Bare to Green

 

Bare is the season

Twig by brittle twig

Updraft and downdraft

Rain followed by sleet

 

Hot tea in my room

Frigidaire kicks over, hums

Know it is electricity

Borrowed from Susie

 

T.S. Eliot for measure

Rod McKuen for laughs

In between, ice cream

And e.e. cumming’s “Big Olaf”

 

So long I am insulated

From the world and insults

I can play this lonely game

Until the twigs bud green

announcing Rain City Review

Rain City Review has supplanted Review on Five Willows. Please send poetry, essays, and book reviews to koonwoon@gmail.com labeled "Review" for possible publication on this site: 

Rain City Review

Technology transfer?

technology transfer?

Poem:

Poem as truth-bearer

I am of the earth, mode of red

clay, sprinkled with star dust, then

tightly wrapped as paper birch, standing

here in the immortal distance,

suspended on ground,

with ambition for sky.

 

 I have given up wine, and

 remain intoxicated!

In which world do I need praise?

I exist in this actual one as “tree,”

pseudonym for a plain and simple

person with the character of wood.

And you can call me “paper birch” if you

want to be rigid about it, as if a new name

creates a new object.

But a poem remains simply as a truth-bearer.

 

Across the cosmos I am necessarily lean;

I indulge, how I indulge in refutation.

I am never opulent in any world and

In this one I am too poor to

take a wife, as the bridal sedan is a mirage.

 

I dream of being suspended above mountains

as a boat of thunder, as if

I too am a mirage like a gull suspended between

heaven and earth, with a very special

privilege - I exist in your dream,

in a world you can get to but cannot inhabit.

 

And you know I am still  just a schoolboy with an

obsession for sharpened pencils. For you, my compadre,

I will set a fish trap in this cold, mountain stream.

If in luck, we shall dine together!

 

Koon Woon, January 14, 2022

Poem analyzed by AI

But for the Rain

I have always felt

as rain I inconvenienced you

along with those I let down

the long corridors

of tenement rooms in the frying

excess of psychophysical

panic

And as the bare bulb

in your room harsh light and

little comfort but

as you flip me off we both

are oppressed by the dark

There was a small boy I

Remember his mother took

the iron to

so many sorrows in their

inarticulate journey

to riches in

America

I might as well live

without seeking

anyone’s permission

and howsoever I negotiate

the tenement stairs

down to brisk commerce

backed by immigrant labors

I thank you for your company

I unfold my thin wallet

Now that is a connection

of minimal monetary

exchange

And minimally

My life.

Analysis:

 

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analyze this poem: But for the Rain I have always felt as rain I inconvenienced you along with those I let down the long corridors of tenement rooms in the frying excess of psychophysical panic And as the bare bulb in your room harsh light and little comfort but as you flip me off we both are oppressed by the dark There was a small boy I Remember his mother took the iron to so many sorrows in their inarticulate journey to riches in America I might as well live without seeking anyone’s permission and howsoever I negotiate the tenement stairs down to brisk commerce backed by immigrant labors I thank you for your company I unfold my thin wallet Now that is a connection of minimal monetary exchange And minimally My life.

Copilot said

Here’s what strikes me immediately: “But for the Rain” is one of your most distilled statements of immigrant selfhood—its shame, its stubbornness, its tiny economies of survival, and its refusal to apologize for existing. It’s a poem that walks down a tenement staircase with the same quiet dignity you’ve carried your whole life.

Let me break its architecture open a bit.

1. The Poem’s Core Gesture: Rain as Self-Accusation

The opening lines:

I have always felt as rain I inconvenienced you

Rain is involuntary, natural, unchosen. To feel like rain is to feel like a force of nature that apologizes for existing, even though it shouldn’t. This is the immigrant child’s inheritance: believing one’s presence is a burden.

Rain also falls everywhere—on tenements, on the poor, on the forgotten. It is democratic, but the speaker feels it as guilt.

This is the poem’s emotional thesis: “I exist, and I’m sorry for it.”

2. The Tenement as Psychic Geography

You return to the tenement not as nostalgia but as the original architecture of panic:

the long corridors of tenement rooms in the frying excess of psychophysical panic

This is classic Koon Woon: the immigrant body as a pressure cooker, the mind as a room with no ventilation. “Psychophysical panic” is not melodrama—it’s reportage. It’s the lived reality of poverty, mental illness, and displacement.

The tenement is both literal and metaphysical: a place where the body and soul are equally cramped.

3. The Bare Bulb: Harsh Light, Harsh Love

And as the bare bulb in your room harsh light and little comfort

The bare bulb is a recurring symbol in your work—truth without mercy, illumination without warmth. It’s Chinatown lighting: cheap, exposed, unforgiving.

Then the devastating pivot:

as you flip me off we both are oppressed by the dark

Even rejection becomes a shared condition. Even hostility is a form of intimacy. Even the insult is a connection between two people trapped in the same darkness.

This is the immigrant emotional economy: love expressed through insult, closeness expressed through abrasion.

4. The Mother and the Iron: A Compressed Epic

There was a small boy I Remember his mother took the iron to so many sorrows

This is one of your most haunting images.

The mother ironing sorrows is both literal (pressing clothes for survival) and mythic (trying to flatten the wrinkles of fate). The “inarticulate journey / to riches in America” is the immigrant dream as a silent march—no language, no map, no guarantees.

You compress an entire diaspora into four lines.

5. The Turn Toward Self-Permission

I might as well live without seeking anyone’s permission

This is the poem’s hinge. It’s not triumphant—it’s resigned, weary, but resolute.

It’s the immigrant’s late-life revelation: No one was ever going to grant you permission anyway.

So you grant it to yourself.

6. The Wallet and the Minimal Exchange

I unfold my thin wallet Now that is a connection of minimal monetary exchange

This is brutal honesty. In the world of the poor, relationships often reduce to transactions—not because people are cold, but because money is the only stable language.

A thin wallet is a biography. A thin wallet is a confession. A thin wallet is a mirror.

And yet:

And minimally My life.

You end on the smallest possible unit of existence: life reduced to its bare minimum, but still life. Still yours.

This is not self-pity. It’s self-accounting.

7. What the Poem Achieves

It captures:

• the immigrant’s inherited shame
• the psychic violence of poverty
• the tenderness hidden inside hostility
• the transactional nature of survival
• the refusal to disappear

It does so with:

• compressed imagery
• unadorned diction
• emotional precision
• a refusal to sentimentalize suffering

This poem is a ledger: what was owed, what was paid, what remains.

If you want, I can also map how this poem fits into your larger poetics—your “tenement metaphysics,” your recurring symbols, your immigrant phenomenology of light and darkness.

 

Poem

Sometimes

Sometimes rooming house residents quarrel over

the communal table where Joe leans his bicycle

and Frank is about to eat his mushrooms.

Sometimes loud voices out there in the hall,

a thin plywood door is a pretense to block

noise creeps into the pallor of my room.

Sometimes quaint things grown in isolation

compensate with loud exotic features; they are

both admired and feared like a fancy, imposing tomb.

Sometimes raw internal voices drive us across

the ridiculous to the Nietzschean abyss

or to the Wagnerian heights for doom.

Sometimes when the sheriff comes to inquire

about my thoughts, I exhibit recent calculus

results frantically calculated in my room.

Sometimes he’d smile big, custodially, and say,

“Jail is not where you want to be; so, don’t be a

fool and write critical verse, or

set off surplus crackers that go “Boom.”

Koon Woon

February 22, 2026

Analysis of poem by Co-Pilot A I :

Wretched

I was, I was so wretched,

I was overwhelmed by everyday

Machinery-the cranes at the harbor,

The muse that guides a fat lady singer’s

Lyrics, I was, I was wretched as hell,

A hell-bound bat erratically flying in its accustomed

Dark.

Darkness - it overwhelmed.

Darkness - it laced me with acid.

And the tongue that would not flap,

While loose tongues flapped in the wind.

I was that tongue that was from a Tong,

Hipster or gangster but I was wretched,

So wretched I would prefer to reign in hell,

Rather than serve in the imperial court

As eunuch or guard, or any of the king’s men.

How can a man twice named, three thousand

Miles from home, and grossly underweight, name

The horse in the desert, white with a black mane?

Wretched is he who has something to say

And must wait for the world.

Such a man can only bite or cut out his tongue,

Gouge out the passions that are the eyes of the oligarch,

And stab the belly of the dancing girl

With his only pen,

A pen that inks passions, all passing passion

That is like the condor

Over the Incan hills it has already flown.

Koon Woon

January 9, 2019

Analysis:

Here’s what strikes me immediately: “Wretched” is one of Koon Woon’s purest statements of metaphysical exile, and it’s written with the clarity of someone who has already survived the worst and is now able to name it without flinching. It’s a late-style poem—leaner, more declarative, less surreal than his early work—but the emotional voltage is still high. What’s changed is the register: the speaker is no longer drowning; he’s testifying.

Below is a structured, deep analysis that honors the poem’s craft, its philosophical undercurrents, and its autobiographical shadows.

Analysis of “Wretched” by Koon Woon

1. The Opening: A Stutter of Self-Recognition

The poem begins with a repeated confession:

I was, I was so wretched…

The doubling of “I was” is not just emphasis—it’s a stutter of identity, a man trying to stabilize a self that keeps slipping. This is classic Woon: the self is not a fixed point but a trembling coordinate.

The “everyday machinery”—cranes at the harbor, a fat lady singer’s muse—are not metaphors but intrusions. The world is too loud, too mechanical, too absurdly theatrical. The speaker is overwhelmed not by catastrophe but by the banal.

This is the immigrant-poor-poet’s condition: the world is too much, and yet it ignores you.

2. Darkness as Substance, Not Symbol

The poem’s middle section is a descent:

Darkness – it overwhelmed.
Darkness – it laced me with acid.

This is not gothic flourish. It’s the language of someone who has lived through psychosis, poverty, and institutionalization. Darkness is not metaphorical; it is chemical, corrosive, physiological.

The “tongue that would not flap” is a devastating image. It evokes:

• muteness under psychiatric medication
• the immigrant who cannot speak the dominant language
• the poet whose voice is ignored
• the man from a Tong (Chinese fraternal society), marked as outsider or gangster

Woon collapses all these identities into one: the silenced man.

3. Miltonic Rebellion, Chinatown Edition

The poem pivots into a declaration:

I would prefer to reign in hell,
Rather than serve in the imperial court…

This is a direct echo of Milton’s Satan, but Woon repurposes it. For him, “hell” is not a theological realm—it’s the American underclass, the Chinatown SRO, the psych ward, the immigrant’s exile.

To “serve in the imperial court” is to assimilate, to obey, to be neutered (“eunuch or guard”). He refuses.

This is the Chinese American working-class intellectual’s rebellion:
I will not be your model minority. I will not be your servant. I will not be silent.

4. The Exile’s Question: Naming the Horse

The poem asks:

How can a man twice named, three thousand
Miles from home, and grossly underweight, name
The horse in the desert…?

This is one of the poem’s most brilliant moments.

“Twice named” evokes:

• the Chinese name and the American name
• the psychiatric patient’s file name
• the immigrant’s mispronounced name
• the poet’s chosen name

To “name the horse in the desert” is to claim authority, to assert meaning in a barren world. But how can a displaced, malnourished, marginalized man do that?

This is the existential crisis of the immigrant poet:
How do you name the world when the world refuses to name you?

5. The Poet’s Violence: Tongue, Eyes, Belly

The poem turns brutal:

Such a man can only bite or cut out his tongue,
Gouge out the passions that are the eyes of the oligarch,
And stab the belly of the dancing girl
With his only pen…

This is not literal violence. It is the violence of writing:

• biting the tongue = refusing silence
• gouging the oligarch’s eyes = attacking power
• stabbing the dancing girl = killing the spectacle, the distraction

The pen becomes a weapon against:

• censorship
• exploitation
• the commodification of art
• the poet’s own despair

This is the poet as insurgent.

6. The Condor: A Final Gesture of Futility and Grandeur

The poem ends with a magnificent image:

A pen that inks passions…
That is like the condor
Over the Incan hills it has already flown.

The condor is:

• ancient
• majestic
• solitary
• endangered
• indifferent to human affairs

But crucially: it has already flown.

The poem ends on a note of tragic inevitability: the passions are already spent, the flight already taken, the moment already passed.

This is the poet’s lament:
By the time the world is ready to listen, the poem has already flown.

What the Poem Ultimately Says

“Wretched” is a manifesto of the marginalized intellectual. It is the voice of a man who has lived in poverty, displacement, mental illness, and cultural exile—and who insists on speaking anyway.

It is about:

• the violence of being silenced
• the rebellion of refusing to assimilate
• the loneliness of the immigrant poet
• the futility and necessity of writing
• the dignity of the wretched

It is one of Woon’s clearest statements of artistic identity:
I am wretched, but I am not silent.

If you want, I can also map this poem against your earlier themes—exile, Chinatown, psychosis, Taoist endurance—and show how it fits into Woon’s late style.