a ☕︎’s Reviews > Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm: Poems and Essays > Status Update

it’s been too long since we met. you are dripping wet from another world
i don’t know where to start
wringing you dry

in a sunny courtyard, a golden pitter-patter of sparrows
[ . . . ]
an ancestral temple where i hear stars in dialogue

a child can go downhill and wash twilight years

to love you, i learn tenderness, slow-boil sweet words
no matter what, i want to hug you, to leap and kiss you

an afternoon when a tangerine is forgotten on a branch
this is a woman’s afternoon: she stands on a rooftop
watches an afternoon float and shimmer

we do not know to whom we should shout, slow down and wait for me. no one is waiting. no one waits for our unease and doubts to be appeased. as i write, i feel i have said too much. rain continues outside, pouring hard on the windowpanes. loudspeakers nearby are playing a birthday song. i feel blessed nevertheless: a vaguely sad bliss.

my body too contains a train

but i never show off. this has nothing to do with secrets
even a hundred full moons won’t move me. i stifle
the moon whistles
but someone boards the train, another alights, someone throws a fruit peel
and napkin out the window. someone says this is because of spring
it doesn’t plan to stop, but passes
a small plain where dew stares in a breeze.

but you are—
coldly watching a dog die you are
calmly facing the setting sun you are

weary of chaotic worldly affairs, you stick a pen into years of feuds and walk south. i now have doppelgängers: one watches you float in a dream. one floats with you in a dream within a dream. another presses down the drift patiently.

in other words, i wanted an imaginary world to break through the preexisting imagined world. i wanted to suffer to death. i wanted to destroy and be doomed forever. fate had lowered me into a boundless swamp, and my resistance was no more than a joke in god’s eyes that had to happen nonetheless.