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

Pancreatic File of Koon Woon

Pancreatic File [BOF May 3, 2026]: 

 

The end is near. V is telling me that characters on Wagon Train are her sons. Television can give us another possible world to ponder, but it is an implausible world.

I still go see V everyday at the nursing home except the days I have chemo. I fear the chemo is no longer effective. This makes V and I have about the same timeline.

 

I got bad news last November. The chemo helped for a while, but now it looks like palliative care.

 

The question is “Now what?” Everything is accessible – memories, possible worlds, the actual world, and there is perfect knowledge as it characterizes the S 5 Modal System.

 

She said, “You can see the world through the eye of the needle.” She was a seamstress most of her life. The needle was her livelihood. And she was my grandmother who rubbed my forehead to fearless sleep. She spooned me cod liver oil, and her garden greens were loved and abounded.

 

At the Triple L

 

Snow drifts down

Settling in crotches of the birch

Temperate drop as the cab enters the compound

 

I found my way to Mr. Schuler’s office.

It was an austere room.

He peered over his glasses and motioned me to sit down.

This is a memory, when I was sick, but not as sick as I am today.

Mr. Schuler is not a literary figure; he was a colonel in the air force.

“I don’t think you will be here very long,” he said, “you can think your way through problems.”

Then he asked me if I had a will.

After the interview he called Roy to take me to my room in one of the cottages.

 

When I got there, I saw three small beds in the same room.

There was a clicking noise, sounded like Morse Code. But it was just the heater trying to come on.

It was a cold January with the biggest snow in 20 years, and the cab did not make it all the way to the compound when I arrived. I lugged my suitcase the rest of the way, weakly, as I was in the mental hospital for three months.

 

At the cottage, I heard noises from another room. I peeked into it. Three televisions were going simultaneously, and three motley fellows were engrossed in television life. They did not even see me.

Then I backed up and went by the alcove. There was a jigsaw puzzle in progress by some insomniac.

 

I decided to lie down. Soon I was asleep and dreamed that I was Dr. Zhivago in the coldest of Soviet winters.

 

Stan Burris woke me when he came into the room. He was dressed in a dirty corduroy overcoat and boots. He is the reason I am at Triple L.

 

I thought Stan was a spy from Canada when we were in the hospital.

 

He told me that this compound was a great place to roam in because of the land size. And it was peaceful. He did not tell me by peaceful, it means “half-dead.”

 

I thought he was my friend. He needed support only. And it took me another twenty years to realize that what he said about being a baby in an orphanage and was not held the first six months made him cold. Not in temperature but in lack of empathy.

 

I will be stuck with him for another twenty years. That was how difficult it was for the mentally ill to find a friend and companion. We are ghosts that live in isolated Gulags all over this beautiful land of America.

 

I was having a Buddhist dream. I was on the slender thread of the spider’s web as the King of Spiders spin a thread that reached from Heaven to Hell, where I was. I climbed up past the demarcations of the levels of Hell and was just about to reach the living earth, when my fellow hell mates started to climb on the slender thread. I was afraid their weight would break the thread. I tried kicking them to make them stay down. But I pulled on the thread so hard that it snapped and all of us fell back to Hell.

 

When I woke, I was not Dr. Zhivago nor someone who once pitied a spider in life. I was a felon of Hell. But I was in my room too, and Stan Burris was also there, reading NO EXIT by Paul-Paul Sartre.

 

I fed V a Haagen Daz ice cream slowly bit by bit with the chocolate covering flaking off and when she finished, she said she loved me. I had also eaten a bar and was concerned about too much sugar. Don’t know if it is true or not, but cancer feeds on sugar. But if it doesn’t make you sick immediately, life is too short not to enjoy this Danish invention that was really New York born.

 

Now we are drifting like snow into the crotches of the birch. It is damn cold, but at the nursing home it was eighty degrees. I washed V’s arms with a damp cloth and now it is obvious that she is fragile like mulberry leaves visited by silkworms.

 

And I am expanding this quiet moment into infinity, but when V coughed, I know time had elapsed.

 

Where are all the people in our lives? We see them on Zoom, some on TV, some in a huge ballroom when a dance could alter your life. I had no such luck. I did not even imagine love being freely given until I am nearly dead.

 

Love makes my small toe stir. I brushed V’s hair. She held my hand. The snow continues and the nursing home temperature unashamedly kept rising.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Negotiation --- a poem

Negotiation

Green, greener yet,

geometric yards and gardens,

span a field of white light morning,

 

up climbing, the familiar family scenes,

before morning passes into oblivion.

 

From the bus window, rain smeared, Lorca is

seen standing on Stockton and Vallejo, without

his saddle and hat,

 

negotiates with his first morning despair.

 

Houses with hedges,

the oak on the front lawn,

while the willow supplicates behind

the house,

 

I will be silent as the rainwater.

 

Dream on, compadre, as the white horses

with black manes,

 

come they to the edge of water,

finding a note in bottle, imperially scripted

by the Empress of China,

 

She said she will install her feeble son

on the golden throne.  

Isn’t this how the story goes…

 

-          Koon Woon, 4/25/26