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Thet Wai Poem
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?
Copyright © Thet Wai | Year Posted 2026
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Details |
Thet Wai Poem
This boy
My son.
I used to feel
that he never listened to me,
always going against me.
This boy
was one of my biggest problems.
The machinery inside him
was like the latest EFI system
once I took it apart,
I wouldn't know how to put it back together.
Still, I could never throw him away
a glistening, greasy chunk of meat
covered in sand.
A termite,
perhaps,
for whom I traded
my own dreams
for his future.
Then my grandson said,
Grandpa, you don't understand anything.
Look here.
Don't worry.
I'll explain it to you.
That boy—my son
even complained
that his own son
was getting on his nerves.
But my grandson
he is just like
the way I was when I was young.
I find myself
drifting along with his imagination,
wandering through
the little worlds inside his head.
And sometimes,
I even find myself amazed
at my own son
because somehow,
my grandson
is even more lovable
than his father.
Copyright © Thet Wai | Year Posted 2026
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Details |
Thet Wai Poem
The three hands of the clock
stand at ninety degrees.
My roots are on the couch,
my eyes turn toward
the approaching feet,
my ears toward the wrist turning
the key in the door,
the smell of vodka slipping
into my nose.
When a lucky break falls
right into my lap,
I need no lawyer,
I know nothing of the law.
I pull half a body close
and lay it crosswise across the bed.
Geckos, spiders, cockroaches, bedbugs, cats —
I don't bother counting them,
nor the table lamp,
the curtains, the bookshelf.
All the sourness in my mind,
I kick more than a dozen times
straight into the goal,
and a little
Zuu... escapes my lips.
......................................
One more calendar page
belonging to an animal—
I treat
it like an animal would.
It's
easy, easy.
Copyright © Thet Wai | Year Posted 2026
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