好久不見

冯百岁
that's my Chinese name,
can I give you
an English name, if you don't mind?
I'll call you "12:30 at night"
'cause that's when I most often think of you,
you'll call me 冯百岁,
because that's how long I'll be waiting
to hear your name
again

From Formosa to the Beautiful Country

Scared to write poems
for you
in English, I frantically switch to Chinese:
我喜歡你
你叫什麼名字
你是漂亮
I know you know
what I'm saying, but I don't
know if you understand.
And I know you can't hear me,
but I do know you're listening, somewhere,
listening in Chinese
to me thinking in English
of what to say
in Chinese.
Nothing's lost, but found—
discovered,
I'm going to buy another car,
so I can drive to you across the ocean.

Where Have All the Supermen Gone?

Operator, I need an
operation, I was going
to write a poem, but now
I'm just writing you, whoever
"you" may be.
I want to be able to look people
up in the phone book again,
or at least the dictionary:
what does he mean? What does she mean?
What do you mean
when you say we won't be seeing each other again, I mean,
really, what about the other senses? Will we
hear, smell, touch, taste
each other again?
And if not again, then maybe once
all over
again?
I want to able to look people
in the eye again, not just
this ;), or that ;(,
or other demonstrative determiners and pronouns.
I want people to have a name, and I want to call them
by that name over the telephone, I guess I'll
have to take a number.
But what happened to all the phone booths?
Where will Clark Kent become Superman?
Will he become becoming, will he
become anything, ever
again?
When you dial zero, I suppose
the answer's always the same...

Operator, I need an
operation, I was going
to write a poem, but now
I'm just writing you, whoever
"you"
may be.

GCP

We've reached an age where
pop culture evolves faster than
the generations,
take my mom, for example,
going to see The Hangover Part II with my sister
and her friend. When I heard
about this, I just couldn't imagine my mom
reacting to that kind of material, this
gross domestic product (GCP)... but is there anything even remotely
"cultural"
about that junk? I guess
I wouldn't know, as I've been
elsewhere—stuck in a pan-Asian dimension—
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean movies
all day err day.
Sometimes, I just need to take a step back, look deep
into my Netflix queue, and find
a movie with white people in it.
or at least minority-Americans acting
like white people, something.
I'd never seen Marathon Man, so I watched it
earlier tonight. I didn't like it, but I did like that I could relate
to the
over-written, over-plotted, American-propagandist
William Goldman bullshit...
When you come from a country with a
gross cultural product,
the smell of shit ain't shit
at all.
In other news, I've noticed
people have started refering to other people
with an @ in front of their names...
Why can't @Rick just be Rick? How
can one be at him, or he be at himself?
(these are good questions, but without
good answers)
I'm listening
to the Wiseguys' "Start the Commotion," the remix version.
It makes me remember
those early 2000s Mitsubishi commercials—
the last gasp of the '90s, really—when
cars were not just about good gas mileage
and saving the environment, but rather
looking cool, feeling great,
and driving fast.