Some friendships are meant to be remembered, and some are easily forgotten. But then there are some friendships that have a way of inflicting themselves on you. They grasp you by your guilty obligations, your quiet frustrations. Private notions of loyalty and compassion degrade over time, varnished by a silenced eternity of stifled resentment. These are the kinds of friendships that plague you long after their logical conclusion. This is a form of friendship that I often wish I’d never known. For the rest of my life, I will be haunted by the ghost of a friend who refuses to die. He shot himself in the head like an asshole.

I never asked him to shoot himself in the head, and he never asked me if he could dump his collection of scribbles on me. He just woke up one morning and decided to do both of those things, and now I find myself inexorably linked to the most obnoxious corpse of a pest who ever wielded a pen. How’s that for a eulogy, Ben?

Until the day he died, I’ve endured Ben’s friendship for years. Now that he’s dead, it’s a little disconcerting to realize that not very much has changed. Ben is the one who shot himself, but here I remain, the walking dead, with a conspicuous bloody hole in my head. It offends the senses and dulls the sentiment. Just a bit. I am not him, but he is me.

Posted by KZ on 02/06/09

A common age and a common name, how low we bow
to common pains, the like mistakes
dictated by complacency, familiar trembling aches
decaying the root of reason, the tides of time sweeping
swooning plops ashore in granite rhythm
sea of the wincing stewards of change

Past we roll, oblivious to the bloody sky
on common grounds, a constant state
Unsteady peace, fear into pieces
ambassadors of nuclear rage
particles bursting apart in frenzied glee
shrapnel, rusty screws, ball bearings
indignance and human decency
the cries of righteous suicide
as we rely on steady orders from unflinching leaders
ordained by rite
by authority of warring deities

Fear not, child
The ashes are bequeathed to the meek

-Kevin Zing

Posted by KZ on 10/14/08

Define salvation. The mind immediately grasps for explanations of the metaphysical, recollections of the mystical, wisps of stardust and Divine refuse, ethereal trails of holy time, thoughts, visions, majestic myths. The Divine. We all have some joker in the sky to blame for our joys and our woes, existence of flesh, the theoretical residence of ghostly apparitions of self, the infamous soul. We exist to toil and amuse, and if the holy men are right, the allotted ratios are something we all have to decide in life.

Salvation implies distress, strained existence, discomfort and insistence to persist without so much as an explanation as to what we need to accomplish in our mortal state. The coil, they call it. Coil and recoil, life and death, it’s all the same meager sentiment, this jumbled mess. The debts we retain in life extend further than a grave or the confines of generations or decades, the waves of fate ever failing to respond to our devastation, our indignant rage, the demands and indictments in favor of explanation, justification for indiscriminate destruction, incessant hate. Humanity has been set ablaze, and who in God’s name are we expecting to tend to the flames?

Salvation is change, a means of relief from intolerable heat, and moaning, indefinite need, greed for desire’s sake, the sake of revisions to escape the weight of lamentable lost purity. Salvation is the culmination of dreams, the subconscious growing with ever more contempt, yet each day we rely on those depths to keep us afloat, to live in the exclusion of savagery. Many fail. Yet those dreams drive us forward, mere vessels of tendons, bones, water, delicate flesh, and self-transcending selves in need of a destination worth attaining, a justification for this retched state in which we toil and grieve and exist on the insistence of fear. Such is life, and such is us. Salvation can’t seem to come soon enough.

Posted by KZ on 08/28/06

Stories never begin with “Once upon a time” anymore. I imagine there must have been a time when “Once upon a time” was the noblest salutation a storyteller could say to preface his tales. No longer, I guess. Compulsion urges us for constant change — and so we bend a little each time so that our constructions take on slightly unfamiliar shapes. There’s no nobility to be found in tradition these days, because the familiar is crude, and woefully cliché.

Once upon a time, a friend of mine died. He never quite learned just how to bend. He was a writer, something like me. They found him hunched in his chair with an exit wound shattering the calm of his right temple. He was left-handed. On the desk in front of him laid a pen and an empty page, haphazardly soiled by blood and mental debris.

Inspiration once flowed through him so naturally, but he could never commit his thoughts to language on an open page. Every sentence he ever wrote meant labored pain. He could always capture beginnings, but could never retain a satisfying end. Colloquialism felt too familiar, and the grandiose often felt strained. He figured, by the end, not a single original thought in the world remained.

Now he’s gone. Life motioned to bend him, and he chose instead to break. Once upon a time, my friend allowed himself to die. I wonder if he ever realized that his fear of the cyclical kept him running in place.

Posted by KZ on 04/17/06

Sooner than never
they change at each stage
they stage each arrangement
through fictional shapes

formed to fool
they play with words
as if nothing ever
disrupted
the stream of eternal monotony

You can’t change what you can’t name
so ignorance they teach us from an early age
dressing their lies with the bind that ties

explained genocide

-Kevin Zing

Posted by KZ on 01/20/05

Hands, they betray me like dissident fiends
disrupting
the gradual flow and how
they sting with each frosted touch
cold tips, those mocking digit spears
all comfort
shooting pains in veins inflamed
knuckles reeling
protruding
in rhythmic vibraphone time
like a rippling wave through a crooked spine.

-Kevin Zing

Posted by KZ on 10/25/04

I’ve been using the same blog description from the very start: “Another would-be poet lost amid a sea of numbers.” When I first came up with it, I was still a junior accounting major who would have preferred to have majored in English instead. But being the son of Asian parents, I felt compelled to make more pragmatic choice. My strength is language and analytical reasoning, not numbers. I can summarize appropriately, turn a phrase every now and then, and I can offer passable analysis of a written work if you give me time. But when you throw a bunch of numbers at me and tell me to sort them out, I feel like a dyslexic kid being forced to read aloud in his ESL class. Accounting is fairly number-intensive, which is where the whole “lost in numbers” bit came about.

Actually, that’s only half the explanation. Being the self-proclaimed literary type, I tried to infuse that dumb little blurb with two meanings. On one hand, it was about accounting. On the other hand, it was my attempt to say, “Look at me! I’m a poet. But since there’s so many wannabe poets in the world, I’ll acknowledge that fact before you can greet me with a yawn, thereby setting myself apart from the rest of them.” The funny thing is, neither of those sentiments is relevant any longer. Now that I’m done with that undergrad crap, I’ve basically been given free reign to pursue whatever I want to do. And about the poet aspirations, I’ll be honest—I hardly ever write any poetry these days. When I do actually write a poem, I work on it for a few painful weeks, look at the final product, and then I think to myself, “I sure hope the spirit of Allen Ginsberg isn’t reading over my shoulder at this particular moment.”

So, having said all that, I’m not sure if I want to do what I came here to do, which is to post a newly written poem of mine. I suppose I wanted to write you a few paragraphs’ worth of an apology before you actually got to reading it. Yes, I’m poisoning the well, subconsciously hoping to soften whatever blows of criticism that might be thrown my way. But you know what? If it sucks, then tell me so. Suggest how it could be fixed, if you think it needs fixing. And if you think the entire poem is a trite waste of breath, then uh, just do me a favor and politely go fuck yourself. No, I’m kidding. I know I’m treading way-too-familiar ground with this poem, which is what makes me so apprehensive about it. Okay, this train wreck of a confessional, self-conscious monologue must end now. Here it is, this “poet’s” latest work.

On the Verge of Living

I’ve often wondered if dead men dream
And if they do, for what unattainable thing
Do they hope for and long to find?
Sometimes, they tell me, you just shouldn’t dream
for it’s a useless sport, a silly game for the frivolous sort
in pursuit of far more life than one could ever hope to afford

But the dead, to them my thoughts keep turning
Lifeless men
buried far away from where their bodies lay
forever in constant motion
lie to themselves and dream of vital things
worldly sighs, oh sweet desirous life
how hunger sees to it that all will keep turning
the dead, to regularities keep returning
and how hunger compels them all to keep stirring
the dead, to regularities they’ll keep returning
so still they insist, never to dream
since there’s nothing more to life
than immediate need
No time for idle sports, no time for change
hoping for nothing more but advancing in place

And now here I stand, on the verge of living
guessing at all the things that dead men dream
I look towards life with no great sense of certainty
and I smile, unabashed and unafraid
in spite of the unforgiving immensity
and in spite of their good intentions
I turn a deaf ear to what dead men say
resolved to live so long as I’m living
and I will live as I continue to dream

Posted by KZ on 10/02/03

Go ahead and bleed your meaning away
may it seep in streams
and as it falls in bulbous beads
don’t you dare allow it to clot
for a scab would mean the death
of diminishing vision.

-Kevin Zing

Posted by KZ on 07/31/03