04 October 2001 - 16:08 - centum1

This is the false one hundredth entry. If you go back and count, yes, this is entry 100, but there's an entry a while back that consists of links to diary rings. So the next one will be my real one hundredth entry.

So, what do I want to spend it on?

I would like to spend it on some of my terrible poetry and also on a little rant.

I'll get started now. There are only two poems of mine that I feel are remotely "ready" (whatever that means) by my completely arbitrary standards to put up in this entry. One of them is a response to the poem "Second Nature" by Diana Chang. That poem will be the first to appear, but before I type that, I'd like to type Chang's poem. So here goes.

Second Nature
Diana Chang

How do I feel
Fine wrist to small feet?
I cough Chinese.

To me, it occurs that C�zanne
Is not a Sung painter.

(My condition is no less gratuitous than this remark.)

The old China muses through me.
I am foreign to the new.
I sleep upon dead years.

Sometimes I dream in Chinese.

I wake, grown up
And someone else.

I am the thin edge I sit on.
I begin to gray - white and black and in between.
My hair is America.

New England moonlights in me.

I attend what is Chinese
In everyone.

We are in the air.

I shuttle passportless within myself,
My eyes slant around both hemispheres,
Gaze through walls

And long still to be
Accustomed,
At home here,

Strange to say.

And then, my response:

dichotomy
(response to diana chang)

so you are, too:
caught between two worlds
in a body yearning to be bigger-

you seek validation, some community?
here it is: we're just like you

(and no, we didn't choose it either)

Flip-flopped we stand, shattered, broken, together:
there will always be that sense of foreign
and you wonder whether those dead histories are ours:
whether we stand together on our parents' shoulders
whether we mightn't be alone for real, worldless
whether that guilt is for real:

(sometimes it's easy to dream we've forged a new culture)
(those were the nights I thought I dreamt in Chinglish)
(those were the days I sneezed in Anglo-Saxon)

and then we are, alive, shuttling back and forth;
(sometimes juggling threefour as we're condemned
distasteful by a people-)
foreign even to ourselves
this three-thousand year legacy, this two-hundred year experiment:
we're creatures of the borderlands, we live in a wasteland, ever foreign:
borderlands that cutslicepeel until nothing sacred's left unprofaned
(your body is a temple, is it? the heathens torched its image long ago)

(and where to go when war threatens is anyone's guess)

and it's no wonder we're prematurely aging, prematurely blurring:
spectacles and dye won't help who we are and what we've become
so wary what we say (fearing the mask we wear is wrong)
we're all too normal in a balkanized society
we've become that Mostar bridge in ruins, soon to fall
defying polarity from necessity (not by choice)
of both and yet of neither-

you too say america is in your blood
boston, portland, duluth, and the body of christ:
but do you not feel the sun tides of the dragon in your veins?

model minority, pah: we attend
because we feel like duty, sense with guilt:
but our roots run exposed and we cringe
seeking culture on our own terms:
colonizing (years late) the new world, opposite way
husbanding what's ours, paper, silk, powder:

(you see us everywhere and in the West, inscrutable, liberated-)

you, kindred spirit: of both like me,
bound to earth but free to fly - within -
eyes, cheeks, tongue at odds
with what is Asian, what is Western:
(bound to fight quixotically for our own)
where is home? you long for one, too.
where is acceptance? you long for it, too.
where is trust? (if you'd give it wen ho lee-) for what is it given?
are these such strange thoughts?
is it our duty to be split in two, given to none?
and nights, too, do you lie awake, wishing you'd belong?

All right, one more to torture you, and then the rant. This one, like so many others, is untitled.

come with me o spirit
explore the wonder of the body:
touch warmth with me
find ivory-pitch skin:
trace sinew and vein with me
and then:
oh god, open me with me
peel away my flesh
past organ muscle nerve bone
tear your violent way through me
get to the very core of me
and find your god within-

And now, for the short little spiel. Today in the car, I was explaining the difference between perennial and annual flowers and found myself drawing on my knowledge of Latin roots. The same for the word "suicide," se + caedo. Two years ago, I would have been unable to tell anyone any of this because I would not have known it; three years ago, I would not have found the strength and the stupidity to come out to my class. So I should take pride in my knowledge, what I have shown myself able to do, what I have learned... but somehow, I who worship guilt and knowledge above all feel empty, feel worthless somehow; feel that deeper than deep I want to bury this emptiness, with fire more powerful than alcohol, with blood more dark than wine, with...

I want to be rid of myself, but I want to live, and I don't know how I'll manage that. I'm not so much of a fool now as to say that I don't believe in God, because that would be a lie. But my God is a strange one, and his jests are cruel ones, and he does love to jest...

Which leaves me where I started. Not knowing what to do, where to go, and having said that in a hundred different ways on this site.

Pax vobiscum.

J

caedo, caedere, cecIdi, caesum [3] to fell, to hew, to cut, to slay, to slaughter, to murder

se third person reflexive pronoun, singular and nominative

I can't get macrons (long marks) into my text, so I capitalized the letter that has a macron which really matters. I know I'm inconsistent for not capitalizing the rest, but hey, you can't get everything you want.