Category: seasons

Hong Kong

Dotted lanterns wend invitingly

Up the smudged hillside.

I want to go there,

But the sculpted steps will be treacherous:

Yesterday was T8,

And the typhoon washed the whole island.

It has moved on now,

Moved home across the waves,

But it is still apparent,

Puddled on the roads and in the vapour.

 

The descendant mist stoops fast,

Faster than expected,

And soon those distant lanterns will be unwinked;

What then will guide the crowd,

Through the heavy, pressing shroud,

And keep the stumblers back

Beyond the brink?

Hayfever

June rolls around, and I hear them,

Coiling their canisters

In the meadows 

And depressions 

Left by picnic blankets.

They want to bung me up,

To pepper-spray me until

My eye-water leaves me

Smudged rugged.

They want me to slow choke,

And wake with a stale fur

Like lichen over

Teeth and tongue.

 

These are your flowers, you poets,

These Husseinist bioarms,

These roses and lilies,

Petunias and daffodils,

Ranked to smear summer

Across the unchallenged face.

Imagine III.

I know the universe works mentally…

I know everything.

 

Later still,

He came upon a revelation.

We all see it differently.

A summer’s breeze

Is nothing is

One soprano in an Aeolian choir is

God’s breath is

A brotherly flux in air pressure is

Feeling balmy on the skin after

All day sending emails.

More though,

The mind is as malleable as code:

You can edit, you can edit, you can edit.

The Sun’s Jealousy

The sun did not rise today —

No —

He pounced unannounced,

Shouldering his jealousy

Into the unguarded Earth.

He’d seen, you see,

How she seldom shied

From the lips of the breeze;

H’d noted too

The chiselled moon, 

And how he’d come early,

Adorning the blue.

So as long as he might,

He kept his lover in sight,

Stifling her surface

With a cloying love bright.

Her grass he yellowed,

And my skin pinks,

Blushing until, reluctant,

He sinks.