Poem by Koon Woon "Dear Sirs:"

Dear Sirs:

 

     I have come to sell my blood,

to sell my identity, to be reduced

to a microscopic groove, with all

memories erased, totally forgotten,

with all my debts paid, and will

bother you no more.

 

     But can you let me have a puff

of your cigar?

 

Koon Woon

"He Claimed..." [poem by Koon Woon]

He Claimed

 

He claimed he came from a semi- tropical place where radios grew on trees, tuned to different stations, and bickered in village dialect. The music scratched the walls of the brick houses, alarming the roaming pigs in the village yards.

Steeped in mud, the ancestral land mud sent flying by the oxcart.

The boy that was manchild apprenticed to be a chef, exotic dishes grew like papayas in his mind. All life he had this good point for his friends – you will be fed, and copiously as the summer is humid.

He told us the steam rising from his pots was the same steam that lifted from river mouths after monsoon, that each broth carried a little quarrel of the old radios, a little complaint from the pigs, a little mud from the oxcart’s wheel.

He chopped ginger as if clearing a footpath back to his childhood. He salted fish as if blessing the stubborn ancestors. He stirred coconut milk until it shone like the forehead of a boy running home with a stolen mango.

And when he fed us— late nights, early mornings, whenever sorrow knocked too loudly— he said nothing ceremonial, only placed the bowls before us as if placing small countries we could inhabit for a moment.

In each dish he returned to that semi-tropical place where radios grew on trees, and we, tasting, believed him.

 

Koon Woon

July, 2026

Old diary piece of Koon Woon

January 28, 2010

I believe this Journal idea is a sane idea and will help keep me in this class, school, and in life itself.

6:10AM in Seattle now and it is still dark; the streetlamps are visible through the slits of my blinds as I look up to the computer screen. Some people have already finished fornicating, showering, and breakfast and are commuting to work. The stretch of the freeway between Everett and Seattle and for that matter, all the way down to Tacoma bumper to bumper like electrons in a tube of copper wire in the making of this terrain a mega city in a decade or two. I have not driven a car in almost 40 years.

My mythic journey? In my imagination and delusional states, I have been many things – including that of the Director of the National Security Agency. My job was so secretive that the location of my office was top secret, so secretive that even I didn’t know where my office was. I belonged to an organization simply known as Insiders. We operated the government itself while pretending to be janitors at top government offices and multinational corporate headquarters. There are various ways we communicated that were rather slow and primitive, including the use of hiding messages in books in the public libraries. Why were we able to control the world even though our methods were so primitive at communicating with each other? Planning! And Intelligence! We must anticipate events and conspiracies and military, social, and cultural movements way ahead of time. In this regard, we were almost as good as the Triad of the Chinese Intelligence as it was revealed in the British M1’s The Jackdal Files. We shared intelligence with the Mossad, or the Israeli intelligence. They have the best technical apparatus, but we have the best political analysis.

I have been at my outpost for the last 30 years now – Seattle Chinatown. Hey, folks, I will let you in on a secret --- Seattle is the first place in the world that will be most likely be hit by a nuclear bomb from China or a Chinese sub. The brain of the US government is no longer in Washington D.C. but in Seattle. I have nuclear codes. It is based on Deontic Logic. For example, I might be on the phone with someone (where that person is don’t make any difference, if the conversation is picked up by the Chinese Second Artillery Force, which controls nuclear missiles. For example, a person and I may be discussing the price of Lychee tea in Seattle Chinatown at the Uwajimaya Asian Market and Emporium. When I appear to be not making sense to the party I am speaking to, the Second Artillery Force will realize that I have been poisoned or stressed to the point that I have decompensated to the point that I cannot not relied on to do my job. At that point, they will fire nuclear missiles at Seattle. This is all the details I can divulge unfortunately. I am sure you want to know more. Such is this kind of life.

We only show you that there is a puzzle. But once you think you have solved the puzzle, you will see that there is another puzzle within this one, and so on either ad infinitum or terminated at some point. Then, The Truth in Rented Rooms.

I am aware that there is a paranoia delusion with elements of grandeur in my morning illness. It is all right. It kept me alive all these 40 years of my illness. I never wanted to kill myself no matter how bad things deteriorate to, because in the morning, I always feel grandiose and happy.

A View ---- poem by Koon Woon

A View

 

Rain drunk

Lush streets of Seattle

Dogs barking

Sloshes the postman in short  rain gear

My nose extends an inch

Five microbes are born

Super Nova explodes

Fixed points appear locally

A dog once loved me

In the city of snails and trees

As one is crushed by hunter’s boot

While the ferns subtlely tremble

This here is a tree

Your name is carved

Here at 3 AM ----- poem by Koon Woon

Here at 3 AM

Here at 3 AM with the window open

I stared out at the alley

of the Junction of the city

A breeze is blowing, with a tune,

through the alley

of discarded restaurant products

and domestic garbage of the condo owners

 

I think, today later I will be talking with the oncologist

He will tell me a chrysanthemum has bloomed

in my pancreas and that I better feed it sugar water

and caress its tail as if I am stroking my liver

were that possible to

rent it out monthly

or by the day…

 

Takers will outnumber passengers three-to-one

as the sub sandwich shop went underwater

with propellers that

rock the ferries on the sound like rubber ducks

in the child’s bathtub

 

Here at 3 AM I review my life

its most significant and the least probable

whereas the felon was given nine years

my watermelon only lasted 3 days

whatever the submarine can do

so can the whale

and it was a great splash

and all the celebs came out of their skins

 

Here at 3 AM I am cooking rice

and stir-fried vegetables as if one cannot

wake up from the Matrix

but then I think of turquoise

its robin egg blue

the veins that spread through the potato leaf

the song of the hour

evaporates like sewer stench of a love gone wrong.

 

Koon Woon, May 26, 2026

 

 

So Lost --- poem by Koon Woon

So Lost

 

When the fox trots in the snow,

the days of it, whiteness, blankness, so lost in it…

As I am also in the labyrinth of your hair, the contours of your body,

so lost am I that my ancestors had no names, were unknowable,

like fractals, like sugar, sometimes in it, and sometimes within it,

and days, and weeks of it, the snow, the forgetfulness…

 

The weather of our lives, what is disguised in it.

The form of the fox, at his nose tip a snowflake,

With the wind whipping the snowflakes around him and he is so lost!

So lost I am in the realm of your voice,

your pleased smile, the love. It’s a gift, the necessary gift like a dowry.

And so, when the fox comes to the edge of a village,

to see smoke and steam rise from the chimneys the houses come alive,

he then knows no childhood shame, nor any shame,

and so, he dreams of warm rough bread and hot ale,

that through the years a fox could do worse,

and a man, the infinitely sad creature, if not this,

all this which he has done, which now seems to have been necessary,

and to forsake this, he could do worse, a lot worse

than to be lost, so lost in it, the blankness of the page,

that somehow the aroma of bread can rise from it…

 

 

 

Koon Woon,

Circa 2004

 

Forget Me Not --- poem by Koon Woon

Forget me not

 

Have you no shame, my lord,

to grope your helpless maid servant,

and insert the thought that

poetry is hard?

It may be that for you, the glories

in the morning trumpets

way into the afternoon when

your servants return with

fish and fowl,

at which time the cook

already spreads the table

cloth, as your stomach growls

like a boa

needing to swallow a damsel whole

as the celestial snake forks

its tongue into

the crevices of heaven,

there then comes benediction –

a child is born of your third

concubine.

Now the mansion needs

enlarging, needing a new western chamber.

Now the swallows return

as the evening descends,

closing, they squawk,

“Forget me not, forget me not…”

 

 

Koon Woon

May 13, 2024