i. three lost interviews

This kind of question
Better leave it to experts.

like that i think better.
last time buy rice where got name.
now royal umbrella golden elephant
phoenix all sort of brand also got.

Of course what is left
I will sent home,
he thinks, paying
the dark-eyed woman
to come into his bunk.

How we calculate the figures
Is confidential. We don't want
To influence the market.

they promise MRT but
train don't stop near our house.
have to take feeder bus
what to do.

When the lights go out
he remembers
the warm body beside him
is love.

Show me the homeless.
Show me the poor.
We are not like Europe.
We are not like America.

i call up hotline to complain
is it because i small people
they cannot do for me is it
why next block can i cannot
is it because i not big shot.
they say wait must check.

Like this.
O yes, do it like this.


ii. ghazal

Your son so clever, got into RI!
How much you pay for tuition every month?

How I carried my schoolbag last time.
Now my right side lower than my left.

How come you don?t like to play soccer,
instead write what poems -- gay is it?

You must make yourself more visible,
else work but no one notice. Then how?

How words come between. How they gag.
How these fragile swallows yearn to flock.

Poet you know this, and yet not how
to live as if it mattered that you know.

iii. history (i.m. 11.9.2001)

It has a curious way of making you wait
before striking. By day the usual blanks,
the same quota of sunlight. Fleeing
at night into sleep, into poetry which is
another kind of dreaming. And then it
flanks you like a predator. The news,
the naked shock, the future's payload emptied
into present. At once you know this is also
how love ends, how verse begin to fail.
That when a man wakes to find his lover
gone, he does not weep, or write sonnets.
He has breakfast, a cigarette, reads the paper
to find history has taken its place without us,
whatever our questions and our stories say.