Sun at 6:00 PM

I almost forgot the toilet paper
just like I almost forgot you,
not to equate the two but
there's something nice about the notion
of being able to flush it all away.
I've learned to appreciate even the littlest bit of sun,
I'm sick of my grey area lack of a love life
it's just like Duluth
never sunny, it never rains,
always never, never ever,
forever and ever
never.
But that's changing,
just look at the sky,
clouds rolling out like toilet paper

Bad dream

"It's like a bad dream," he says to myself in the third person
in the dark
"heck, it's the bad dream Browns,"
I live in a virtual world
sometime around '96-'97 where
the video game music is good and the
music video games, well, they're even
better.
Women? You whose imaginary sister works at Shuang Cheng
if you don't call me tomorrow I'll resurrect
payphones just so I can keep in touch
with what I imagine to be your body, I'll put
Cullen's brother's defunct Ford Taurus
on top of the 4Runner to create
the TAURUNNER, opening a new Dimension
Films branch at the end of
my rope...
Why, tell me, was Dark Forces never co-opted?
I crafted this rope out of your hair, it smells
like Pantene Pro V and
bad dreams.

In touch

Going to the mall for dinner on Saturday night,
I get some breadsticks while
waiting for my Japanese,
there's almost ten orders ahead of me, it's amazing,
two Asian-American families and an older Japanese couple
with their older Japanese-American daughter,
they give free refills, I make sure to thank him,
I make sure to thank everyone
for letting me be so lame as to be here
for dinner on a Saturday night,
it's closing time, my social life went out of business
a long time ago. I pass by a video game
night—Street Fighter vs. Tekken—so I'm not
the token white person after all and I'm not
as out of touch with society as I thought in fact
I'm in touch
with what's left of it.

Bo呢? Bo知道

My running commentary won a marathon,
hell, I have the Bo Jackson of running commentaries,
it was so good until it was stopped
in its tracks by you and your Diablo habits
and your brand lame shoewear,
Bo Jackson's been doing a lot of charity work lately,
me? I've been making jokes about Diablo 3 which
seems to be all the rage
quit these days,
but I'm not giving up.
My brain hurts because I'm so tired
but I can't keep taking Tylenol
and listening to this generic music
because there's nothing generic about your genre
and you're the best headache I've ever had.

Every night

Every night,
servers become classes
and my classes become servers
and that girl from class becomes
the acquaintance I stumbled upon in a server.
My sister graduated today,
I never walked, I ran, I didn't run far
away but rather I ran in
circles, which leads me back to you:

I'll let you go this time,
I won't press, I won't write some awkwardly forced
Chinese or Chinglish email to you.
I'll let you go back to 杭州
and if I ever make it out there, maybe
I'll run into you in a city of almost 9 million people.
I'll think of you from time to time, and I'll feel
bittersweet,
what will you think when you think of me?
You'll think of pineapples, because they're
bittersweet.

The whatever it was called ballroom

Chinese test of DOOM!
and I'm finding pleasure in smelling like smoke, shaman prom, and having friends on a
cell phone,
why can't I cope with the fact that I'll never be
president? Why can't I "deal?"
Why can't I cope that I can't
write a poem every day
and that I enjoyed spending time with Yuanxin
at that talk at the St. Paul Student Center,
with the Martin Luther King Chinese guy
and that one girl who talked to me,
on a pretty Spring, lukewarm, white-sky day
when we had to move the tables
in the whatever it was called ballroom,
and that I have to go to bed.
Should I have ended that with a question mark
because life ends with question marks
only I don't know any Marks,
I only have questions.

If it's even an it

It's kind of fascinating, how
I'm struggling to not eat Cocoa Puffs
even though I'm not even hungry in the first place,
as I watch
my Steam friends list move between servers
like bars, wait, where did Airball go?
How I feel like I should listening to music
but feel that it would hurt my ears.
How she looks like Anita Mui,
and how you can't find any good pictures of her.
Why is everyone ugly on OkCupid? I guess I haven't
mastered the art of a flattering picture of an ugly person,
heck, I can't even recognize them,
but I guess Anita never did either,
I feel like I can connect with her in that sense,
just like I can connect to these usernames on a list
turning green and blue and grey to indicate a change
in the atmosphere.
Sometimes the names even change,
how can you reinvent yourself when your name's
plastered all over the internet?
I got off Facebook so long ago that I no longer have a face,
I got out of real life so long ago that nothing's real,
give me a book of life and maybe we'll have a deal,
it'll get me reading again,
UpButtCoconut just joined the dodge ball server,
oh, wait, it's been a few minutes since I wrote that and
it looks like he's gone,
at least his name isn't there anymore,
if he's even a he,
if it's even an it.
But what am I but a bunch of words in Microsoft's application
of roughly the same name?
I can sleep all I want but I'll never feel rested,
just like Anita, rest her soul,
I'll always be tired, I'll always be hungry,
I'll never be awake, never be
an it.

Where in the World is Barbara Walters?

Where in the world is Barbara Walters?
She's not in the Korea Restaurant, she's not in that
hachiroku-wannabe Honda hatchback, and she's not
in the building blocks and toys of my dreams, a.k.a.
the world (Second Life?).
Just where is she, then? She's in my loneliness,
pulling strings and selling her cat's cradles
to other women because God knows I love my
feline friends.

Spiders

My only companions are my Subaru,
my 3000 dollar computer and
the spiders, oh,
the spiders, they crawl up my pants,
they hang out in my hair,
they join me for a shower, hell,
they even try to hang out with the computer
and the Subaru too!
The Subaru gets me where I need to go
and the computer gets me to the people I know,
the people, the screennames, I must be to them
what the spiders are to me,
I'm not scared of spiders anymore, I'm not scared of mice,
I'm not even scared of myself,
I'm not scared, I'm only used to it,
which is more scary than anything.