[Digital Poetics 4.21] Five Poems by Leo Li
highway to by Leo Li
Bullet Training
It doesn’t hurt to be called painfully British
by a friend when a year ago I didn’t even know
what the word geezer meant until he used it
on me banteringly. The first time I heard it from someone else
was Tangerine in Bullet Train. Surely I’m Asian
enough to know the film’s all bants. Surely them berks
are taking the mick – who loses the plot to orientalism,
dead as a doorknob (at Buckingham Palace)? Surely
a word ain’t no bullet. (Not even jellied eel. Crikey chugging
that cack is worse than being called names.) Surely
if a word was a bullet, then I shall fight in Chinatown, I shall
fight in the British Museum and the V&A, yet I will
always surrender. (’Cause the geezer’s not for turning
his eyes introspective, innit?) Surely to unsee the white
flags strewn down my eyelids I just need to be pissed
on Corona after a roast lunch. (I know a well-nice
place in Kensington.) And surely after all that
training, I’m a proper British geezer now, ain’t I?
Lingual Hopscotch
How do I hopscotch in English?
From A
to Z
like Amazon? (since neither Blackwell’s
nor Waterstones is selling a single
copy of 西西.) Or by juxtaposition
of islands: Hong Kong and a dystopian
Laputa? Or by association of B
with Y, I entertain afternoon bore
with 2000s pop, lullabies of yore,
songs bygone. Or do I lace C
with X,
and look up a flight on Cathay Pacific, from HKG
to LHR? But where will the ensuing letters
bring me? And where do I even begin with D
and W? Why
does my distance from home increases
with every jump I make? Ultimately
how do I jump from the H in HK
to the U in the UK,
when I’m no longer the boy who played
hopscotch and knew nothing about
the ordering of the 26 alphabets?
No longer him who had no idea that
even if I were to exhaust the OED, not a single
jump will ever take me from 香
to 港.
The Wasted Man
April morning of nativity, he guillotined modernity
to be baptised by Neanderthalic bloodlust, entering a utopia
of motherless sandcastles. Vulcanised centuries and steeled
idealisms mouldered into penal orphanages. He said that
hope was to forget
trenches burying innocence. Across the Styx
from Dunkirk, amnions shellshocked by evening
shadows sojourned in a greenhouse of ashen poppies
which stared him back like his father’s exit wounds.
He said husbandry was killing the subjugated wife,
who’d sowed daydreams in his dead lands; inspired
by pulp crime and committed himself to hanging
his wife on the spires of St. Paul’s
where the Sun never sets. Just before midnight,
he drowned his newborn daughter in lager incanting,
in me they find death, for I am the good father,
while lullabying his tadpole son towards cataclysm
with an empty packet of Viceroy. The next morning
he Guy-Fawked the Parliament singing Bohemian Rhapsody,
bulldozed Lennon Walls in the name of pacifism,
spread his Icarian wings but lost his way around Piccadilly
Circus, cried to Buddha saying he’d done it all on a whim,
had tea with Marilyn to make himself solitary like a cenotaph
after they’d shopped for sex, terrorism and idolatry
at Selfridges, the double-deckers drifting past which were blood
-red like Admiralty Arch dusking under the bells tolled
by Her Majesty’s London Bridge, which wrought tears out
of an earthworm foundling hollering, mankind is dead, doomed,
wasted – on his last pint of youth and Werther – I don’t need salvation.
After electrocuting the remains of his kins, jail cells
were but mouthful of ironic titters and bedtime fairy
tales told by the devil’s silverfishes, with walls
etched with the spearheads of his somniloquy:
every generation is a lost generation.
Tree-ring Dating
He realised that I’m a traveller from an antique land,
and his pupils dilated like tree rings being uncoiled
by temporal abnormality. No C-14 dating could inform
him of the primordial rainforests where roots of sequoias
knotted. From there centuries of encounters bloomed,
fruited in nectareous weddings of daydreams’ pips
and an alpine nip. I suffered erosion no one fathomed,
and witnessed in barren soils withered devotions
scrawling their prophecies on annual rings. Despondencies
of a naturalist wearied his caprices, till ice cubes
melting in his fruit punch deciduously forsook
their glacial canopy. A minute ago, he proposed
to take me to see the millennial giant sequoia
at the Natural History Museum. Even that immortal
was felled, he muttered, distracted by sunlight, diffused
and eternal, you ever wondered there’s anything
that truly lasts? Between us, there was an understory
ridden of mycelia of disparities, blighting the tree
trunks, till we could no longer read our histories off
of the two lone and level tomorrows branching off
towards their fugitive microcosms.
Kodama (木霊)
I learned of the spirits inhabiting the woods
and set off to Snowdonia with my friend
from Cinderford who sleepwalks with Basho.
We used to be assiduous, in our halcyon days,
in composing renkas on billowing moors,
where sprouted groves of dandelion clouds; dispersing
our voices lightyears into nebulous winds
and feral waters baying back. Behind us,
the spongiform city where I’d always thought
I belonged mouldered in silent balm. I told him
about the rooftop farms above the abandoned factory
building where I planted my first snow peas.
It felt like a sandbox, and I was a troll playing
God. Complacent to immure nature in my garden gloves,
I cheered for my first yield but heard no echo. Cement,
or steel, or the vulcanised heart absorbed all
songs from the woodland spirits. Now I said to him,
echo, and he looked to fungi slumbering at the feet
of frosted conifers, blinking the season away.
Branches criss-crossed to form a gate
to paradise garden. Veinous roots gripped
onto our heels to remind us of our cradle underneath
the translucent bodhi. Stopping, he said to me,
kodama, and the leaves of my heart rattled.
*
Leo Li is an aspiring poet based in Hong Kong. His works were published in Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine, and regularly featured in Durham University’s official student publication, Palatinate, literary magazine, From the Lighthouse and college magazine, The Dove. His prose fictions, Frieze of Life and Overture were shortlisted for the UK’s Student Publication Association (SPA) National Awards for two consecutive years (2023 and 2022).
