Crooked Nail

The world seemed
A Chinese construction site

The sun

A manhole cover

The sky

Asphalt
The rain that fell
 A dirty, dark gray running gutter in the clouds

The streets and buildings

Like the pipes, ducts and sewers beneath

And a grid of low storm clouds hovering over the grid of the city

Like a mesh of electrical lines streaming madly from pole to pole,

Concealing the world

Walking through Taipei alleys
Between buildings
Into streets not really streets,
But riddles of a maze

Lost in a direction I'd committed to more than midway

In the hope that it led to somewhere I hoped

Might lead to some way out

From between the iron vice of shoddy buildings

Squeezed in tight next to each other, this scene

Pounded, beaten, packed down, trodden, flattened,

Crushed, trampled and compacted

That held me even tighter

So that  the hammer of days might pound me

Like a crooked nail gathered from

The filthy construction site of the world

And reuse me some other time.

My life has been thrown into a sack

With other crooked nails.

I was hit a faulty blow a long time ago

And not set straight in the wood,

Yanked out and tossed into a pile

Continuously I walked these crooked, bent streets

Of my mind in China and Taiwan
And I ached as if I been struck a sour blow.