Chrysanthemum Literary Society: July 2011

poem

Please Sir, Tell Me Who I Am

Please sir, before you release a bullet against me,

tell me who I am, or if I am who I think I am.

I wear a waiter’s yellow jacket, I bring teapot and tea

and I flick the beads of an abacus in the back of a herbal store.

Yet I sigh at fallen cherry blossoms, pink and white like little girls’ skirts

on the dirt in Kyoto Park, just a few nights ago when the blossoms lit the hills.

Now I am washing dishes in China Gate Café and groan like a lion in a dying fall,

to slink later to a mahjong club and get a big erection when I bang north and south.

I write to my wife in Hong Kong and am I lost into it!

Like one tree going into a forest to hear false poets in my deaf ear.

I hear “sound and fury” but I remain skeptical of their meaning

and the local fortune-teller says the lines on my face read like a poem

And the lines on my open palms and all the veins and arteries

on my naked body are like a road map of China.

Koon Woon

March 28, 2008