If You See Thet Wai, Tell Him
If you don't sleep
and eat at the right time
you tend to live a short life
you can do what you want,
but you also have to make
the people around you happy.
With smoke billowing
and cigarette after cigarette,
you fool—
you're hunting for diseases
not only for yourself,
but for everyone around you.
Hey, Thet Wai,
if you want to do
whatever you please,
then go live alone on the moon.
You have no impressive education
to make people admire you,
no respectable income
to earn people's respect,
and not even the gift of speaking
in a way everyone would like.
Just a man
stumbling over his own thoughts,
tripping himself up
and lying there.
A degree,
but no job.
Too ashamed to take this job,
too embarrassed to take that one.
So you sit over a cup of tea
until your ass goes numb,
sometimes shutting yourself
inside a room,
feeling as though
something is about to happen—
as though
one thing might happen,
or maybe two.
It's hard, Thet Wai.
Hard for people like you.
You treat writing poems,
writing words,
as though it were
some great responsibility
the world had handed you.
As though you're helping.
As though you're giving advice.
As though you're pointing things out.
As though you're offering comfort.
As though poetry itself
were some kind of medicine
for wounds.
Yet you're no use
to your friends.
You don't earn money
for your family.
The country
doesn't recognize you.
No one looks up to you.
You're hardly famous at all.
And yet you keep
making something out of the fact
that you can barely write
these little poems—
a man forever
trying to make it seem
like it amounts to something.
If you don't make money,
we don't want to admire you.
That man—
that poet
they call **Thet Wai**—
if you see him,
tell him this:
How much
is one of your poems
really worth?
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