About Drone Bee (Gaya Space)

I’m a homespun uncle poet, the Drone Bee, Gaya Space from Taiwan. In Taiwanese, a 'Hang-Phong' is a drone bee—the lazy bastard in the hive that doesn't do a damn thing, can’t lay eggs, and relies entirely on his sisters to feed his mouth. Why did I pick this as my pen name for writing poetry? Because back in elementary school, I learned that a drone's sole mission in life is to mate with the queen bee. Back then, all I knew was that 'mating'—or let’s just call it bumping uglies—seemed like a pretty sweet deal to adults. I thought to myself, man, what a life! Born just to get it on with the queen. Right then and there, I made it my life's ambition to become a drone bee. Naturally, the very first piece in this poetry collection is 'The Drone Bee’s Wish.'

These poems are the world as seen through my big, bug-eyed drone perspective: inside, you'll find the laid-back life philosophy of a sloth, the horny howling of stray cats in heat getting youngsters all fired up, and the carefree capon, eating himself fat all day while watching regular roosters tear each other apart over territory and hens. These poems aren't highbrow, and they don't use elegant vocabulary. I've never had formal literary training, and I've never written Taiwanese poetry before. I just started thinking in Taiwanese, using it to unpack the worldview I've gathered over my life. My Taiwanese poems use the language of everyday life to write about the human body, desire, humor, and the many faces of life. They are a form of “Adult Grit” seen through an adult lens: sometimes vulgar, sometimes absurd, and sometimes deeply sincere, giving Taiwanese a voice for the things people usually find too difficult to say out loud.

Nowadays, AI is smart as hell. It helps me rhyme, teaches me how to build my own website, launch a podcast channel (to be launched soon), produce music, and all that. And that’s exactly how this website, these published poems, and this podcast came to life..." The English versions of these Taiwanese poems were initially drafted with the help of Gemini and ChatGPT AI. I then leveraged my own English proficiency to carefully weigh and refine the word choices, striving to capture the market-grounded flavor and cadence (khì-kháu) of the Taiwanese dialect used in my original creations. While the English renderings may not align word-for-word with the Taiwanese descriptions, the goal is for the choice of vocabulary and sentence structure to convey the original perspective intended in the Taiwanese poems. As for the Taiwanese Romanization, it reflects my customary Chiayi/Taipei dialectal pronunciations; after an initial draft generated with AI assistance, I made the final adjustments based on my own pronunciation.

This website is restricted to adults 18 and over. Some of the poems, songs, and spoken-word works presented here explore adult humor, sexuality, the body, and the more direct language of everyday life. However, being an 18+ website does not mean that every piece is appropriate for public display. Some works are considerably more direct, explicit, or simply 'too salty' to be on the public site. To preserve the original character of these works while keeping the public website within a more comfortable boundary, some of the saltier poems, podcasts, songs, and other adult content will not be presented here in full, but will instead be available in the Patreon members-only area. If you would like to explore the more complete, less-edited side of Gaya Space, you are welcome to continue your journey on Patreon.