The Golden Age Chinese poets
were always drinking too much
always going to sleep in their soup
or falling out of boats 
trying to serenade the moon.

They wrote poems with names
like Waking from a Drunken Sleep
Or In Praise of a Little Wine Jug.
Poems that chronicled the simple pleasures 
of waking up drunk on a mountaintop
or putting your plans aside
to watch a rain storm.

No doubt they’re the reason
why I'm always looking out of windows,
why I'm always passing by trees
wondering what they might be like to sleep under some imagined spring day
or why the summit of my ambitions
is to wake to an empty calendar,
it's pages as white as mountain snow.

If those around me
knew the influence Li Po & Tu Fu
and others where having on my
motivations
they might pull me to one side,
like my teachers used to do,
and lecture me on the importance
of positive influences

and I would listen patiently
but know my mind would
soon begin to drift,
travelling from it's mooring
like a small wooden boat on a dark pond
or the moon in the night sky,
forever outwards,
in search
of deeper silence.