Category: Literature

* 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.

* 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.

* Youth *

The empty space you left permeates,
Infectious, hollows mind.
Frontier expanding,
A world vast and warmthless
Merges, 
Future starts.

I’m still breathing with corrupted lungs,
Chocked by the ashes that fall 
As the winter comes.
The lover that went wrong,
My name forgotten, blurry and gone.

I was the reckless, the only youth (between us)
Falling for that youthful dream that drowned in your leaden truth.

I knew you were bleeding (before all this),
But you are the lucky one.
Because the dying is the one that you think went wrong.

I am the one naïve youth that you will soon forget,
Left in the far field
With the blade still deep
Bury under the skin.
Missing the hand that
Once hold the grip.

I’m still missing.

After Daughter, Elena Tonra “Youth”

Read “Red Doc>” by Anne Carson

(This is only a short and incomplete note on my thought on Anne Carson’s work, which should not be taken seriously.)

Review 3/29/2020
It would probably better, to read “Autobiography of red” before reading this. Maybe some extra Greek mythology would help too.
But I enjoy the read, as it is a journey of word play, not just playing with words, but the structure of sentence, paragraph, visual effect, and sound, eventually, this is a prose poem, like the greek saga, should be listened.

Read “The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I believe Charlotte Perkins Gilman said herself that she never thought about being a novelist, yet she wrote amazing stories. 
In a sense she’s maybe referring to her ability to construct a complete, thorough structure for her novel, as her short fictions are the ones that continue to catch our eyes more than a century later. It’s not that her novel isn’t amazing, it is just that her short stories are much more distilled, with simple but powerful idea that each contains a hard-to-avoid narrative.
Her essays, which are equally important and deserve to be collected and preserved, however, are less distinguish as her fictional work from my point of view; theory evolves with new research and social condition and can be outdated. With so much development and fundamental shift, feminism today is far broader and more complex than the one her generation struggle to develop. Although many are still not achieved, we can see that feminist today has a much more diverse goals and her essays are more of a philosophical foundation than practical tools any more.
I enjoy the short fictions significantly more than her other works.

Read “Girl, Interrupted” by Susanna Kaysen

This isn’t restrictedly speaking a novel, but it provide something much more than just an account.
I was occupied by the story after watching the film when I was probably the same age as Susanna Kaysen when she was confined to the McLean Hospital. I didn’t know either, at the time, that Sylvia Plath was one of the prominent figures who stay shortly in the same institute. After so many years I realized that I am always fascinated by this kind of stories because I was one; a revelation made after eventually reading the book.
But each one of us, Susanna, Sylvia, Lisa, Daisy, Georgiana, is dealing with a unique situation that only belong to that intimate self, as such, though there are sentences and observations that strike me hardly, the story is actually foreign to me, and it makes the book witty, obscure at some passage, funny, sadden, and intriguing at the same time. 
This is not the reality that Sylvia tried to tell us by poetry, not the dark drama something like Joker would demonstrate, not the incredibly deep reflection by Virginia, but a POV from someone who was, by her own words, interrupted.

* Morning Mist *

The morning mist is famous to the musing gaze of the wondering soul,
Whiteness hooves across the fields,
Single minded, 
Taking away the breath
Of the leaving train.

We disappointed her,
Letting her through to that stillness.
Her skin bright as a lampshade.
She is famous
To us,
While loneliness is famous to
A poem.

After Naomi Shihab Nye “Famous”
And Sylvia Plath “Sheep in Fog” and “Lady Lazarus”