101, Taipei
        after the Mandopop song 'Centrifugal Force' (Yang Naiwen, 2016)

Happiness in wanting to say something but not saying it. I want to say
happiness in a way others cannot. You look up at my blue-green glass,
double-paned and glazed, and think we, even when someone
jumps, are never on the sane page. Of course, I look like
a huge magic wand that grows a sad rose. Yes, the rose
is dyed, at best. No, there is no rose. I, who have grieved
for the softness of streets replaced by purpose and shops, know
you will one day lie face down with your beautiful eyebrows.
Others think the body bag that does the job is plastic art,
but it is the zip, its reverence tossing us away from the implied
cause. Do you know the 21st century took our belongings inside?
If, as Mary Ruefle says, we are to be exact with the price
of a thing (be it a rooster plate, a kind rope, or, better, songs
about life not smooth as a tattoo) by adding 99 cents
to what it is already worth to make it feel more real,
you wonder what the steel of that one senseless floor
is for. For long, I have become where your soft spots
whisper We are metaphors or Take us, before, all winter long,
raw anticipation aches, sees nothing. An unbecoming. To some,
it is less sad. I am still the same set, same scene and torque
groping and tending the moon in Ourselves. Their selves.
To you, just another phallus? One that jokingly stands.
All seasons are equally good for waiting and missing out -
how you are here early, as if waiting for the world to come
down with its legs up, for the thing in your head to be heard.
It is hard to see a swaying hand in a crowd; everyone now crawls
towards everyone less sad-looking. Yes, the rain gets you
nothing. You are a living construct that mellows street lights.
Shouldn't you be going home, where questions are decades old?
The ones you are expecting will not come. They are a list
by a kid to keep you soaked to the bone - the star
barista, the edgy clerk, the entrepreneur who burns
family pictures. People come with their cameras to frame
the circumference of their open despair. I close a door
behind you, but it is conservative to say only the natural world
matters. I am famous. I appear in maps. Come,
didn't you say I speed up happiness with a city view?
Beneath me, a male world thrums with every strung kind.

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Copyright © 2017 Nicholas Wong All rights reserved
from Australian Book Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission