Paul Tan (b. 1970)
SELECTED POEMS
我是 (i am)
Chinese too
skin as yellow as loess
shining like good gold
my eyes surely black
dark mirror black well
limitless unlike
my tun-tun-tu-tu vocabularyenglish speaking
cursing dreaming moaning in it
waist deep chest deep
in over my head
i eat these words
a whole thesaurus
stuck in my throatstuck like sweet treacle
or glutinous rice, you say
why does the teacher strike
me with her wooden pipa
as i sing whitney houston for you?
my tongue feels kinda funny
i think i’ll go eat wormsmr neither-here-nor-there
doing a slow limbo rock
lower and lower straddling two halves
there’s a smell of joss
and the crowd is crunching ritz
something’s about to dislocate
by Paul Tan
from Curious Roads (1994)
