MISSION
You are a friend
And have a way of doing things,
But that is not enough—
A crowded place without
Intrinsic meaning, we
Proceed relentlessly. Since all
Diverges from, in any case
I like the sun, reminding,
Still some glaciers we have only seen
In photographs. Providing you return,
The factory will throw a
Celebration my way
Which is yours, forever all ways
To begin with, in a kind of special
Pleading which encompasses without restriction.
But for now, the city’s key is not
To be already here, much
Less arrived completely. Can you make out
The productions of the present? Speaking
Strictly as I feel,
We are too healthy to be good.
CONTINUUM
I
The first time
Someone walked past
Singing and apparently indifferent
To the fact
Of being heard—why
Did it already seem familiar? We’ll
Be right back—
After this some
Games of confidence, a charge, then helpless,
Happy now…
A box you find
Enough to fit the world—one’s always on.
II
Friends, later.
Shepherds off rails.
Arguments fill one room, space another.
Pressure, kids,
Suspicions—gripped
In any case. Keys turn. A house is flipped.
FEBRUARY
Slush piles of the world, awake!
Though sleep is restful, nothing satisfies,
And everybody out there with a passion hates you.
There is no name for what
You’ve gone to say.
But ventures beckon, and the thoughts of
Queens—like candles, they lie
Well off, twisting in the ice of futures.
Now, everyone is friendly with a difference.
If bodies sometimes slip into their
Former hides, it’s their loss, while the bear
We made, out in the heavens, turns to fortune.
Should a home await us
It resolves to sand. The little blank emotions
Shift, but slightly, like the feathers in a coat.
And the uninvited, guest of the invisible, arriving
From the distance, letter firmly in hand—
Surges at some throat from pictographs, unsent.
EVENING SHADE
1
Your poetry had been dissolved
In a solution till it felt like home,
Percussion running over time,
A game of flight that ended bad.
But nothing ended, and the point
Was carried over water, and
The atoms of the water…
You can either hunt
And put it in a box
Or you can put it in a box
And hunt: whatever works
For you.
2
Hope babbles up a poppy:
The key of love that turns
And turns inside the lock.
It’s
A cinch, and so
Much less.
The blessed, meanwhile, spins
And wounds: nice cells, break
Up.
Spurs imply: not water, only a
Relation—still, now,
It’s over.
I don’t consider myself a poet. The reason for this is simple: I stopped writing poems early in this year (2015). There were many reasons to stop, but it was only recently, reviewing hundreds of poems written over seven years, that I understood my motive for departure at its source. With very few exceptions, the poems were animated by regret. They originated in regret and returned to regret. They contrived at clever manners of containing regret, they toyed with a regretful tone, they elided regret and gratification. If I charged them with layers of meaning, or structure, or music, it was done, haha, regretfully. The line between the regretful and the regrettable will always be unclear; even so, I’m fairly certain that don’t regret composing the poems, for myself at least. I learned something. Like DJ Khaled says, I changed a lot. But language, in the end, is for other people, and it’s hard not to suspect that other people deserve better than regret, no matter how artfully veiled. Still, now that these words belong to other readers, it’s no longer up to me to say just what I mean. I specified a range of intention as best I could. It’s finally out of my hands. Perhaps I’ll be mistaken, but for now, at least, it seems as if there’s no pleasure in poetry that can match the sense of leaving it behind.
Frank Guan writes regularly for n+1: his most recent essay, on Drake, appears in issue 24. His other non-fiction has appeared in The New Republic, Full Stop Quarterly, and ARTnews. He translated Baudelaire. This is his fourth year in New York City.