Did Never Should Do

[Yejun]

Have you found someone else to curl up
Next to on an Osaka-bound Subway train?
Have you left the city for the country,
Or the country for a city, a town,
a village, a hut in Chiang Mai --
smoking opium with guitar-playing
emaciated Thai?
Have you died without an outcry
or hid from the tax collector --
Obdurate and insecure, or penniless,
Bahtless, wonless, enless?
Crawling to a final phone booth to call home,
Do you still think Alice Walker is good?
What do you do? Where do you live?
I should have married you but never did
And loved you, but I never did.

[Doreen Peri]

excellent poem, brad

really loved it!

(spellcheck bathless endless )

[still.trucking]

I liked it a lot too.

[hester_prynne]

Downright brilliant!
H

[Yejun]

Sorry for the delay.

Thanks to everybody for their kind comments.

While I suspect that Doreen already knows this, it occurs to me that others might not so here's a quick breakdown:

Baht--Thai money

Won--Korean money

En--Japanese money (the Y is dropped in Japanese)

Though of course I was hoping to trigger some of the associations that Doreen clearly sees.

Thanks again. It's been a rough couple of weeks.

[Doreen Peri]

sighh.. didn't even think of it ... just thought they were typos

should have known better

all the years I've known you, i know you are meticulous with your poetry... you'd never post a misspelled word, I don't think

shoulda realized it was an intentional play on words

duh

now i like the poem even more!

[Yejun]

Sure I have.

Being "meticulous" also means, at least for me, dealing with a kind of tunnel vision. You get so caught up on one thing that you forget how it interacts with everything else.

I deal with it by knowing that I can always change it and, sure enough, I usually do--just not always right away.

[Arcadia]

yeah, the risk of having the answers from the beggining, I guess. Great poem!