Yesterday, as pretty much all the days hanging out with jb have been down here, was hella fun. We went to get a murland traditional feast meal thing, steamed crabs. Jesus christo, I ate more crab than I have ever eaten before. I actually got to the point where if I had eaten anymore, I might honestly have barfed.

before we ate

But goddamn was it good. Pricey, but good. And old bay is the strangest flavour I have ever had in my life, but it ain’t bad. It actually grows on yu, like mold. Or a girlfriend with a really high voice. But honestly, I had a lot of fun eating a lot of crabs… though I kinda wish I went to the restaurant dirty dick’s… because apparently their motto is “I got my crabs at dirty dicks.”

after we ate

But it was in the drive over to harris’ and back that got me really thinking. You gotta remember, I was already hopped up on benadryl at the time, so I wanted to crash out… but jb turned the music up, bumped the hard rock, opened te windows and proved to me that it could actually be awesome to drive. You gotta understand, I hate, hate, hate cars. I don’t like driving. I hate the concept of it. but I will admit, there is a visceral joy in driving fast down the highway with your radio blasting the right music. What a goddamn great experience. One of many so far, and hopefully one of many more.

so pretty, my camera does no justice

Afterwards we went back to annapolis to kick it and drink, as per usual. I really don’t have much to say about this segment of the night, except that naptown folks are hella friend. Also, drink jim weed. It’s this awersome sauce sweet tea flavoured vodka. If we had it up north, I would honestly be drunk 99% of the time, it’s that good. And if you stop down here, stop by Dock Street Bar, which is a hella excellent crab cake establishment with friendly bartenders.

Now, as I’m writing this from the baltimore zen center, I felt like I should shout them out. My friend jb is one of the teachers here and it’s a great place. Welcoming, homey and offering a variety of classes from meditation to martial arts. If you’re interested in buddhist zen meditation or to learn martial arts, you should check them out.

zen jb

Finally, I am going to be in DC over this 4th of july weekend and am telling yall, that if you’re in the area to hit me up. Especially if you know anyone in nashville cuz I know no one in that city at all… but definitely want someone to show me around all the honkytonks or whatever.

find all my odd-yssey pictures so far here… http://www.facebook.com/vinh.hua?ref=profile#/album.php?aid=2071973&id=34604166

See you on the road.

masters of the universe

Life is like cat allergies, it could always be worse.

goddamn it has been a long month.

which is why i only got 8 days into the poetry project before giving up. too caught up in too many things to keep it going. my personal life is all a shambles, my school life is overburdened. and to top it off, i lost a month and a half of work on my thesis because the file got corrupted and is completely irrecoverable. luck loves me.

but imma keep my head down and bull through. i can’t wait till i finish, graduate and go apeshit. go back to the gym, get prepped for a competition at the end of the month. god i’m going to enjoy feeling tired from physical activity.

i’ve given up on the poem-a-day project for the simple fact that my everyday life has to take priority… and because i realize i really really hate posting poems that aren’t polished. such is life.

wish me luck.

i’m the type of poet who writes in great spurts. and i am currently hella blocked, so no new poems until i can get over it. because of this, here’s two old poems, slightly done up to presentable. appropriately enough since it’s a horrible, nasty, get into your bones wet and windy day, i’ve decided that they’ll be love poems. as happy as i ever write ‘em.

big smiles.

even when you want to cry.

oh… and if’n you’re interested, i should be there and it’s dope as heo… the apia summit. a great gathering of artists and just generally dope people. and dude, it’s in the bay area this year. how dope is that?

—————————————–

jokes

the imperfections of our bodies
give shattering testimony
to the perfection of the moment

shared knowledge
of sex
being too sacred
a meeting
to be had
without laughter.

touch is a ghost, is
a memory, is flame
and salty sweet moisture,
is the tracery
of sparks

touch whispers,
touch grips fluidly
and straddles
the fault lines
between
pain, pleasure
playfulness.

no self consciousness, not now
when we lose track
of limbs, the parts
yours that become mine
mine that become yours.

for an instant
entwined, no
me without you, identities
defined only in relation.

and then i rolled off.

———————————–

untitled

my fingers walk the outline
of your silhouette, trace the tightropes
holding our tenuous miscommunications,
trusting in our unspoken tensions to hold us up.

we sequester whispers in the corners
of half-hearted smiles

dude, weschler’s currywurst is fucking bomb. because my plans had fallen through last night… yes i got ditched… i hit up my local watering establishments for some late night alcohol and food.

how was i ‘sposed to know i would find my new favorite watering hole? massive, amazing german beers poured by a hella efficient, friendly staff. currywurst, which i will officially say is one of my favorite foods ever. a wild boar sausage that was literally to die for.

alcohol and pork. how the hell do you go wrong with that?

but yes, i just needed to make a quick shoutout to the place before i got into the poem of the day. i hella recommend that folks should roll through there whenever they’re in the east village. and hey, since i live near there, you should hit me up, if’n i’m not already inside.

oh yeah, i won my slam last night. made a pretty penny. i’ll be back next month, alcohol money is worth slamming for.

but let me say again, this posting schedule is kicking my ass. i never realized how difficult it’d be to turn out a poem a day. jeebus. but yes, onto the poem’s intro. this piece comes from the fact that i really do have goddamn weird dreams, that are, to me anyways, completely believable while i’m in them. so i really will wake up thinking i was the bodyguard to the president and ate a bullet for him, or that i dived into a computer and rode on top of the fail whale.

awkward i know.

april 4th.
dream fail

i dreamt one time
the earth was invaded
by polkadotted unicorn space pirates
and the key to saving the world
was saving the stripper

one night, i thought i was superman
the asian dude who failed in math
and gave up the violin discovering
his gift for rescuing fair maidens
and cats stuck up in trees

the time you hadta carry me home,
drunk, i saw us as intergalactic ballerinas
our pirouettes encompassing
star systems, our soubresauts
like sun flares

when i passed out
at that party, i saw myself
as leonidas at the springs
holding off a legion
of fratboys with nothing but a braut

i woke up this morning
after having dreamt
we were still in love

turned to see you
next to me in bed, the assurance
in some deep part of myself
that all was right with the world

and realized how much
i hated dreaming

will be slamming at the bowery poetry club for their college slam tomorrow afternoon at 6. would LOVE to see you.

April 1st

ain’t want to be no hero, buy no farm

sisyphean remembrances
are penance for our momentary hubris,
the pyrrhic nature of our commitment

i took showers three, four times
a day to scour
the smell from my skin, the grit
that inevitably infiltrated
its way past coverings, wedged
itself where the straps pressed, the water
like balm on parched tongue
in a mouth dry from desert and ‘drenaline..

trying to draw comfort
from rumination, like humility
from a superpower, i draw
from the infertile grounds
upon which we lie
false foundations
falling away, the center no longer holding.

there will be debate
about blame, when it was no longer enough
and motivation, when esprit de corps
became the only tenable connections
drawing us firm.

duty, both weight and impetus
for boys with set eyes
and stubborn backs.

funerals for heroes, and the cowardice
of not wanting to be one.

april 2nd

small favors and tragedies

ball missing the net by a breadth’s breath
in a grand street pick up game
among immigrants who share
no language, no customs
nothing but their foreignness
and the comfort of pirouettes and epees,
the unspoken eloquence
of the game.

having no papers
for the first jay in months
after the worst day in years
… the evening before
a surprise drug test

losing the number
of the pretty girl
destined to break his heart

snapping your ankle, all the months
of recovery… just before
you stepped
onto a mine rigged
to take out your platoon

the train doors closing abruptly
in the hopeful eyed boy’s face, his mouth
twisted in a moue at his tardiness
as he fingers the ringbox
stuffed as deeply as he could
into the bottoms of his pocket
even as the woman who he is to see
goes over the words over and over again
till their sharpness wears down,

“i don’t love you anymore.”

administrative stuff first. as usual, i’m calling out for both gigs and contributors to the site. i’d love to book a show whereever you are. ‘specially if you’re at a place i’ve never been. and secondly, i’ve love to have more writers here. i’m adding another friend of mine to the blogroll, going by the pseudonym harleyquinn. she’s lived on the west coast, lived in the best coast, was raised in a place with no coasts but lots of cows, seen the world. she’s as bitter as i am, as romantic as a nightingale singing in flight and has the right combination of mania and fatalistic humour that always seems to resonate with me. i’ll be pressuring her and sheeptang to post more to make up for my short comings. please continue to remember contributing to asian women. and if anyone wants to send me penpal notes like some of you have done, then please feel free to do so. i don’t know how long it’ll take me to reply, but i will.

i’ve had some really amazing pen pals in my time who’ve managed to teach me more about myself and about human nature than i could believe possible. it’s always nice to add more, ‘specially since i’ve gone through… drama with some and fallen off with others. at any rate, all the pen pals i’ve had and kept in contact with have always been dope, beautiful souls and great writers. it’s nice to vibe, without the exigencies of the body to mediate text and meaning. it removes tensions and adds layers of meaning. or maybe removes layers of confusions and misunderstandings, thereby allowing us to come closer to the truth of ourselves.

fair warning, this is hella emo post. hell, i buzzed off my mohawk and have a monk’s fuzz. you know it’s bad when i shave my head.

so i haven’t posted in what for me is a long while… firstly this is because it’s a hectic time for me, as it is for pretty much every other student in the united states. secondly, it’s because my laptop keyboard is hella broke, which, because i do most of my writing at home, has slowed down my creative output pretty badly.

finally… it’s because i’ve been going through rough bit.

it’s a cliché, but then, like bukowski says (in now,ezra,), we always write in cliches, say the same things when we’re trying to touch the divine. mainly because there is no divine, there is only the human, those bits of ourselves, dark, light, in between, that we all share. and it’s the lucky writers who manage to speak to those universals, those shared spaces in a way that’s just the tiniest bit different, has that much more nuance to the entire thing. so as i come to reexamine cliché, i find myself not as afraid to use it. they become cliches for a reason after all, we do all understand what we’re talking about when we’re using certain phrases… they have all the familiarity of your home’s bathroom door, that you somehow manage to navigate yourself to even through the dark, as familiar as the crutches a man uses when he’s discovered that which carries him has atrophied and all he has left are his crutches, as familiar as reaching for a long time lover in the half-sleep that comes in the wake of night terrors.

misfortunes always come together like hurricanes, the confluence of fate-winds that meet almost perfectly together to somehow form torrential downpours and gusts that scour the soul. it’s never a single piece of bad luck, one stubbed toe that breaks down the human creature, we’re too resilient for that. it’s the combination of misfortune, that addition of burden that is never additive, but always exponential. (yes, the kid who almost failed the sped math class just made a math metaphor. epic win bitches)

so mischances and mishaps have left me here, all torn asunder, like a florida town after a particularly horrific season. the windows of my life battered and cracked, the detritus of my everyday scattered and strewn. with the odd quiet, that sleepiness in the air that only comes after catastrophe has hit, the misery of hopefulness, of having to rebuild, no matter that you know that you should, that you can. the fear that it will all be futile.

but then again, it is seasonal. i go through my moods. and i call them that to hark on some form of artistic pretension, to touch that part of you, the reader, that has accepted unto the point of cliché, the artist and his moods, his sensitivities. that is not to say that i’m not a sensitive dude, i am. i can be as touchy feely as the next, and i have my passions, that come with all the force that i apply to any portion of life i care about.

but it’s more than that, it always has been. i’ve pulled a hikikomori these past few days, locking myself in my room and leaving only to eat. or to drink. only able to function once i’ve managed to fill myself with enough uppers that to not leave my apartment would be even more maddening than what already inhabits me.

les face it, my moods are not just moods, passing fancies. they’re the moments that have such a powerful confluence of painful shocks and grinding burdens that the storm proofing that i’ve done all my life is not enough. the boards over the windows that i’ve constructed out of the flimsy resilience of duty and of lasting fancy are torn, and the the full brunt of tidal waters floods in, to take away that which i’ve sequestered, locked inside of myself and cherished. and the blasts drag my past up like malignant zephyrs, to hail them once again on the battered sidings that my father put there with his own hands. the careful arrangement of my mother’s garden within myself, torn all asunder. the photos and snatches of workworn prophecy and poetry that i’ve stolen, cribbed and cherished from each and everyone of you, tainted by devastation that only comes when one has given up plugging the holes in the walls, consigns what one has built to the maelstrom and hides oneself in the basement.

yeah. sorry, i’ve been emo recently. and emo to say that words have power, and if one is able to call a tiger a kitty kat for long enough, maybe one will come to believe it, and the fear of it is no longer so frightening.

i’m a depressive. i admit that.

but as my father reminds me, as i beg him to, i also have duty. it’s what i am. so fundamental to the core of my being that i could not imagine myself without an understanding of duty.

i’ve been fixated on salt recently. not on salt in and of itself, but being worth my salt. roman legionnaires were once paid with it, because it really is essential to life… and if you took that from another man, you were expected to be loyal, to do your duty. hence, “being worth your salt.”

ain’t no man ever gon’ say i ain’t worth my salt, ain’t know my duty.

life is the art of the possible, and the denial of reality.