POEM: QUESTIONS LINGERING ON THE BICENTENNIAL OF THE BIRTH OF POE

Dear Edgar Allan Poe,

Some questions about your imagination, and your death:

Why did Charles Baudelaire call your imagination the greatest of your century?
Why did Paul Valery think you incapable of making a mistake?
Why your obsession with crowds and cities (civilisation means "living in cities")?

Why were you obsessed with burying your lovers alive?
How did you die?
Were you beaten?
Was it staged, like the death of Kit Marlow?
Were you syphilitic?
Or was it just one final bender?

When they found your collapsed body,
why were you wearing another man's clothes?

Dear Poe, did you know that Thomas Jefferson was inviting
all of your class to dinner, alphabetically and in pairs,
but you dropped out of U Virginia
before he made it to the letter P?

What is your take on Humbolt's conception of the Cosmos?

Why does Dupin's love of reason lead to madness?
Why can a simple gold bug find the treasure?

Why did Vladimir Pyast, your Russian translator,
go mad while reciting "Ulalume,"
in a St. Petersburg theatre?

As the writer of split houses, family members buried alive, grief, the madness of crowds, mania, the petrification of a culture, the destructive turn to reason, broken harps, crimes without an logical motive, houses barricaded from the plague burning outside, the coming generations ignorant of the centuries of beauty and knowledge that precedes them: why, Edgar, did the Russians worship you so?

After you died the Baltimore Clipper announced your death as "congestion of the brain."
Were they actually talking about soaking our imaginations in yours?

POEM: PUSAN

1.
Summer blows in beneath clouds of yellow dust.
He emerges from the subway to view the cat
and snaps open his knife...

2.
Earlier, he ate dog with raw garlic.
Before slaughtering the beast,
they beat it
again and again.
It turned manic...

3.
He swallows adrenalin infused meat.
Heart pulpitating.
He feels alive...

4.
This coastal Asian city.
His eyes paranoid and sharpened.
An expired visa and nationless.
An emptiness to the streets.
He notices the cat's tail
thick and stumpy.

He holds it and slices away...

5.
When it vanishes he follows
the trail of blood.
It leads through a fish market
down dusty trails,
across car hoods...

6.
He believes in a personal theology.
He believes in his knife.
He believes in talking to the dead.
He believes in counter-language:
engagement
and the glory found in reverly...

7.
By sunrise-he is almost starving-
he sees a new cat.
He removes its tail,
punctures its throat.
Drinks and feasts.
He removes entrails and crawls inside
and staples the stomach closed
and sleeps to muffled traffic.

He dreams: of armies moving down our peninsula
of Buddha's birthday
of people sheltering in the subway
of gnarles hands,
grinding teeth
of shamans dancing in the hills surrounding Pusan.

8.
It's time to rise to the dance,
he says while sheltering
beneath the cat's fur.

POEM: UNTITLED

There are still songs
and music to be found
as tectonic plates
press below Tibet
and the monks...
"Om."

There are still songs
demanding to be sung.

I hear them roll over
the fields of barley.
Where the death camps
burned our flesh.

They can be heard
in the metropolis:
In the subway
In the broken shells
found along the beach.
In revivalist's tents.
In the still traffic.

In the sun barely
getting through the
thick haze above.

China's desert
ruptures, grows and
like an angel of death
it blankets our city.