* Burning * blackout poetry from Witch Burning by Sylvia Plath

Witch Burning

In the marketplace they are piling the dry sticks.
A thicket of shadows is a poor coat. I inhabit
The wax image of myself, a doll‘s body.
Sickness begins here: I am the dartboard for witches.
Only the devil can eat the devil out.
In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed of fire.

It is easy to blame the dark: the mouth of a door,
The cellar’s belly. They’ve blown my sparkler out.
A black-sharded lady keeps me in parrot cage.
What large eyes the dead have!
I am intimate with a hairy spirit.
Smoke wheels from the beak of this empty jar.

If I am a little one, I can do no harm.
If I don’t move about, I’ll knock nothing over. So I said,
Sitting under a potlid, tiny and inert as a rice grain.
They are turning the burners up, ring after ring.
We are full of starch, my small white fellows. We grow.
It hurts at first. The red tongues will teach the truth.

Mother of beetles, only unclench your hand:
I’ll fly through the candle’s mouth like a singeless moth.
Give me back my shape. I am ready to construe the days
I coupled with dust in the shadow of a stone.
My ankles brighten. Brightness ascends my thighs.
I am lost, I am lost, in the robes of all this light.

(rediscovered, work from March 2021)

* What will I leave behind *

If I could, that timid happiness now belongs to you.

Oh you don’t know what I’m talking about?

If I could leave you the sweetness of the late summer,

The juicy, extravagant fruity fragrance, sometimes with

The guilt of self-indulge

But I couldn’t,

So I wrote it down,

I carve that into the paper fibre,

To the hard disk

For you

* Take with Me *

How, I may ask, to take whatever does not belong to me?

The clouds, the stream, the softness of the spring grass,

The excitement of a baby?

I don’t know, by memorizing, if that works,

So that I may rejoice

Take that smell, that touch, that tingling sound

So deeply into me,

I take the entire world with me,

When I lost it, lost it from this moment

* Mnemosyne *

I wasn’t trying to tell you that that Saturday afternoon is the best a day could ever be
But I really couldn’t help.
I don’t know how to put it all together,
But can only heave through all the telltales, 
All the sadnesses and fulfills.
But I also know that drizzle;
I collected for you the earthy wetness after a sparkling breeze
And another time captured an early river gauche
Then turned the ordinary morning to a new wave scene.
I keep the empty redden Moscow sky only
For a film you have yet to see.
I let colours die, mourn the pass-by,
But sometimes I just sit quietly watching, 
That timeless smile fixed in the fainted eyes.


Threads of miscellaneous and
Specimen of light,
Those are my favourites,
Apart from the everchanging time.

* A World Alone *

That late afternoon silent moon gently crawled 
Across the vast blueish vault
Without the fainted stars, without smoothing clouds.

You bit my chest; I licked your wound.
We were sleepless, attempting to scoop
A piece of the world, a world full of poison.

Yet we insisted, drunkenly devoured.
Sugar melted caramel burning,
Ginger tea brewing with your nervousness;

We teased and ranted, talked about butter & bread.
Your words tittering, my mind danced. 
Caress as much as it could be.

That late summer night walked
Empty Bernard to the Jewish town
We thought we knew each other

But maybe we were both clueless,
Perhaps I was the unicorn
and you are somehow simply lorn.

Now that it’s all bygone I couldn’t
Burn all down
I keep dancing in this world alone,

Because we were all alone.
All the future and dream
All that delicacy on which we lean,

I am dancing in this world alone,
Because we are all alone.
We are all alone.

It’s not going to be everlasting, maybe,
But I set on to let it happen
Till one day my smile were gone though I still feel it wortheverything.

Get me still,
Get me distilled, millions of seconds passed but
That space time frozen like arctic glass.

I never imagined it getting rough,
We might make love
Which was what you think of

But now it’s all bygone,
I keep dancing in this world alone;
We are all alone. 

* Scar Tissue *

Susanna told me that scar tissue has no character.
They don’t age.
I heard organs don’t feel pain, mostly.
That’s how some people swallow objects;
Blade does not exist if you don’t feel the cut.

Embrace it.

But what about the heartache?
May be a nocebo
That exists only in fMRI scan.
Not paid by the insurance plan.
But stanza after stanza
Engraves the adversity
Onto the monument of our existence,
That is, our body,
As we move on.

Scar tissue has no character,
It made us a character.
And pain does not age.

Micro Fiction #Silvie is famous

Sylvie is famous. The sort of indie-famous, like after performance friends would come to the stage front to greet her while she’s sorting the cables and synthesizer, though the venue is always tiny and only had devoted fans like a secret inner circle. 

The tinniest concert I’ve ever been to has only five people showed up, the keyboard slash vocal from BC sold me a $10 ticket and it had to be split by two bands and supposedly the venue. She’s mildly famous.

Actually, not quite.

Sylvie is famous in a sense that her movements are delicate enough to attract deserved attention. While shifting her body across the studio, the popping sound from the wood floor scattered throughout her path, following the soles swiftly. Mostly her feet move horizontally without lifting very much her ankle, drawing a cursive line so close to the ground. It is light and calm, seemly without even disrupting the air, as if you can hear the stillness surrounding her lower body.

I don’t really know why would that be impressive; I remember seeing Misty Copeland’s legs, with an almost angular calf of which the edge of the muscle beautifully represents the functionality and capability it possesses, supporting her gesture to the precision. A fine machinery I almost want to say, that’s the kind of complement I make to a ballerina.

Sylvie is not Misty Copeland, of course; she barely knows ballet. In fact, we met in an evening contemporary dance class, where dance is rather therapeutic than pedagogic. 

But that’s probably the point, that her naturally cultivated habits and tendencies, rather than technicalities and formations, demonstrate quite genuinely a light-hearted but sophisticated mind, that tiny pieces of information about her leaked spontaneously through gestures despite scores. When she listens a sensible mind chases the rabbit in a fleeting wonderland that we share. But mostly she dances into a mind space that seemly secluded, and stretches back occasionally to the quotidian normality.

I don’t really know her well; I know that she studied theatre but not quite sure why Molière would be taught in French literature instead of department of theatre, or maybe it is. But I do know that when the motion flows though her fingertip it seems to me a performing art, and I would watch the piece regardfully. 

#Practice – Place I Miss

I’m wondering what it would sound like at this moment in Jeanne-Mance Park. Not this moment as 8PM at night but the moment when quietness become so obvious that you don’t need to be quiet to listen to it. But that’s the point, I’ve never heard of a Jeanne-Mance Park without traffic, without crowd, without livelihood, even in an eerie January night. 

I remember the sound of wheels drifting away in that thick winter air, as if the sound waves were liquid bypassing my ear, and the flickering lights of vehicles across my sight. What I also remember is the bilingual gibberish from the mouth of the innocent kids jumping, the sound, sometimes swear, laughter, and the embodiment of the vitality of the city.

I wonder, how it sounds like right now, the Jeanne-Mance Park.