Learning Mandarin has got me wondering
if perhaps I’ve been meandering,
avoiding yuyan which is to the point,
skirting ji qi ji lu construction,
not always accounting for kaixin
honesty when striving for gaoxing.
And getting by used to be enough,
but since forgetting waiwai’s song
I’ve long been occupying a zhong
missing Meiguo, piju, chao fan Fridays
and if huo means live / life / alive
it’s about time I gave one of them a try.
I have dreams of moving to Zhongguo,
same dream I met O’Hara Frank
in Xianggang harbour, real ren,
who told me twice that wu
is the most important meal of the day
as we chensi under crane.
It’s getting easier to see myself a laoshi
after shiqi nian spent xue sheng,
trying to put pen to some serious shigu,
and xu and shu still sound the same
while I still have neither just yet,
working on them like practising pinyin.
True to shu (again) on all of this change
stemming from journeying jia again,
aging a decade during shi xiaoshi flight
before the jetlag hit like jufeng realisation
that having faith in the future is a wei ju,
like reading this poem for an audience
when I’m still coming to terms
with consonant clusters and end vowels.
Craig Writes Things 