Kin where kin are
Grandad read me manga, tales rendered in
Chinese ideograms that made no sense, on
the settee exploring a black-white world,
antics of a time-travelling genie-bot.
Newspaper and razor blade on bureau,
he snored while I with purest trust and glee
sliced print into filigree, till chaos
erupted with my red; then all was light.
No memory of wounds healing but they did,
these fingers unlocking robot gantries
to workplaces with ease and unease, to
second homes fraught, where hunger meets lucre.
Relief where doors reveal no blade or trap,
delight where fads and open cubes pose no
gauntlet; dismay where the toxic reign in
guise of colleague or senior, disgust where
each word is uttered in the tongue of worms.
Must danger lurk within when the struggle
is without? Must petty slight wraith into
blood feud? Must work hurt, must labour harm, must
toil scar? Why are kin denied where kin are.
Something there is that rejects evil, that
seeds hope and withholds air from they who prey.
We strive, and make sense in this world - what could
be, what should be - with purest trust and glee.
The Armoury
Dad’s toolbox has rusted through and
through the years, I see less and less of
its blue. The tools have no name, so
the hammer I dub Anger in your honour,
that tool you use hot and thoughtless.
Obsession is your cold spanner
to bind the spirit, control the chaos,
masking your twin Insecurity.
Hacksaw Caprice completes the set
of poor tools and poorer weapons
you wield on one and all and sundry.
I ask Dad not for his tools but forge mine,
humour and hope, in memory of you
sitting unblinking beneath your lone light.
Last Rights
Are you going to the wake? they whisper
questions at each other which whirl skywards
as old things stir, stretching limbs. No wait whose?
Are you serious– old scars yawn as thick sap
weeps through years of makeshift shielding, through skin
become bark. Well I’m not going. Flashbacks
pounce, auto-playing ad nauseam; fingers
rake over archived texts, scrolling back to
troubled times. Why? You forget? He was an
unkind man. On the appointed day they
hear a bell toiling unseen, pass a crow
speaking in tongues for the dead, utter wards
to wall off the past. You don’t want me there –
I won’t hold back my spit.
Nota Bene
I’m an afterthought, footnote three –
please see annex, appendix c –
scrawled in the margins or summoned
to serve at someone’s pleasure. The
why comes later or not, just a
tool a cog a scaffold, duct tape
deployed when something breaks; never
a key note, not once a chapter.
Yet I crave not, seek not; my heart
wears the indecency, the un-
kindness. They would care less, so in
this half-light I write for my self,
my pen dancing past paper’s edge.
Playing in the Wind
I reach for the window latch
to beckon joy in, to catch
in the glass a glimpse of
the morrow in another world
breathing a different hope,
breathing a different light.
The old world stares back
through the pane, declaring
the third place broken, lost
to the plague of crows. We are
restless, rest-less, surfing and
drowning, shackled and bereft.
Live, work, play – they were
three; now a thousand homes
through a thousand windows
mark time, hearing in the wind
a hint of the songs to come,
candlelight teasing the moon.
*****
Ping Yi writes poetry, travelogues and fiction, and is in public service. His work has appeared in Litro USA (Editor’s Pick), London Grip, Dreich, Meniscus, La Piccioletta Barca, Sideways, Vita Poetica, Poetry Breakfast, Wild Greens and ONE ART, and is forthcoming in Harbor Review, Rising Phoenix Review and The Prose Poem. Ping Yi is from Singapore, and has lived in Boston, MA, and Cambridge, UK.
