Anonymous

Are you really a PCV

if you’ve never cried on a late-night bus ride?

Never felt tears trace your stress-creased face

falling, speckling, seeding the rice fields

over which you bridge, drive

listening to Leon Bridges lyricize on heavy headphones

heading home to your host family’s house;

the too-far-gone forlorn farang

in a far-flung foreign fairy tale of durian and two weeks too late

birthday mail once more fleeing from the City of Angels?

Do you think I’m being foolish if I don’t rush in?

Do you ever wake wearily on that well-worn walking-street

wallet in pocket but loose baht pick-pocketed, long gone?

Ever feel these salad days are a lackadaisical daze of

hazy emotions: mad sad maybe a tad crazy

so you put pencil to paper, pen poetic, set the page ablaze

hands hastily diarizing the phrases your brain relays

creatively unfazed despite your lazy morning-after gaze, sight obscured

by rays of early sunlight heating the creeks on your cheeks through

the yellow-green taxi’s window, articulating so to explore that obfuscating

frustrating though beautiful amazing maize maze of feelings that sways, winds

litters your mind with right turns and wrong ways?

Yeah — me neither.

Have you ever been in the soot-black bean bags back by the bar

fists balled to a torrent of hot tears wondering

why the fuck

you’re still here still feeling this way that you are?

Ever laid in Lumphini Park for a sundress caress, a current of colored cotton

surging to touch glowing, flowing across hips, curves but

soon after eyes close to meet lips to lips you’re back

seated near the rear of the bus, tear streaked

wishing you had just bought the hostel bed

instead of the palace hotel room?

I too hope we can meet again.