Long Wai Poems

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?