Thank you.
"Barbarian Suite."
I call these mock Chinese lyrics.
They're going to sound end stopped, epigrammatical.
And I was trying to mimic the hep--, the sounds
of the heptasyllabic Chinese lyric.
"Barbarian Suite."
The Ming will be over to make way for the Ch'ing.
The Ch'ing will be over to make way for eternity.
The east is red and the sun is rising.
All bleeds into the ocean in the Calafia west.
My loss is your loss.
A dialect here, a memory there.
If my left hand is dying, will my right hand cut it off?
We shall all be vestigial organs, the gift of democracy.
The pale faces, the wan conformity.
The price we pay for comfort is our mother tongue.
China is an ocean away.
Our grandmother beaconing with too many children, too
many mouths to feed.
We can no longer dress her and improve her accent.
We can no longer toil in her restaurant "Double Happiness,"
oiling woks, peeling shrimp.
She is the bridge.
And we've broken her back with our weight.
We studied Western philosophy and explore our raison d'être.
All is well in the suburbs when we are in love with poetry.
What did you think, the emperor will come to your grave?
To tell you all is groovy in the hinterlands?
What did you think?
Life's that hunky dory?
What did you expect, old peasant, old fool,
one day out of the woods, and the dirt
will eject from your nostrils?
Even dung heaps will turn fragrant
with a thorough cleansing?
Orchids doth not bloom, baby.
They cry.
They explode.
Meanwhile, our anger gets muted in their fatal beauty.
AmerAsia is so harmonious under a canopy of stars.
The pram of a new nation.
The winds rock it gently.
Truth has no face, we make it wear ours.
You walk on the beach with your beautiful son Julian.
We dare to eat peaches and discuss the classics.
One day, they came to me, my dead ancestors.
They whispered "sse-sse-sse-sse,"
homophonous with death.
I was under the covers with my barbarian boyfriend
blowing smoke rings, talking jazz.
Posterity is yet another compromising position,
addenda to the Kama Sutra.
I was playing goddess/ dominatress and kept a piece
of his ear as offering.
Caldron full.
Caldron empty.
The duck dangling in the window is the last vestige
of our sizzling suzerainty.
They believed in order, which meant victory over oblivion.
They believed in the restaurant called "Double Happiness,"
where all the partners were brothers,
all the sisters wore brocade.
The cash register rang his daily prayer wheels
for the dying and the saved.