Daehangno

The cleaning out of the crawl space continues to provide trips down memory lane.  Yesterday it was this poster from my time in Korea.  It is from an area in Seoul known as Dae-hang-no or “University Street”.  It was (is) a popular student hang out spot when I was there in the early 90’s that included oodles of coffee shops, bars, food stands, and performance venues.   

On the weekends the main street down the center of Dae-hang-no would be shut down to traffic and young people would congregate in groups on the sidewalks or the street.  Some groups would have someone playing a guitar.  Others would be playing Jang-gi (“Korean chess”) or just talking and laughing over some KFC.  It had a very youthful vibe, like a commons area at a college or a huge tailgate party.

Speaking of KFC, this American fast food chain was wildly popular there.  The signs for it only ever said “KFC” because “Kentucky Fried Chicken” was too much of a mouthful for Korean speakers and it was marketed accordingly.  It was an easy landmark for an American to find and where I agreed to rendezvous with Korean friends in those days before smart phones.  It was not uncommon for someone to be an hour or more late for a meeting of this type which spoke to the problems of getting around in a city that constituted a quarter of the population of the entire country, though some Korean friends confided that there was a cultural component to it as well.  It required a lot of patience and a degree of faith to continue to wait for someone for that long and not give up!

It was the place that I learned that rice wine served in clay pots was not something I should imbibe.

Interestingly enough, it was also a place for student protests.  I remember on one occasion I was with Korean friends when a boisterous group of protesters came down the street with banners.  It piqued my curiosity, but my friends quickly spirited me into the closest bar to get me off the street.  I could only assume it was a protest that involved being disgruntled about foreign (read: American) interference in Korean autonomy and governance.   In a kind of surreal juxtaposition, the young people in the bar picked up on what was going on and they began joking with me to set me at ease and let me know that I was not unwelcome there.  It was a great example of my experience of Koreans as polite, humble, and selfless the two and a half years I spent living there, first as an American soldier and then as a civilian doing some post-college traveling.

So, it was during one of my many visits there with Korean friends that I came across this poster in an alley that paralleled the main drag.  There were tons of them taped to the walls and buildings along that stretch and I fancied that I wanted one and surmised it would not be missed, so I pulled one down and rolled it up as a prize.  On this “Les Mis” poster there are words in English disguised as Korean words.  By this I mean that the written Korean language, known as “Hangul”, is phonetic and foreign words can be transliterated into it.  This differs from Chinese which uses glyphs that cannot be sounded out phonetically.  

Koreans are very proud of this unique alphabet and their scholar-king Sejong the Great who developed it in the 15^th century to give Koreans an alphabet specific to their spoken language and not just a borrowing of the Chinese glyphs.  I was told by a Korean student who frequented my English language class that King Sejong used the shapes from a traditional sliding door to design the letters.  After I’d learned the alphabet and its pronunciation I was able to navigate much more easily by reading signs and learning some rudimentary words and phrases.

A game I liked to play while traveling by train, bus, or subway was to identify all the English words that had been transliterated into Hangul on signs and billboards.  With some practice I could find them quickly as they had a peculiar unKorean-like form despite being in Hangul.  On the poster just to the left of the large “L” of Les Miserables in a small blue box is just such a word.  The letters are two to four per grouping which put side by side constitute a word.  In the blue box there are three groupings (뮤 지 컬) making up an English word, the first pronounced “myoo”, the second “jee”, and the last one “kol” which when pronounced all together sounds something like “musical”.  This experience came in handy recently when my daughter befriended a Korean-American girl in her class.  I showed her how to write her name in Hangul so she could share it with her friend.

When I returned to Korea the second time around after a year’s absence I learned that they no longer shut down the street in Dae-hang-no on the weekends which left me feeling sad and like something important had been lost.

***

The Winds of Olympic Park

서울 올림픽 공원

The wind whipped soundly 

on the high grass covered hills 

of Seoul’s Olympic Park.

I felt I could fly, or at least

run, jump, and tumble, leaving the 

ground for a moment or even more.

It is hard to explain as it had 

a dream-like quality bordering

on psychosis, but there it is.

I could have stayed there with her

under the sun and stars until the plane 

came to take me back home.

But now it is only a memory 

in a poem that makes me wonder

if life is but a cycle of reveries. 

***

Planet Poppyseed

Like an Apollo 

moon shot

I rocket to work

leaving the 

gravitational pull

of Planet Poppyseed.

The time 

spent away

is an interminable

weightlessness 

becoming 

wistfulness

for the time

of reuniting

with the

celestial sweetness

that is my

little girl.

***

Loser

I found it in the library’s culled CD stack and slid a dollar bill into the slot of the wooden collection box on the wall to claim it as my own.  It was a purely nostalgic purchase tied to the first song listed on the back of the case, “Loser” by Beck.  The album came out in 1994, the year I graduated from college and left with a friend to drive to his home on Staten Island where we spent a few days taking ferry-driven jaunts over to Manhattan before I flew out solo from Newark to explore Europe for the summer.  

A quarter century has passed since that trip and I am now less than a month away from turning fifty.  My hair is receding from the high tide mark of my 20’s and my beard is mottled with gray like dried moss on a beach.  I realize only now how surprisingly similar I looked back then to the picture of Beck on the back cover (see below): thin Caucasian male, long wavy hair nearly shoulder length, and a penchant for long sleeved t-shirts.  

***

I landed at Gatwick Airport outside of London with my Army surplus backpack full of power bars, a change of clothes, a book or two, and wearing my trusty pair of Birkenstock sandals.  The customs official was a young attractive female who looked me up and down as a straggly American washed up on the shores of her island.  Her presentation started out professional but quickly transitioned to curt when I was not playing the game right.  

“Where will you be staying?” She asked.

“Uh, all over I guess.”

“How long do you plan to stay?”

“Uh, I’m not sure.”  I wasn’t expecting these types of questions.  I was time and itinerary-free, not thinking that might be a problem.

“Where will you be leaving from?”

I seriously wasn’t stonewalling her, but she stopped after that question when it became clear I would simply be wondering throughout England and Europe with no plan of where I would go or when I would be planning to return to the United States.  She looked at me, looked at my passport, stamped it and handed it back to me with what might have been a kind of exasperated grin.  As the Bryan Adams song says, I was “young and wild and free.”

There was a week or two in London then Paris before I started to realize that Western Europe was draining my money too fast and so I got a bus ticket to Bratislava, Slovakia where my best friend from college, Shane, was working with a group of other college students to spread the gospel of free markets with some Jesus sprinkled on top for good measure.

During the month I spent there we visited a club or two to include one that was an old bunker burrowed into the base of a mountain, like a large cave with curved walls that likely served as an air raid shelter during the Communist era.  It was known as the “U Club” (the U pronounced like in “zoo”).  There was a live band and a middle-aged plainclothes policeman who was drunk and asking us if we were there selling drugs.  We had a hard time convincing him that we were there just to have fun.  We yelled back and forth over the music, half in English and half in what Slovak Shane could muster after having lived there for about a year.  He finally decided to leave us alone when he spied a very attractive young female on the dance floor who was gyrating in a kind of ecstasy with her eyes closed.  He sauntered off to dance with her despite the fact she was ignoring everyone around her.

Another person I remember from the U Club was a young lady who spent much of the night staggering around with a drink in hand, a Bohemian caricature trying to be the center of attention.  At some point she was lying on her back half on and half off the stage where the band was playing.  Her head and arms dangled upside down, like a rag doll tossed onto a countertop in danger of falling off.  We saw her again a week or two later in one of the city plazas, drunk and calling out for “vino!” always a young man watching out for her like a reluctant bodyguard.  Such a sad, lost soul.

And then there was “Charlie’s”, a club named after Charlie Chaplin that sported his likeness in a large black and white mural over the entrance.  It was night and there were a lot of people milling around the front of the building to include a young man named Boris.  Boris was from Poland, prematurely balding, and eager to rub shoulders with us American expats (well at least my friend was an expat.  I was more of an interloper).  He brought us into his confidence and talked about how dangerous it was these days in Eastern Europe with the fall of the iron curtain.  To emphasize his point he waved us in closer in a kind of conspiratorial manner and pulled his jacket back to reveal a revolver tucked into his pants.  Shane and I exchanged a brief look of alarm and quickly came up with an excuse as to why we had to leave, but Boris was not so easily dismissed.  He insisted we should meet up again and to placate him we agreed to a date, time, and place to hang out again.  With this we parted and disappeared into the crowd.

At some point we made our way into the club where the music was pumping so loud you had to yell at people to be heard.  Shane and I got separated briefly and when he found me again he had an Asian college student in tow.  He was pointing to her and yelling something that ended up being “she’s Korean!”  I’d spent two years in Korea and he thought this would be a great way to make a connection with an attractive stranger.  We put our heads close to each other and yelled out a conversation in which I learned she’d been adopted as a baby by a Swedish family.  She did not speak Korean nor had she visited Korea.  “I’m Swedish,” she said matter-of-factly.  I encouraged her to visit Korea for no other reason than I thought she should.  We did not “click” which I now realize was because I was trying to force her into a category that she didn’t really fit in to and so we melted back into the mayhem in opposite directions.

That’s when the song dropped.  It was “Loser” by Beck.  I instantly felt my head bobbing as I started hopping in place to that funky phat beat and a silly grin spread across my face.  My long wavy locks bounced and whipped as my head swung from side to side and my body spun.  It was a kind of abandon to lose myself in a song at a time when I was far from home and trying to find myself.  Self-consciousness fell away.  After all, I was a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me (Boris?).

Speaking of Boris, we did not meet him at the agreed upon rendezvous spot and some time later we were unfortunate enough to run into him again.  He was visibly upset and told us it was “not cool” to promise to meet him and then not show up.  I do not remember how we extricated ourselves from Boris a second time but I do remember it was exceedingly awkward.  It seems Boris was the loser and “you can’t get it right if you can’t relate” as the song says.

***

Now my balding head bobs in a nerdy Subaru with Loser bumping on the speakers while scenes of my small midwestern town slide by outside the windows.  Snow is in the forecast.

Bottom of a Well

At the bottom of a well

the circle of light above

looks small and moon-like.

I need a rocket ship for

rescue, but when that 

is not forthcoming

a friend will have to do,

and the humility to

accept the help offered.

***

Te Deum

The click of plastic CD cases 

sets a cadence for musical exploration

in the used CD shop on Kirkwood.

The novelty of digital sound is still 

a relatively new and exciting experience for

those who grew up on cassette tapes.

I am in the jazz section ploughing 

through some John Coltrane 

feeling a love supreme when

I suddenly come full stop on 

“Te Deum” somehow misplaced 

in this part of the shop.

It is my Russian friend who made 

high recommendation of Arvo Pärt

and the name itself has me intrigued.

I hurry home and pop it into the player.

The lush yet sparse music penetrates me

like an existential dagger.

It is like a small hole has appeared

in the fabric of space-time revealing the 

Kingdom that was, and is, and is to come,

Amen.

***

Couch in my Pocket

I want a couch in my pocket

that I can pull out whenever 

I need, cup it in my hands,

and with a few warm puffs

it expands to full size, poof.

No water needed just moist

air from deep inside my chest

that makes necessity of want

in a world that is too much.

Pardon me, I must lie down.

***

Grace is a Pale Blue Orb

Grace is a pale blue orb

offered by selfless hands,

received into an open heart.

Like the earth seen from the moon,

the depths of its beauty can 

only be imagined in part.

It is life, it is love, 

it is a death that frees one from dying,

passed from the Divine to us all

(parent to child)

but if that chain is broken by some terrible tragedy

it can still be found through the hole 

that has formed from our suffering.

***

The Library across the Street

He hangs out

on a bench 

at the library

with all his 

belongings

in a bag.

It’s not necessarily

good or bad

happy or sad

just an example

of a world

gone mad.

Be sure to 

say “hi” when

you pass by.

They’re people

just the same

as you and I.

***

The Reckoning of Now

When things have been rough 

(and they’ve been rough recently) 

I’ve had the tendency to escape 

in my mind to the past, to what 

I would consider happier times.  

Today it strikes me that this is 

a highly selective and greatly 

illusory process that  allows me 

to hide from myself...

my failings, 

my shortfalls, 

and pockets of downright dysfunction.  

Who can save us from ourselves?  

It’s like sharing a foxhole 

with an enemy combatant 

while the war rages all around.  

Can I look with pity on this man that is me?  

As much as I want to separate myself from him?  

Is this what it means to love one’s enemies?  

There is truly only the reckoning of now.

***

In Search of the Night Kastle

The feather lay half in and half out of shadow,

clean and dry, molted, not torn free or bloodied.

A sigh of relief escapes his cachectic form as he

wades forth through bands of light and dark.

It is soft and downy, smelling of melancholy,

promising a long awaited reunion of father and son.

His own wings had failed him long ago from disuse 

leaving him to wander on foot to find what he had lost.

The Night Kastle beckons as the place he’d left the boy 

young and wingless within its walls, a place of protection

against dangers both real and imagined in the  

slanted lands where only shadows grow.

The Distorted Image

Far from Home

The interplanetary locum tenens recruiter had really talked up Mars as a plum position for a working psychiatrist. “Lots of lonely people out there, Dr. Monk. Depression rates are high, not to mention a steady stream of trauma victims from the asteroid mining operations.”

Dr. Monk was seriously considering the offer.  Nothing had panned out for him on earth: a failed marriage, estranged from his kids, that indiscretion...  And Mars had the most infrastructure of all the hitherto inhabited planets from the outward expansion.

He was not really a nature guy anyhow, preferring the cold clean lines of metal and glass, plastic being about the most supple thing he could tolerate (there was plenty of that on Mars).  He was sure to be paid handsomely to self-exile from a crowded mother Earth.

The trip was made in suspended animation, dream-free, and therefore instantaneous.  Being a bit on the socially-averse side he was not one to venture out much and so the transition was a smooth one, from one hermetically sealed structure to another 50 million kilometers away.

Scrubbed air circulated pleasantly through the endless corridors smelling like absolutely nothing.  A deep hum permeated everything and made for a kind of calming white noise, but now that he was here something deep inside him sensed that he was far from home.