Goodbye, Korea.

August 11 2006.

Goodbye Korea with your fish smelling markets and flies eating watermelon.

Goodbye to your old brown women squatted in front of roots and vegetables, scraping the bark off with thin little knives.

goodbye to your bare feet on styrofoam box tops,

goodbye your wrinkled faces and bright white smiles.

Goodbye korea with your desert sun over rice fields

how's it happen that the land is so baked hard and still so green, such loud cicadas, big mosquitos.

Goodbye to your land and rolling hills and lovely rivers.

Goodbye to the big white birds at hazy sunset.

Goodbye Korea with your famous warmth, your beautiful tall girls, your strong handsome men.

Goodbye grains of rice in the color of every stone

and the lovely buddhist relics and the churches of today

like magpies in every city

roosting their red neon crosses on all the streetcorners and back alleys.

You smelled like sewage, Korea, your stairwells were full of beggars

you were loud on the highways and your trucks shook the sidewalks.

I'll miss your old men because they don't look kind

their gaze looks angry and powerful like tigers

but I wasn't afraid because Korea

your young men were kind and I know the old men

are just them grown old

having seen the bloody hell of war and times of poverty.

goodbye Korea

to all your imperfections, your public displays of unsightly emotions,

goodbye to your pride and your extinct empires

goodbye to your museums that hate Japan and love the Koreans of 2000 years ago.

Goodbye to your neon, your subway trinket vendors

your take-a-chance water.

Goodbye to your kitchy 50's style

to your coiffed, high heeled ladies

goodbye your boy soldiers in camoflage everywhere

goodbye your soft language that sounds like calm water

goodbye your spicy food and your unexpectedly kind welcome.

If I didn't know better

I'd say I met you before, some long ago day

when you were the center of the world.

If I didn't know I'd say everyone came from here

that your dirty streets and noise were the mother of us all.

If I didn't have this life already laid before me I'd keep you for my own,

and I'd stay and toil with you and laugh and

stand with you in the dawn and through the day until midnight.

Goodbye Korea,

that somehow I've loved and somehow known

though I hardly saw you, I couldn't have really

but I did.

Korea you're bold and brave

and I'll keep thinking of you

and maybe someday I'll come back to fill in the blanks

of what I haven't seen

you noble country,

touchable country

Goodbye, Korea.