Violence is a given in any practice of art. Given, as all art is complicit with the idea of representation. There can be no art that is not at some level sensed or experienced. The aim of the artist, then, is to transcend the idea of art as mere objective correlative of that impulse of violence, to “exploit” violence - to do violence unto violence ( Read more... )

reading my poems

the man I love

my father
            asks me 
not dissimilar to
            having read my poem 
my all-too-brief lovers
            if I still do, knowing
thinks he knows me
            I would not 
by the words
            hurt him
by which, it is supposed, I chose

even if
to reveal my thoughts
                          ( Read more... )

The Gate (published in What The Living Do, 1998)

You asked - Why are artists moody people?

I wanted to tell you that sometimes

people take themselves too seriously - And yet in the car I

think this:        your feigned vacillation

in response to where we ought to go for dinner

is pretext to the winning suggestion, after mine.

( Read more... )

The narrator tells us, his voice

calm and quietly fascinated:

there exist

in nature certain species of wasps

that stun their prey into submission

for an egg to be lodged

in the flesh, turning them into mere

incubators -

When the children are ready

to participate in the cycle, the host

( Read more... )

Kai Chai, who is the current poetry editor for QLRS, just informed me a poem of mine has been selected for publication in the July issue. The previous poem, written a long time ago, and published in the journal was when Cyril was the editor.

Love is the law: it silenced me.

This is why I turned to the piano:

to speak of love, to say I love,

to give voice to the relation

between the object and the hands that cradle it.

Wings beat at the window,

by which the moon observes

her own reflection, to read the meaning of her fire.

Outside: the sounds of your boots

crushing the dead roots.

( Read more... )

A catty and intelligent defence of the non-arts, sparked by artist's indignance at "controversial" window displays: 
Underlying the whole debacle is the horribly flawed idea that artists are somehow at the apex of our society. According to this ridiculous thinking, artists are somehow innately superior to us window dressers, or to coffee-shop ( Read more... )

I．童年失欢

童年的梦想--

干瘪如泉州四合院老家的

那口井

替思念解渴不是水龙头的专长

我从故乡偷渡的那枚硬币

找不到一口许愿的井

童年的梦醒--

事与愿违地活捉一只猫

埋在垃圾堆中

贪婪地咀嚼头条新闻

赤裸裸的文字中

以飞弹的照片

最具腥味

它鼓鼓的小腹提醒我

不管黑猫白猫

都是耗子的恐惧

童年的梦死--

硬币和黑猫排队，上香

童年的遗照

渐渐泛黄

--------

Bored at work, so heavily edited Qian Xi's version of the translated poem:

Childhood
dreams -

parched as the well

in our Quanzhou home's
courtyard - thirst
or longing

to quench is not ( Read more... )