The two young lovers looked at me

'' What are you writing"?

" A rhythm of pounding words" I told them.

Bustling in this sticky season.
Tormented by a deep longing.
And nights of making love
in still life silence.

Sleepy now
Too many hours
walking the streets
of Hanoi.

I would rather a life of poetry.
Thank bashing about
these humid days
without a breeze.

Sometimes it is difficult to straighten
my saddened thoughts.
I make my bed, drink some coffee
and catch up on the world.
But it is not always enough.

I muddle through the day
swimming upwards, backwards
and from time-to time
finding moments to write
and see things differently.

On occasions I read Bukowski,
then I realize that things could be worse.
So I read Dickinson,
to find a tangible mind and spirit.

In the end, my thinking
always seems to end up in another room.
A landscape of the spirit,
blue sky and thinking open mind.

I wanted words to drop on my head
"Topic sentences" he said
Last of the new poets
The last one on this side of the world
But he was speaking another language
I tried to conjure up words
Henry V at Agincourt
Dr King in Washington
'A Hard Rains Gonna Fall'
From some town hall
Words, words, words
I don't know what to write.
My brain has no way with words
Dylan says ' It's hard, it's hard and
it's hard...I know!
But he says 'I can'
He tells me about Sylvia Plath and
Ernest Hemingway
And Three Hundred Tang Poems
And something stared in my soul
A story of forgotten words
"Write" he said.
I began to make my own way.

A silent walk to MGateau’s.
My own journey.
I hear their voices loud,
I hear their voices clear
Sinking in the dreams of others.
Faint sounds, all a faraway distance.
Some memories are left here.
Layers twisted into fold.

Oliver Mtukudzi died today.
My friend said
“So what….many singers die, it’s inevitable”
But I have a lingering mind…

Long before the shadows came,
and love was stolen from us.
We would listen to his music
and rainbows stood in a moment.

Oliver Mtukudzi died today…..

Tracts of land
inhabited by people
A flower, a hero
or revolution.
To define a country is easy.
A pulse of a nation
** Chi Minh.
Defeat of the French,
the Americans.
But what about the prisons?

French prisons
American prisons
Vietnamese prisons.
15 years in Con Dao
6 years in the Hanoi Hilton.
Voices that still echo to this day.

And now the pen,
to free the corridors of our minds.
Diaries, letters
kept close
Inside a cold place.

Now they tell the world
that doors are closed.
And freedom is there.

We move on.

At the beginning I noticed nothing,
too many stones by the dead river.
No gratitude for truth or beauty
Those I loved gone.

I felt like an illegitimate child
walking across an invisible border.
Rejected by its parents,
no one left, a black world.

A kite dived in front of me
I thought it was a sign
The corpse of a dead idea I once had.
Then I saw you, the last of your kind.

Obeying time as before and unknown to myself,
I listened to your voice
To you, a room is a cell of unreadable books
subtle and grey in the morning light.

As the clouds gathered over Mt. Wutai
You whispered in my ear
Nature now came close.
And brought back what I had lost long ago.

I met a married couple
in ** Chi Minh City.
He was 63, and claimed
he talked to God.

She was 28, heavily pregnant
and told me that God only
smiled at the unsurprised.
I was curious about them.

As we walked by
Saigon Notre-Dame Basilica,
she talked about Vietnamese men,
how they would hit her.
Make her ‘do things’.

She said this man was kind.
“He gets angry, but he does not hit me”.

The three of us spent most
of the day together.
Spinning words of wonder,
as we visited the Independence Palace
and the War Museum.

The man was interesting,
caught halfway between old age
and a new life.

We laughed about age
“**** Jagger had a baby in 2016,
and he is 75” he said.

So I told him “Keeping pace is all the rage these days”
This made him laugh.

Some jobs you like,
and others are so dreary and pitiless,
that you stay in bed.
Motionless in time and
watching the sun climb.

But then,
many who stay in bed
have a history of grief.
An empty doorway,
and a faded family photograph.

Nothing to do with their job,
just tricks of the mind.
Memory by memory,
it is easy to forget that what’s here isn’t life.
And nothing can ever happen unless you say so.

It’s early in the morning the sun dimly white,  thin air on the Taiyuan rooftops. Frozen thoughts swim to the dry banks of the River Fen, locked and clattered in the same broken run.

Why did you stay, but not forever? A constant companion sang the cat. A perfect octave in a moment of intervals, between margins of half-heard music and the last light of unclear whispers.

I’ve been wounded in so many nights, a hallmark of all the hidden places.  Like a sleepless boy who hates his bed, something of this slow fading is impossible to forget.

From my window I can see clouds breaking the morning - turning to see your shy-flushed face, that carries the shreds of a dream that I can't remember. Delicate spaces between us - I love you.

In deep winter, it is easy to be lost.
The uneven edges of life,
exposed by the cold hurried snow
leave little space between the stars.
Only the counted poems seem to matter.

I can envision loves, deep night
and the shapeliness
of lines borrowed from the past.
These lines of verse,
taut and unrepentant
offer the sun to my bones.
And the snow gathers on….

When awake in the dark mornings,
a heart pounding and star frost outside.
I think of the sun, now turned away.
A vague mood momentarily out of shape
and living fast.

Each light stings and spins,
trying to rebalance the
the dark and light at the same time.
One continuous line dragging
each damp filled day from morning to dusk.

The hope…..
that light will return,
once more eager for sensation and meaning.
A pearl veil of day….with a laughing soul.

In the margins of returning light,
city backstreets in hard rain,
people at every junction.
Personal memories, none.
Lost hope burned in the rain.
The evening stars, a pattern of
sorrow.

Nothing good will come of this.

Dark days ahead.
Banners from the days gone by
flutter in the changing wind.
A comma, a semicolon, a word.
Weapons of mass education
compete with weapons of mass destruction.

Disaster, war, famine and fire.
All crashing and raving.
Demanding your attention..
Noble hero sings about an 'idiot wind'
A protagonist with his own brand of magic.

World on the brink.
Now, eat up your words.
Chew the poets, the writers
and those who write the songs.

Hold on to your fate.

Another year without summer,
the cold sun fills the heavens and the earth.
Darkness on the edge of the city,
a hard moon sick and rising.
One suffers love, so meager

The Jade Emperor shows me a way forward.
A vision in light white silk, beyond the empty void
burning me up with hope……
my mind is awake……
No way now to hide the fire inside.

Back in Xinxiang
the coffee tastes good.
'The Carpenters' are signing about love,
which becomes lost in time.
Never to be smooth again.

Deep inside, a spring longing.
A shadow still wedged between the rocks, and the rising spring river.
Seared into my aching bones.
Always to linger,
and never to be free.

The music stops, it always does.
Vaguely, I hear a sound....
        ..... a sweet voice
..... a distant voice
“Come close, and follow me.....”

Pulled into a violet world,
surrounded by the noise of our origin.
I see you...
and my unfinished flight.