E(ating) the E(ast)

When the brown gave way to green, I had been sleeping, it seems.  But sleeping is never really sleeping, when you exhaust yourself in dreams, being chased by cows giving birth, with the person who became schizophrenic with you and the grass for weeks at the mountains you were last.

 But this time, the mountains sold ponchos for the rain and offered bamboo hiking sticks. And this time, you got lost, but getting lost is never really getting lost when gravity guides the way: somehow, down is always down; and you’re going down.  And getting lost un-alone, with a promise of an acapella Queen partner, somehow reassures you that you are not “just a poor boy”, anyway.

There are no bears, or lions, but the birds speak Chinese in bird dialect, so you can’t ask them for directions.

It’s the fog too: the lace dress that the sky sways in, letting the peaks poke their heads beneath it, lifting it up, like a temporal ceremony: tossing it aside when nakedness bombards the night.

She sees the peaks in the morning, in a full nakedness that the sun blushes at before the roosters crow.  

The next day I got slapped in the face by white water, in conjunction with a raft. Paddle-less, we were prisoners of the “rapids”.  Unlike the level 4’s and 5’s that I’ve braved before, if there was a moment of 4-5 in these rapids, there was a promise of padded rocks at the bottom. The most alarming thing of this battle was the neon, beetle-like, clawed, thing, pinching into my leg through my runners; who I, unabashedly, ruthlessly, threw to the fish, (if there were fish).

Finally, in the bamboo forest, I contemplated throwing myself into the trees from the red-ribbon, petite wooden plank swings, whose protectors scraped fruit from muddy rinds with their bottom teeth.

I told the sky to get undressed so I could be naked with her in the waterfalls, but neither of us obliged.

I found song on the journey “home”; And slept like that milkman, with that bullet in his brain. 

Lessons grasping for 26: when a machine is coming right at you, don’t move.When you discover, again, that the sun will explode, rub it into your face while it still falls in finer cascades.

 Etch your name is wet cement while they build the subway.

 I’d have asked for directions, but my drawing, I discovered, really did look like a bag of 1859 railroad coins, and how would they ever know how to tell me how to get THERE, with a series of gestures and what are dismissed as gentle gags.

 When, one day, you wake up and discover that you live in China, you aren’t Chinese, you don’t publicly gorge out your nose, your spitting is no better than it was when you were 8 years old, using your Ninja Turtle’s tee to wipe blood from your elbows, your “looking like a million bucks” is obsolete, but have learned to settle for “looking like a million Yuan”, in the dark, and you’ve taken it upon yourself to scream “Ni Hao!” to the people who stare at you, but when, while riding your bicycle, a person departing from a taxi opens the door between you and the curb, you instead scream “Ah, ni hao, bitches!” 

While composing innumerable passages, because you have lost touch with the ruler-upon-knuckles-grammar obedience due to nighttime fits in Poetry Month, you again become bitter that Benjamin Franklin always got away with the most atrocious 5-page-long sentences. 

1. The human body is an extraordinary machine, allowing relatively effective function on levels of sleep, that due to being so low, are difficult to even discuss. And fuel? This machine won’t spontaneously combust on the gritty stuff. This machine knows how to run.

            A. Now, this is not the same as no sleep in college, see because the environment there was one that was conducive to such circumstance; we were practically expected to be zombies. BUT now that I am the professor, all eyes and ears are on me.  This has relatively low risk, regardless, even when in a sleepless lackluster—being a foreign teacher, I am already seen as a weirdo, and the fact that my students are not English speakers, well, I can just pretend that slurred speech is normal, if I don’t make a fuss, then neither do they!

2. Lying in bed, I suddenly remember that when I was 13 years old, I most desperately desired to have a ghost boyfriend to come teach me how to kiss.  That is, I wanted a boyfriend who was a ghost. I am not referring to Patrick Swayze. Now that I have had boyfriends of the undead persuasion, I am sad, almost reluctant to report that I never had a ghost boyfriend.

 3. The dust. I am utterly and wholly, even ineffably, perplexed by this dust.  It is everywhere—the bikes lining the walls of my building outside- as if a performance of Pompeii, backwards. See, on ghosts, barring the robust action of people, I would think this place a ghostville. But specifically my office. The accumulation is unexplainable. I have commenced detective work and am prepared for long hours of detection. But why is my shit perpetually blanketed in this dust film!

            A. (This is after a brisk wiping, to be sure, and windows and doors closed,somehow, it returns, parades.)

4. Walking down the hall: back and forth, from office to classrooms all day. Each time, I could never peel my gaze, which fell to the floor as soon as I was at a distance to bring it in to focus, from the bee. The dead bee. In the middle of the hall. Unmoved. Finally, signs of spring: Tianjin, don’t disappoint me, you precious precious girl.  

Because I found that an echo is still only an echo, when surrounded by snow.

I found a barn is still only a barn, but never only a barn.  I found that honey still settles in a tummy the way it settles in a comb.

And universal things can only be universal in a certain universe. I found Orion sitting cross-legged, on his side.

I decided to cook with butter once, just happy to cook.

I found Paris is no place for Vampires—the blood is cold, and the tokens used for Salle de Bain stalls haven’t been much for the finger-nailed.

 I began biting my nails.

I began dreaming of war again.

I remembered that fire, in its elementary fatigue, has never been better suited for chests that pulse near the wild ones.

 I take great care in getting my antioxidants through red wine and The Blues.

I met Agent 007 again, and observed the Zoulou from something 25milllion minutes away and distance of other breeds too.

 I requested the company of bees again and am looking forward to a reuniting with my girl, China. 

Again, I return to the mountains, a place where I can always breath in a way, a way that the air enters into me and brings me a certain kind of pleasure that I find most solace in.  It’s Sicily today. I lay around in schizophrenic grass, where, if I close my eyes, I can quite acutely hear the grinding of grass, slipping through the sloppy chops of the brown brown cows that I have been sent to sit. Cowsit. We cowsit for hours. Novel for some time, ultimately morphing into a challenge that reverberates, bouncing, seeming to graze our very skulls, while we contemplate now, whether it is we or the grass who are schizophrenic. The latter, my care to explain drifts further and further away.

The grit of China in my nostrils has all but lifted. But its gritty fortitude in my diligence for work and eagerness to reunite with my cold and dusty office remains.

In the morn we depart for Rome. I will shake the cold from my bones and keep a seashell for my mother.

I sent a carrier pigeon this morning: a note to China: I’ll be seein’ ya soon, old girl.