Proofreader's Pain

Intensity knocks on my door. What is this, what is this sound? I have lost most of my grammar. No words can say. My worst enemy is authenticity, and my sweetest friend honesty. Authenticity dictates; honesty loosens. When the grammatical universe falls apart, there is nothing but debris and oily water. How unsure of herself or himself can a person be? That must depend largely on the shape of one's linguistic universe. They never told me America, France, Togo &c. did not exist except as faceless egos jostling against one another in tears. I do not feel betrayed, but do feel bad for the globe, whose fate is to misrepresent continually the shape of the world and at the same time keep silent about its own fatal errors. Where art thou, proofreader(s) of the globe?

A Happy Wallflower

I am looking at an ongoing party from behind a doorway.

And I am happy that way.

The Urban Dictionary lists the definition of wallflower (with the most votes) as: "a type of loner. seemingly shy folks who no one really knows. often some of the most interesting people if one actually talks to them. cute." A charming definition. I was called a "wallflower" once, in high school. If only I had had the guts back then to say being a wallflower made me happy: not sad, not lonely, but content.

Please excuse the unsightly drawing.

Turtle Characters

Pippa said: "I wish to suggest that, fundamentally speaking, Chinese characters function much like the Greek or Latin word roots in English. But the crucial difference is that Chinese characters can theoretically bond with each other in an infinite number of ways, and thus it is simply impossible to come up with an exhaustive (or near-exhaustive) dictionary, especially for words in Classical Chinese, which is a for-writing-only language with lots of ellipses. There can only be reference books on the characters, which can only serve as compendia of etymologies, and vastly incomplete ones at that.

"A hyperbolic demonstration: 'It would look like this' would look like 'Quasi visus wolde' (that's three characters) or something like that in Classical Chinese. But the problem is that the same sentence could also be interpreted, depending on the immediate context and on the various historical and literary allusions surrounding each of the three characters as well as the particular text in question, as: 'I would appear almost visible to you' or '[Her face] used to look as if [the summer sun had burned it thoroughly - an obvious literary allusion, completely elided because every reader is assumed to be familiar with it].'

"Well, of course, I'm exaggerating, but do you see what I'm saying?"

Poppo yawned and said: "Maybe, maybe not. I'm going for a swim." Poppo jumped into the pond, startling a turtle and her school of fish.

Sarcasm

Sarcasm grows on you like a tree

Or a mushroom;

It rustles itself upward in noiseless sixty days

Topless

Topless: I am not referring to the nudists on the beach. At least, not for the time being. Instead, I am thinking of the way in which the world where some of us live somehow ends up equating striving for one's best with trying to reaching the top of something, whatever that thing may be. Top, in comparison to what, and according to whom? We may choose to ask, question, and argue, or not argue, but faith in stratification still exists and will exist worldwide, regardless of what we may think. As such, we have no choice but to go topless, rejoicing in being able to appreciate, at high noon, the beauty of clouds, whose stormy underbellies - the very bottom layer of the stratified ice and dust - watch over us with so much serenity and wisdom, that they sometimes come very close, extremely close, to bringing us to tears.

Feathers

Let me write you a song

On the back of a bulboa leaf

With jet-black ink

Seishonagon's Pillow

Before going to bed, I think of all my favorite people in the world, dead and alive, (many of them whom I have met only between pages in a book or through other media). Then I find that there are too many of them, and growing more content by the minute, I finally fall asleep, hoping to see at least one or two of my favorite people in my dreams, if only for a fleeting moment.

A-Mixing

I mix the young and the old, the high and the low, the sacred and the vulgar. I mix teh and kopi, mix chicken with rice, with chili and egg. I mix blue and white, vinegar and soy sauce, dirt and mirth.

Spring forth, flowers, spring forth. For time is short, but sunlight and water abound.

Early Summer

Silenced beyond words, stars fall, in the manner of tears, on a white field.

Ghoulish clouds fly, mysteries trickle down a pot's cheek, and an old flower arrangement sings, "Tomorrow will never come."

Despair floats in the manner of pink blobs, like a flock of sheep under a warm, but cold, sun.

Lettering

I keep waiting for a letter to arrive; I keep looking inside my mailbox, clattered with just old leaves; but perhaps the letter I am waiting for is a letter I must send and yet have not written.

A Restless Bee

A restless bee said: "I listened to Schumann's Liederkreis sung by Hermann Prey. I listened to the whole thing, in one go. Then I listened to Sena Jurinac's rendition of an aria in Eugene Onegin, an opera by Tchaikovsky/Pushkin. And then I suddenly remembered, not surprisingly, Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind - not necessarily the film, but more the novel."

The restless bee began to talk: "In the 19th century, in Russia . . . in the United States . . . but what about the Sinocentrism and its critics in Korea and Japan? Well, the Romantics . . . the center-periphery knot . . . why, Eurocentrism and Sinocentrism were never the same. But the process of nationalism . . . the hunt after the universe went awry . . . it began, not ended, with a deadly explosion. Who knew, that the world . . . had no fixed center . . . ."

The bee began to talk, but dusk was falling, and it had to go home. So it went home, and dusk fell.

Incertipede

Happiest thoughts for the new year, I say

But incertitude inches its way across

My windowsill;

I am happy the incertitude is moving

Like a centipede, it will grow into a butterfly

Bluer than the Blume flowering in Schumann's garden