I might be mistaken
but you were the very first

(at least as I remember),

the one who would awaken

the child, underrehearsed,

as a repeat customer.


The twelve turns swung around 

me for the third time;

the damage by my own accord.

With my eyes kept to the ground,

these dirty hands of mine 

would be a blemish on her otherwise 

pristine record.


Since then, the decline 

in the quality of dates was evident

on either side of the tracks.
A shiny attractor at one time

soon became as inelegant
as another zombie lurking 

in the depths of my phone contacts.


That ghoul revived;
dead friends with benefits
and decorated with unseasonal flowers;
the shiny patch on her nose survived

and the black dress she still tightly fits

gleamed in the light 

of the setting sun’s golden hours.


All neat lines, sharp angles, 

and overlapping layers;
sliding like the glass elevators
inside the chromium tangles;
her face halted her betrayers;

tinged red like the clouds

and their orchestrators.

A moment of sudden uncertainty,
pursuing fame and profit,
wasn’t completely meaningless either;
the lowest rung is always so dirty.

And unable to stop it,

in the arranged dating marketplace,
at the hands of my deceiver.

Existing together somewhere 

beyond the family, outside the home,
the lawn turned from green to black, 

then orange under the light’s care,
cycling back through time’s blown;

the abrasions of the rainy season 

had marked the surface of the stack;


Brand new, or a decaying shell 

on the point of collapse,
the red pylons of the distant Yangpu Bridge
mapped out all the city’s positions well;

like two sticks of incense, perhaps,

glowing at each tip
and releasing all their smoky courage.


Illuminating everything that could see them 

and everything that could not,
she could have been an actor, 

or a time traveller (from way back) then;
sparks were cast down, sparkling hot

glittering waves that tumbled forth

and entrapped her.



Amber street lights, black roads, mauve tights,
like a game restarting in something of a trance;
like two fish trapped in a weir;
stuck in the reddish neon nights,
she disappeared down one hole, by chance,

and from another she’d reappear.


The reflections gleamed ,

neither the air nor the water 

had changed with the years;
the two incense sticks seemed 

crimson, solemn, and brought her

indifferent to the blazing headlights
of a thousand volunteers.

The surface of the river was calm, 

and the sky was broad;
it felt like I had left my room behind 

and was standing with her arm-in-arm,

a simple reward,
together in the midnight street
I might be mistaken
and I may be so inclined.

This poem is an exercise of my own invention. I took a short story (Goodbye, Bridge of the East by Wang Zhanhei) that I wanted to read but hadn’t yet, and ran it through DeepSeek to extract whatever lines it found of a poetic nature, of which there were thirty-three. Without reading the story, I reworked all the lines, in order, into the poem you see here now.

I’m not sure how successful it is and I’m off to read the story now, wondering how similar it might be to what I came up with.

I’ll try this again but perhaps be a bit more selective with the extracted phrases, as this poem is way longer than anything I would normally write.