the pied piper may have played. the sleeping masses in orderly lines drawn by the same longing, the flautists unfilled tonic refrain.

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.