Two Poems by David Wong

The Last Jeweler of Chinatown

His last customer begs to be locked inside the workshop
with unfixed gems that long for naked rings
and broken bangles that keep silent.

When the soldiers come looking, he does not lie.
No, no trouble here, only serve customers—
serve you too, if you want.

They take him up on his offer,
give him a lantern to replace the moon;
Now trucks come to him like gnats,

great steel gnats that go forever forward
into an always glory of oneness, preach the soldiers
who kick him to straighten him.

He uses the old magnifying spectacles
to blur out the faces of rapists
and water torturers.

When light dims, the roads stop their pretense
and bleed freely. Loss is dealt with in doses
swallowed on command.

The curve of the horizon
flattens to mirror the bayonets
and falls with the lids of his eyes.

He hisses at mynahs to force their flight.
Go. Return to the sky.
There’s only trouble here.

Mid-day, an Overhead Bridge in the Malaysian Capital.

Automobiles threshed about like steaming piranhas all named Proton,
driven by the same flesh, living on the same fuel.
Plato’s Symposium could not have helped, nor could Socrates or Kant
or the Buddha’s truths—
wisdom takes too long to manifest, and there is so much grey;
a grey bridge above grey roads below grey sky and grey clouds
and the horizon an endless grey band-aid.
Then the boy in grey rags, cradling a grey bowl between grey feet,
serenading passersby with a song of worship
like each or all were some greatest conceivable being—
beg beg you bless you good person, his lyrics went in a dialect disowned,
climbing into ears and clawing at the doors of nerve fibers
asking neurotransmitters for coin like a perhaps wind
in a still summer eternity.
I let the words in, tearing off the last strip of my peeling innocence,
becoming his phantom limbs.

My father’s banknote pauses the song. The boy looks into us
with apparition eyes.
Someone throws a coin into the bowl
and the song begins anew.
We continue also.
My shoulder fits into my father’s hand for the first time.
You do what you can, even if it makes no difference, he says.
He means we are being swindled, that anything that is given
is taken away when the syndicate gathers under the bridge.
Perhaps it meets a quota, spares the boy a beating.
I watch my mother. She climbed up from this world of armless beggar-boys
and as others weaved around us to escape this bottleneck of time
I was afraid she would return to it.
I hadn’t learnt, like father, how to dissolve empathy into resignation,
how to, like mother, react this mixture with a measured gaze of dry steel.
I was sure the boy would say something.
Why didn’t he say something?
Was he a boy or a boy-shaped jukebox dispensing blessings for coins,
each clink activating a voice like the tired ghosts of Apollo and Dionysus
arguing the virtues of spontaneity and order
with Li Bo whispering over them to stop questioning and be drunk,
or be drunk and question still more—

Ah, beggar-boy, I have trawled through back pages
written by jilted and howling questioners and found nothing
but paper cuts.
I have called for your good person, called into the night
until the night fled down my throat burning into tissue
like black uncorrupted tea to madden me into sleep.
And I woke up holding a scallop-shelled mystery. When I scratch its surface
my cuticles shine and the whole world yawns to say it is for your ribs
to grasp
in lieu of my dirty hands that—before my first pin prick, before Cain and Abel
and the scribes who gave death a name—keep finding so much more of it perm-pressed by time and packed away in sediment;
we are all archaeologists these days—we cross the overhead bridge
eventually.
That was always the destination. Enlightenment. Salvation. I beg, I beg you,
please?