Wei Zhong Le Biography

After joining the Marines at 18 and spending several years abroad (living for 2 years in Japan as well as a 9 month tour in Iraq and a good many months floating around the Asian tropics in Navy ships) I married, divorced, separated from the military, became an amateur helicopter pilot, worked in a factory, did odd jobs, and finally fled my home once again for the figuratively greener pastures (or should I say paddies) of southeast Asia.
The past 3 years have been spent teaching English and traveling around China. My disposition in these years has been characterized by almost bi-polar alternating periods of chronic depression and a passionate feeling self-worth, which can quickly plummet back into the doldrums.
I volunteered in the aftermath of the devastating Sichuan earthquake in 2008, was the winner of a reality TV show, have been mixed up in a great many capricious romances, and found out, finally, just how small and insignifigant a force I am, even in regard to my own life and happiness, in the face of such a morally bankrupt, corrupt, and power-hungry world.
I am now completely lost. At 30 years old I am undereducated, underpayed, and underinspired and I do not sense great things (or even satisfactory things) in my future. I have found love, but only at the price of another love.
I want to write beautiful words, but I have no formal education in literature. I only know much about helicopters and rifles, neither of which can provide me much fulfillment at this point. I know nothing about the structure of a poem. Prose and iambic pentameter - I have heard these terms but do not even know their meanings. I only know the feelings that I want to convey, from my memories and experiences, and in my head this is exactly what they look like. Can I even call them 'poems'? Perhaps just statements of longing, for the past, for happier times. Though it strikes me peculiar that in my writings the times I seem to long for and remember with the most fondness are the times that I was most solitary. I admire people who have a way with beautiful words - wordsmiths who have the ability to make us open our minds and really see something in a new light. People who can take the mundane, and through their words can make it fresh again so that when we read a certain passage we may see and appreciate the mundane as something new and mysterious, as through the eyes of children.