drunk on moonlight from Taipei I stand alone under the Ajax sky.
My heart is depressed, my poetry schizophrenic, but nonetheless, my hand is normal, and I am a writer.
a Taipei key
opens the door
of Ajax twilight
I pursue my poem
throughout the night
put it down on paper
Writing tanka: four lines sound perfect, yet I struggle to write a fifth to perfect my tanka.
my anguish
crumbled into a ball
I continue to write
as the wastebasket waits
for one more throw
Sunlight drifts through the window and settles again on the worn cover of my Chinese-English dictionary.
My heart is a lonely hunter seeking the place where the odor of words is strongest.
Writing poetry is an endless and always defeated effort to kill my shadow.
I am forty…something
in the attic waiting
alone
four years gone by
and yet no chapbooks
My life… a void. I hit my head with books by other poets.
Being a writer means being voluntarily mad and struggling alone with the voices whispering, we all know you’re a failed writer.
Writing is a Jobian struggle against noises -- and silence.
My heart is depressed, my poetry schizophrenic, but nonetheless, my hand is normal, and I am a writer.
a Taipei key
opens the door
of Ajax twilight
I pursue my poem
throughout the night
put it down on paper
Writing tanka: four lines sound perfect, yet I struggle to write a fifth to perfect my tanka.
my anguish
crumbled into a ball
I continue to write
as the wastebasket waits
for one more throw
Sunlight drifts through the window and settles again on the worn cover of my Chinese-English dictionary.
My heart is a lonely hunter seeking the place where the odor of words is strongest.
Writing poetry is an endless and always defeated effort to kill my shadow.
I am forty…something
in the attic waiting
alone
four years gone by
and yet no chapbooks
My life… a void. I hit my head with books by other poets.
Being a writer means being voluntarily mad and struggling alone with the voices whispering, we all know you’re a failed writer.
Writing is a Jobian struggle against noises -- and silence.
Note:
Zuihitsu is a classical Japanese poetic form derived from the Chinese literary tradition that employed random thoughts, diary entries, reminiscence, and poetry. The first book of zuihitsu in English is The Narrow Road to the Interior written by a Japanese-American poet, Kimiko Hahn who received the 2008 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry
