Can I get a hanok high-rise?

Seoul’s skyline is crowned by a jagged sweep of cranes. Many are employed in the construction or reconstruction of ugly, anonymous buildings designed for pure utility. These behemoth boxes of concrete have been thrown up overnight, every night, for more than fifty years. Within them thrive an incredible diversity and density of commercial, industrial, and residential life. Such practicality of form seems appropriate for chasing Miracles on the Han, but it doesn’t make for beautiful architecture.

Korean structures didn’t always sacrifice form for function. Traditional hanok houses were built to be both beautiful and practical. Constructed of stone, wood, paper, tile, and soil, these houses were designed not only to provide shelter but to subtly accommodate seasonal shift. Ondol heated floors in winter, cool shade and paper-shuttered windows thrown wide open in the summer; hanok architecture used natural materials and smart design to ensure comfort all year round.

Hanok are lovely. Outside they sweep and arch to nestle the horizon’s mountains, and inside they curl to hug sweet courtyards pond-wet and dark under kiwa roofs. Last week I toured one kept as a sort of hotel room for wealthy visitors.

I was charmed by the effortless union of old and new. Bronze cookware stood stacked on richly lacquered tables beside a miniature refrigerator and dishwasher. Storage space hid behind sliding rice paper panels concealed a vacuum cleaner and department store bags of swag.

Everything modern was tucked away or tastefully integrated into the ancient and traditional. I imagined the reverse, some quaint traditional handicrafts worked into a thoroughly contemporary complex of brushed nickel and glass, and the effect seemed no where near so pleasant.

I've seen similar juxtapositions feel forced or confused. I had the sensation that this place was self-assured, never boastful, and perfectly comfortable.

Does the Miracle still demand pure practicality? Korea is so advanced that beauty should be something architects can at last afford to remember.

Érotique Voilée - Man Ray (1933)

Slim-breasted

pinch-hip curve

ink-bled handprint--

woe is her segmented

by a spindled press

unless she boasts, sighing

of totemic conquest’s victory.

To read, we inscribe whim

upon her filth-marred primer.

Here the paramour prints

of disjunctive union... there,

the maid of a metal insult.

By delicate turns

over public mound,

she’s rendered erect

and woeful, both.

Indeed,

what woman isn’t

if we are honest?

#12/30 "Barbecue Lolita"

Where is she?

You bring her out here

butt-naked,

the cellulite-less and

marinated ingénue,

that overgrown Lolita;

bring her out to this sour lawn

lit goldenrod under the weary sun,

fastidiously groomed, her

beef-hunk edges glistening

before our barbecue.

Assure her of the red-blooded

American instincts

and earnestness that drive us

over these trailer-rusted prairies

to find necks

and pairs of knees

like hers.

Though ravenous,

we hope she’ll unfold glossy

like a magazine, butterflied

into many thin filets upon our laps;

she could also cleave apart like

mica: insulation for our impulses.

Perhaps we seem

extravagant.

If she trembles,

clinging to her roll top desk,

just bring her

neat and tender.

Damn gloss if she isn’t soft:

our teeth have rotted on the road

and none of us is ready

for a filthy, fighting meal.

No, don’t tell us about

sisters, or a mother. We’re here

for the particular marble in

her skin, the mercury run of

her blood, those knees

and that neck’s submission.

She says she’s lost

her patriotic instinct?

Nonsense. We’ve got it right

here, in the back of the van

and heel of my boot,

in the buckles at our waists

and under each man’s fingernails.

We’ve got it to spare

and spread

over her like butter

before we pop her

on that grill.

Enough. We’ve starved

on this lawn too long.

We won’t wait. Dismantle her

and slap her roadmap veins

splayed continental under

that cloud-cover skin

into our palms.

We’ll chart

our own

path home.

#11/30 "Talking About Dreams"

Shimmering with prescient possibility

we stole a truck to drive our suitcases

up a mountain in a Filipino jungle.

Your grandfather, still dressed for snow,

waited summit-side to buy the truck

for fifty dollars and a wink.

Earlier, my mother was a black man

nursing coffee in a diner. We ducked,

running past the windows, hearts in throats.

Other absurdities also shift

at the edges of a half-pale morning

obscured by curtains.

Lover! I’ve traveled somewhere strange!

(You linger in the fog of your own

somnambulant adventures, unimpressed.)

My night’s technicolor is incommunicable.

The vague taboo pops on my tongue

with singular, spectacular flavor.

#10/30 "Now, Everyone Knows Your Name"

Unsure of what it was,

we scratched it with our finger nails.

Tasted it. It melted at the edges

and multiplied under a microscope:

a fractal sponge scooped

out of strawberry ice cream.

Emptier and emptier it expanded,

wide caverns of paper milk

spun into suggestion’s opposites.

We shrank to slide inside,

to slick our skins on sugar membranes

and dig toes into the ebb tide

of melted cream, falling away.

We shivered to the pulse that marked

each hollow exponent’s explosion.

I ate my heart and wondered

if you’d wish on us enormity,

to fill the grottos

with opposition for entertainment.

I’d never been so happy

as when I was small and sugar

-slicked beside you

in all that waxing emptiness.

I ached to stay,

our toes sole landmarks

in a wide, delicious country.

But you were a lush, indelicate girl.

You dairy-stank and swelled, fast,

merciless as a guillotine; you

leaked from fractal windows.

I clung to you; first a child,

then a tick or trace of pollen.

I was a single cell before

your skin opened

permeable and I

slipped into you.

Imagine my surprise

to find your cell walls

scrumptious, studded with

frozen fruit, expanding

ever lonelier in runny

fractal sponges

of strawberry ice cream.

#9/30 "The Canary and The Snake"

A bird flaps between us

hotpulse-frantic against our knuckles,

warbling of urgent intimacy.

Coiled around the bird is a snake

ruby-striped and gently draped

about its lover’s wings.

You know the snake.

It lived in your boot, once,

menacing your ankle’s pulse.

It left you for the bird: a canary

in the coal mine of our embrace

singing the honest blues.

From my grasping hand to yours

the canary ricochets like a needle

weaving through two slips of gauze.

We’re drawn clumsily along its path,

until two sloppy rosettes

converge in a sad bouquet.

It is absurd to ask how other

more auspicious signs

might have been procured.

The snake recalls your leather-sweat

and socks; it tells the bird

not to bother with such fakers:

no violence is greater

than to make a lie the truth.

The canary is unconvinced.

It believes a flash of ruby-striped

success could wake us up

to the impotence of numbers.

Its song flosses the gaps between

filmy petals, pours mortar down

throats and holds

a hairdryer to gaping mouths.

We know this, yet still we stand

lips parted in awe and waiting

like penitents for the host.

Show us, canary,

how to get back to ourselves.

#8/30 "What do you say?"

We could be sun-drenched emperors

eating the month on fine china

in certain swank hotels,

where the waitresses make

more than professors

for their deference

and shiny, white teeth.

Shall we exile ourselves?

#7/30 "Welcome to Cebu"

In the morning, the city is dirty-beautiful,

bright paint burned tired turquoise and pale pink.

This vintage palette complements

the hello-waving verdant palm leaf fans.

Other tropical foliage crawls

an insistent claim to the land

over buildings of weepy concrete.

The streets are crowded with knock-kneed kids

and shirtless, shiftless men. The men hawk

sunglasses and towels for pennies to the stalled traffic,

or load heavy knots of star apples

onto the backs of motorbikes. Jeepneys bursting

through their glassless windows with humanity

weave naked and neon through the gaps.

Everyone sweats in their shacks

cobbled of corrugated tin and beer billboards.

A woman lifts her hair in a breeze,

smiling at the baby on her hip.

I am here, adding

whatever I am

to this ripe beginning.

#6/30 "Geumgang"

Air breathes easy off the gold river.

Dusted mountains hulk indifferent to us

fools in the valley below, killing

time at a rest stop on stilts

bestride a riverbank.

Cheerful enough,

an ajumma hums a wordless tune.

Her plastic tent and lawn chairs,

red-bitten-pink, sport Coke ads and

that dignity acquired in bald thrift.

She slaps the tent flap open,

swats hair (dyed black and permed tight

in the patriotic style of women her age)

from her forehead with a hand

like a brown spade.

Curious and cityslick,

biology animates me like a child.

I kneel before her tank of uninteresting fish

whispering “hello, pretty,”

to their gapemouthed, stupid faces.

Humming still, our proprietress gathers

baskets and a net. A small, sharp knife

flashes in her spade. It gleams an ode

to brute utility. She corners her catch:

three fat fluorescent Yellows

and a slippery, darting Black.

She lays the first electric Yellow

on a wooden plank.

Her indelicate but practiced spade

slices two rough cuts and takes

a wide triangle from the fish’s belly.

Guileless, I stand transfixed

before the pastoral carnage.

The fish flaps. Digging, she scrapes

wet organs from the gaping wound. Again,

and again; the disembowelment

of Yellows is inexact; half

a ruptured heart left in one,

much billowing white intestine in another.

Black puts up a fight.

In a gesture nearly sweet, the ajumma

slaps it weakly on the head

with the handle of the knife.

No luck. Un-stunned, it’s likewise gutted

and thrown into the basket

From a hose at her feet,

she rinses the blade

before her hands.

Passed under water,

the eviscerated fish

heave for a last wet breath.

I wonder at this organless lost cause.

She tips the basket into a metal pan and

fills it with scalding broth.

One fat Yellow squirms in vivid agony.

She clucks at it once as if to say,

“Be still now, empty thing.

Die as you are meant to.”

When the pan quiets,

she takes up her song again.

#5/30 "Muscle Memory"

I have a vague memory

of water on glass: a fingertip

gently kissing surface tension, dragging

drops to a reservoir until rivulets

broke free and flowed

down a darkened window to the sill.

Your pale chest is that dark window

when I prod drops left clinging from the shower

across your constellated skin.

My hand is young, your chest

a curious partition

protecting irrigation from a storm.

#4/30 "For Order's Sake"

Cast a Soviet monument to our will

in some expanding polymer,

that it may swell and distort:

a Chernobyl marshmallow

over the fiddled roofs.

Assure our citizens of each distention’s

historical accuracy. Shield them

from the dice shot in all our bellies

for a minute with the marionette strings

that trigger a finger’s grace

or fumble.

Breathe nothing of luck, lest our people

pluck the die from their guts to gamble

in earnest, and abandon their oil-slicked guilt.

No better leash exists than this

prismatic filth; all dutifully scrub

with bulk-purchased cleansing salve.

So sing to them

of the sacrificial quotas overfilled

and the endless cable channels waiting in heaven,

of their virtue like a single-sided coin

and the mercifully short half-life of radium.

#3/30 "Sunday"

Handsome anchor,

I am happy to be planted

in your shallow nail beds.

Let’s read and write the news

while under our windows

Chinese women sing in argument,

a scaffold rattles

apart, and spring

breaks like a wave.

#2/30 "On the Subway"

Cake-faced concoctions

coated in leather and bows,

clucking staccato parabolas into the

vectors of disparate hustle underground:

I am trying to contain myself but I want to run my hand

up your stocking-clad thighs, you clank-heeled girls,

and squeeze, hard, the flesh that arches

delicately from your femurs.

What are you made of?

Where are you going in all this sprawling chrome?

Can I rummage through the pockets of your tailored coats?;

I am looking for something I lost or never had.

Catch my irascible eye; I want to

fuck you with it like a man.

You are not the object

of my ire, but you’re pinned to it

like a taxidermied butterfly

or an errant bit of lace

inherited by accident.

I apologize for

glaring, so.

#1/30: "Denial on the Dock"

30 poems in 30 days? Fantastic. Let's do it. Here's #1.

Mama with your fancy heart

full of wedding rings,

let go of them red balloons

and take me to the circus.

I want to watch a fantasy be

honest about itself.

Imagine that tightrope,

perfect under paid feet instead of

trembling in your poor throat,

forever calling across the water

to a ship not coming in.

Mama I am tired of this dirty dock,

tired of the way you say the fish

won’t smell tomorrow but every day

is the same, salt-burning sun

driving your welcome balloons

a little lower, that ship never

coming any closer and fish

one after the other lain

gutted on the wood to stink

like they have to, because that

is what men do to fish; make them stink.

At the circus I hear they have a silk tent

wide enough for everyone.

Forget your diet, let me buy you one of those

popcorns big as your head.

We’ll throw some at the lions

to prove we aren’t scared.

Laugh with me, Mama,

at the clowns and tumblers falling

head over heals for their buck.

Better at them than us, still waiting

for fish to stop stinking in the sun.