"On the seventh day of the Seventh-month, in the Palace of Long Life,
We told each other secretly in the quiet midnight world
That we wished to fly in heaven, two birds with the wings of one,
And to grow together on the earth, two branches of one tree.
Earth endures, heaven endures; some time both shall end,
While this unending sorrow goes on and on for ever."
-  Bai Juyi - A Song of Unending Sorrow - 300 Tang Poems

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The first day they met he gave her the poems
he'd carried all the way from China, a young boy
with a dream and 300 poems a thousand years old

...on the seventh day of the seventh month...

How could she not fall in love with him?

And his sculpture... carved with fire,
the strong, bronze back now frozen,
arms raised in wild and sensual supplication.

Were they his arms reaching for her?

He'd kept it hidden for twenty years,
waiting for someone, the right woman to give it to
And he'd told her,"I knew it was meant for you."

How could she not fall in love with him?

Each night before she sleeps
she reads a poem and traces her fingertips down
the cold beauty of that graceful spine

Wish he were here
wish this was his back
curving around me
curving around me in my bed...
whispering the poems of his ancestors

She knits her loneliness into scarves,
soft pink wools like clouds of candy cotton,
rough mountain wools that smell of heather and winter solitude.
Years from now, she'll wrap them round her neck to remember
how he once kissed her.

Didn't she write a poem about it?

and this is her dream:
they meet when they are young,
they fall in love,
they fall in love and marry,
they fall in love and marry and have ten children,
they fall in love and marry and have ten children and grow old together,
they grow old and blind and deaf, and still in love, they fall into the final sleep together
and their children's children's children will remember their love for a thousand years.

It's just a dream.
He will have children
but not hers.
She'll die alone,
she wrote that poem, too,
thirty years ago.

karma, karma, karma
stealing heaven

she writes:
what does this world mean to me without you?*

utter loneliness

I saw grandpa with hate for the world within his hands
I saw him use those weapons as vice for sick commands
I saw him numb our world with what substance expands
But I never saw him show love that being a man demands

I saw my grandma leave her babies to hands distained
I saw her drink, lie, use men and leave her children drained
I saw her check out of life till nothing of her heart or soul remained
I never saw what love a grandmother’s heart should’ve contained

I watched my mother cry out in the night screaming in a sweat
From all the things her father did that she won’t soon forget
I watched her choose a man who did the same to us in her regret
I never saw her in so much pain as when she found I paid her debt

I watched my mother struggle with nothing for us to provide
I watched her wear the makeup and smiles bruises rarely hide
I watched her sleep with a needle in her arm devoid of pride
I never saw her live where peace and forgiveness could reside

I watched my mother drown her pain with any remedy but no relief
I watched her die inside out filled with bottomless aching grief
I watched her take our lives in one night, they came like a thief
But I never saw her face past regret with so much disbelief

I watched my dad sell his soul along with his needles and dope
I watched him drown in alcohol as a way to forget and cope
I watched him beat my mother an inch from life’s grand scope
I never saw in his eyes a glimpse of regret, love or hope

I watched him come into our room and steal our happiness nightly
I watched him lose his mental grasp that he once held so tightly
I watched him suffer in his own pain that he deserved so rightly
But I never saw any remorse as the the tears fell so lightly

I watched my aunts and uncles abuse, treated as their mother
I watched them transfer hatred easily from themselves to another
I watched them abuse their own children beyond all recover
But I never saw them be real family and try to heal one another

I watched my cousins repeat a cycle of the abuse and drugs they hate
I watched them live their lives as darkness, in lies they perpetuate
I watched them turn into their mothers and fathers, bearing all their weight
But I never saw them fight to change it, left such ill begotten fate

I watched my baby sister cry out while she was ***** and abused
I watched her deteriorate as a child from all of the drugs she used
I watched her lie there desperately broken, battered and bruised
But I never saw her give up on life from the despair that she refused

I watched my brother as a child, to the abuse as he confessed
I watched him try and explain in words the pain which he possessed
I watched him fight with all he had and any touch he did detest
I never saw him in so much turmoil as the night which he digressed

I watched my brother quietly sink into the deepest self depression
I watched him hurt anyone within his grasp, pent up past aggression
I watched him **** himself with a deep sadness and a guns possession
But I never saw him hurt again after that single shells transgression

I was forced to walk this life unaided and scared
I was given a golden ticket out unforeseen
I never saw my family like they really were
I remained somewhere in between
From home to home I drifted misplaced
On my own since before I turned thirteen
I used to think that I was cursed to be alone
To live this life always broken and unseen
Torn away from all that I had known
I never saw just what all of this would mean
Now I know how a perceived past was reversed
My life was being reshaped and heart wiped clean
To not have grown to repeat the family cycle
Of everything I lived and what my eyes had seen

A shadow of a flower fell on the way
I looked at the face of you
Too much and too little
Did I have to say
When this shadow fell
On my face too

My thoughts drifted into a twilight of being
Seized the past and blamed it on you
Forgetting that today
Should be all I was seeing
In your beautiful eyes
Of blue

I did not tell you how you make my heart sing
Lift straight up from my chest
Take off in the air as if carried on wings
Or how in your sweet love
I am
So blessed

Instead, I looked for wounds and scars
On your heart and mine
Wondered aloud
How we had gotten this far
Thought I would bleed
If you were unkind

I did not tell you that you are a rose
A joy of blue, shading my crimson fears
When this shadow fell, on our faces
I chose
To hold you responsible
For all of my tears

A shadow of a flower fell on the way
I looked in the heart of you
Yet you moved from that shadow
As if to say
You can trust me
I will trust you