Seventeen was a first kiss stolen behind my house, every thirteen-year-old's fantasy, as unpractised, as sweet. I'd rather be seventeen but I'm forty and there's a mortgage, half a car, three kids and their dog and a bucket of broken words waiting for me back home.

If home is where you dream then I'm thirty-three in tee shirt and jeans and horn-rimmed glasses reading Merleau-Ponty in the dim light of the Hungarian Café on Amsterdam Avenue, mostly to show off, partly to enjoy the irony of Merleau-Ponty on Montaigne: is there anything as certain, resolute, disdainful, contemplative, solemn, and serious as an ass?

I don't want to be an ass; I'm six years old and back in Los Angeles delighting in the monstrosity of the bougainvillea; four in Istanbul just this summer eating Turkish ice-cream as if for the first time; twenty and smuggling bootleg Moroccan wine back to the wine-drowned city of Oxford. I'm eighty and there's Charles Baudelaire in a back pocket and bottles of Tokay hidden in the backpack still; I'm twenty-two and disillusioned with intoxication and pretending an intellectual austerity in the Rad Cam when a firework explodes through the upper window, showy, unexpected, and to be gloried in.


Koh Tsin Yen

dann wars vorbei

apparently always does not last forever, and nothing is something.
if this is how it is.

Do trees mind if it is the same wind
that passes through their heads everyday?

theres a bud of sorrow
that has been growing within me
and
through the sheets of rain
winds that slice across my cheeks
the cold. the wet.
the tears-
are a relief.