I wonder if I will ever get high again,
If the dying Chinese man engorged with bile
Is embarrassed that we can all see his swollen balls.

He must have felt the cancer growing in his liver like a cancer,
The ache like the squandered promise of the Chinese-American dream:
Medical profession to family to wealth to your American sons
straddling the language barrier just enough to understand
How much is lost in translation:
Graduate from medical school, choose between success and family,
Choose family, work two menial jobs, never see either.

I've come to associate the smell of my father,
Bitter, biting, and completely disharmonious,
An assault on sensibility with the quiet anticipation
of a death rattle.

I barely visited him in the hospital, I would rather
Smoke with friends, go to shows, be that quiet
Person lost in the music, lost in weed and thought,
Than be the quiet son with my quiet brother watching my desperate mom
fuss over my jaundiced dad.  I think

Of the years they slept in separate rooms on separate floors,
When they sometimes spent the night together
Did they fuck?  I have never seen a moment of tenderness between them.

I wonder if anyone else ever sees flashing lights: red, blue, blue, red
and feels the urge to confess,
To tell the officers: Smell that?  That's coming from me.  That's the good shit.
Search my bag.  I need something strong to cloud my head.  Tell my family
why I can't face them anymore: I've stolen away with the selfish intent to die.

I wonder if anyone else ever feels the urge to throw themselves into traffic.
Let someone else clean up the mess: your problem ends
at the point of intersection: let someone else find out what that means.

I steal coins from beneath the altar of the Buddha that sits atop the picture of my father,
Printed on a god-damn dinner plate of all things, frozen in a rictus of forced happiness.
I don't deserve to be happy.  I don't deserve nepenthe.
I don't deserve love and am afraid to ever try for it again.
I wish I could say "I haven't smoked in God knows how long but I've kept count."

My parents didn't raise me to be careless.
But my parents raised me carelessly.