Foreign Holiday
Expats eating sandwiches in the American style—
white faces draped in Canadian flags between
cheap draft beer and slumped shoulders. Canada
Day in Seoul and few have written on it. Lethargy
settles on the evening, seas of black hair in
the streets. Women averting their eyes as the
unfolding foreigners stumble drunkenly,
wax-eared and smelling of piss, seeking some
of oasis of familiarity. Restless surges in heat,
each one sweats the beer in the humid haze.
I laugh and listen to the slight-slur of English
against the sheens of vowels . Here people
are natural forces, countries are signs
and portents, rumors. Each running from
a notion of nation and also running towards
it. Soft air, sticky sweet sweat, and the smell
of alcohol as a perfume in the city dust.
Blown Apart
It is almost to say anything about summer breeze,
even one off the Han River: Han, river whose sound
is lamentation and samsara about which grass sings
which cyclists bike the path. False fires in the mind’s
of men, wounds of being, evolving fire to fire until
the riven thing driven into wholeness as a clutch
of gnats rises from the river’s edge. In the center
of this city, the light from sky and neon, the song
that seems to clench in sadness defines the line
that cuts the beating center into its separate
spheres. So what is there to say of wind: hell-eyed
and wet from summer and the coming monsoons,
the city’s own dark machinery, mismatches at the
bases of buildings. I, addicted to being half-in-
love and half-in-time, long for another home
or the scent of the idea of home, the form
that is emptiness, the emptiness that is form:
home is what the heart lacks. Home like a
river of memories cutting apart a new city:
home, my prayer. Home, my samsara. Even
in the city park, there is always shattering.
(Originally published at Blast Furnace, September 2011)
Symptomatic Commentary 