She cries herself to sleep at night
with only the moon's sympathies
for her plight
which worsens everyday
a loneliness that never really
goes away
and all that breathes in her is
a choked sob as she
carefully applies her makeup
(stencilled eyeliner, dash of eyeshadow,
faint orange blush, smudgy lipstick)
every morning
carefully because
it is a thin thread of sanity
stretched taut in all its fragility.



Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn. Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one - when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. However well-phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling is not natural - if the object and yourself are separate - then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit. Submerge yourself into the object until its intrinsic nature becomes apparent, stimulating poetic impulse.

Infected by the invisibly microscopic. Pain no where and everywhere. Hot yet not a temperature, cold yet not a Cold. Hungry but strangely reluctant to eat.

Waking up today was a chore.