if it were untrue, I might have been
less mad; I am the best of drivers
tiger mother, paper tiger, full
of slant, piss and vinegar
that occasion of our first big fight,
he connoted with a touch too much
self-assurance, tossing out judgment
like a pair of wooden half moons
clamoring across a temple floor, divining
the silence of a question that no one ever
asked, friends and professionals lack
sound counsel because bias, no clues
to be found stuffed inside the metal
drawers of a Taoist shrine or
the images embedded within
a card drawn from the Ryder deck
just another kind of knowledge
to be cultivated “out there,”
a feeling akin at times, to haunting;
I have looked upon my shadow,
argued with the ancestors,
peeling back the edges of my own heart
to show them and me both what’s inside
