Poems from 2020
A few poems written in 2020 by Mingji Liu.
“Waiting”
2020 · Mingji Liu
I’m waiting for dawn to arrive with candy-coloured fingers,
I’m waiting for a call about my licence registration,
I’m waiting for them to pave the road down by the Foodworks and the adult gift shop,
I’m waiting for the next the election so I can watch Mr. Broad-Gauge debate Mr. Vanilla Cream over the Issue of Who Gives Fuck,
I’m waiting for the poplars to turn gold, then brown, then green, and then gold again,
I’m waiting for my friends to have their weddings and divorces,
I’m waiting for the return of Halley’s Comet,
I’m waiting for the ice caps to become a distant memory in a nursing home,
I’m waiting for the erosion of the pyramids at Giza,
I’m waiting for the continents to fuse into a new Pangea,
I’m waiting for the Second Coming, for the Age of Krishna, for the death of ignorance, for the extinction of darkness, of language and division,
I’m waiting for the sun, having engulfed her own children, to fizzle into a perfect white dwarf,
I’m waiting for the collision of galaxies and the melancholy of black holes,
I’m waiting for the last proton, that final quivering particle, to decay into the known universe,
They ask me what I’m standing still for.
What there is to see atop the pedestrian bridge along the tenement rows.
There’s not much, I try and tell them, and yet there’s everything at the same time.
All my new sensations
2020 · Mingji Liu
i
All my new sensations are made of light. Blinding, indivisible light.
A raving bouquet of photons – dissolving every possible reading of the world
Like the caterpillar liquefying inside his chrysalis,
Into a slow soup of romance, an exalted, disciplined, renaissance of desire.
Think lutes, think veils, think gardens, think silk ribbons –
How this surge of courtly love, like a rose window of reverie, dazzles the impious dark.
ii
O! O! O! O!
Oh how I adore the women jiggling down the river trail in their yoga pants,
those lovely brunettes in lululemon tank tops,
how their chocolatey sides plump up and over Pipemaker’s Bridge and into the suburban distance.
Oh such lovely brunettes, such contour and form, the billy bookcase of this planet’s pretty girls,
it cannot be said these are not fine words, no no no no, it cannot be said at all
iii
And now for Spring! The transition months!
The time for brooding and breeding
Signified most perfectly by the white pear blossoms, filling the cul-de-sac with their bleachy smell of semen
Branches of bluntless, flowers of thrust and longing! What a fine metallic scent you make!
Three times I have woken up in the top bunk of a hostel, roused by the kitchen-sink rattling of sex beneath me,
Once in Prague, close to where the mounted saints guarded us from a river’s grief,
Once in Manhattan, where Columbus Circle doped us with exhaust fumes of jazz,
And once in Bangkok, where not even the Buddha could resist the creaking in-and-out, the musk of bare backs,
iv
I tasted brightness once, like a constellation of spices on the lipstick of god.
Tasted it in my skull and in my ribcage as I passed a joint back and forth with some girls from Quebec
Rendering the tallow of my eyes, till I was blinded
beyond cynicism, beyond thirst, beyond conspiracy, beyond beyond beyond beyond beyond
v
And when I came back to, I was lying in the soft summer of a school field,
Close to the cool, boundary stream where the dragonflies darted like low,
Close to the pleasurable shadows of the willow trees,
Waiting for my friends to call me, waiting for the bell to ring.
Brushing
2020 · Mingji Liu
There was a lightness back then
to growing and feeling loved,
easter hunts and candle wishes,
and long summers in the backseat.
How a fresh tooth meant a dollar,
and how it meant something better
was arriving to the front step
of your pain sweetening gums.
Harder now, as it simply goes,
to lift yourself into morning,
between the overcast and road works,
to lean over a stranger’s sink and
make holding patterns with a toothbrush.
Still going places, still known to love,
but flying heavier with contrails
of foam between your lips.
You’re not ready to have your own
right now, and you might never be.
There are journeys even poets can’t
prepare you for. Where is the map
inside you that contours care beyond
the fence line, that stacked stones
atop memory, and promised a sloping path
for you to lead the small hand of another?
cigarette
2020 · Mingji Liu
This cigarette means more
to me than any flower could,
it is like every flower I’ve
held in my hand and more so.
Their petals yield little,
but this paint-stripped taste,
this head spin, the spider-webbed
smoke out my head and up
my jacket is real, realer
than any daffodil or woman.
Dog days of Kensington
2020 · Mingji Liu
The cat melts into a nest of blankets –
Is it just resting or sensing
the world with closed eyes?
A man idles his car in the loading zone –
Is there anywhere for him to go
in his old, blue Mazda?
The vacuum sings downstairs –
Does the carpet need another
cleansing or is it just to pass time?
Everything has lines of motion and purpose
I do not pretend to know what they are
Evening arrives steadily with each
act of observation, each descending
window blind is its own tender element
It is another sentence in a language
we are all patiently learning.
I’ll tell you
2020 · Mingji Liu
Give me a word and I’ll tell you a place,
Give me a sentence and I’ll tell you a
memory,
Give me what you desire and I’ll tell you what
a rush of freedom feels like,
Like the moment a boy found, seventeen
years ago, standing on the storm’s edge,
Out in the West Coast of New Zealand,
screaming in ecstasy at nature’s violence.
Screaming at the wind, the rain, the white
thundering rocks beneath,
Trying to push out a word, a lone idea,
one that could seize this cold, pelleting encounter,
Not knowing, just yet, that it would take a
lifetime to form the first syllable.