If you stop dreaming, then you're just sleeping.

Image: Sai Kung Harbor - Politically part of HK, geographically part of Mainland China.

All this running around Asia has got my head spinning. People ask me if I will go home once I'm done with all this soul-searching. My usual reply is an involuntary cock of the head, facial features rearranging themselves into a confused snarl.

First of all, who said that I'm searching for my soul? Actually, I think I might have too much. So much that it drives me a little crazy. Literally. Secondly, if I were "soul-searching," why would I ever willingly stop? It's like saying that dreaming is only for sleeping. Well, I say, fuck that.

Thirdly? There's no thirdly. Just a Firstly and a secondly, but they were both doozies so I think I can get away with it. Anywho, the following is another attempt at being a writer. Enjoy!

I dwell too much in my head

So don't get offended if I seem offensive, I'm just

Searching for space between make-believe and nightmares

Searching for lonliness while engorging on emptiness

Creating faceless wraiths of shadows of inklings of people

As I sit on foreign toilets purging myself of diarrhea

Why can't creators create in the non-exotic

Stop looking for inspiration in blanched tentacles in crowded Hong Kong alleys

Sai Kung coffee shops lined with writers watching passers-by waiting for lessons

On how to be human

Singaporean bars filled with thirsty scholars guzzling down the dreams of starving artists

I walk and walk to see and see but I can't seem to make sense of it all

Why is it so hard to be natural

Forcing sagging stories into chiseled slabs of some

Hard stone quarried from some realistic setting captured by some metaphor with a moral

I sleep too little

Overflowing with ideas that never amount to much except for frustrating fits

Of insomnia

Of explanations

Of giving everything up to be someone else doing something else

All underneath the shadows of Philippine volcanoes sipping instant coffee

Blurring the lines between night and day possibly purposefully who knows

Who knew imagining could be so hard

Even in humid jungle heat

Especially in humid jungle heat

Unfamiliar mounds of earth covered with unfamiliar sounds of words I can't pronounce

Asking strangers in hostels if they can understand me when I say I'm Californian

Balinese cloves rising up in thick smoke sweetly calming bundled nerves

Trying to unravel plots that prove to be too simple or just non-existent

Like the lady bits of Thailand's lady boys

I talk to myself too much

And I call it research because well it is

To lose touch with reality to better convey reality is what we call sublime

Or at least I think it is

Think it aloud as I stroll through Portuguese Macau hunting for Europe in China

I'm too far fucked you see to make any more sense to sensible people

Mixing myth with history making men turn into trees because a limb is a limb

And I think I love puns way too much

And I worry what the critics at the New York Times will say even before I've written a single word

Because tiny island lizards make clicking sounds, chiding my too sultry nights

Filled with too much avoiding

Sitting in Semarang in the middle of mosquito swarms I wonder if dengue fever will help

Help with writer's block with vivid hallucinations

But I never get sick, just cough from diesel soot and cigarette smog

And don't you dare compare me to Eat, Pray, Love.

I want to give up too much