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!?
Sep 2017
!?
Listen up, kid! The only real things
the only things that are real in this entire world
are mathematics and human error. Look-
Look, look. You get it? You see her?
She's making up new numbers.
*******
ah
Sep 2017
ah
We talked of nothing, thinking of better company. But now
absence hangs paintings over windows:
I talk of nothing, thinking of you.
Sep 2017
-People with secrets shimmer. If you touch a secret, it melts.
-Do I look like I'm shimmering to you?
-Always.
The first line is from Tango at the End of Winter, a 1991 play by Shimizu Kunio. Another line I remember: "You only remember lines from bad plays."
Sep 2017
late into the night,
wondering: should i tell you?
ships pass in the dark.
we don't know each other very well at all, do we? a haiku if you squint/count, have a very nice day
Sep 2017
In the fragile shimmer of your tears lies tragedy.
The bone-white curve of the moon hooks onto the past.
The night has dragged on, endless, stilled to frost;
Who is it upstairs, lost in bone-chilling despair?

Rain plays light on the ruby-red windowsill.
All my years of life on paper, blown astray by the wind.
So distant are my dreams, they become mere threads of fragrance hanging in the air.
Drifting, wind-strung, into your likeness.

(CHORUS)
The chrysanthemum shattered, the floor is strewn with tragedy; your smile has already faded to yellow.
Petals land softly, breaking hearts; my matters of the heart lie in peace.
The northern wind is frenzied, the night is not yet spent; your shadow can't be cut away.
Leaving me, alone on the lake’s surface, to become two.

The flower already nears its dusk.
Once brilliant as the sun, it's fallen, dispersed.
Fate cannot bear the world's way of withering.
Worrying that the river will prove uncrossable, my autumn heart* tears in half.
Scared you won't reach land- a lifetime spent wavering.

Hear the horses charging hysterical on someone's landscape.
The great changes of the world only whistle past my unchanging martial attire.
It grows light out, just slightly. Gently, you sigh; a night spent in this cryptic melancholy.

(REPEAT CHORUS x2)
Original song (Jay Chou): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdjbRvvJAzg

*Visual wordplay: The character used here for 'worry' is composed of the characters for 'autumn' and 'heart' when split across the middle. A pretty character with a poetic anatomy. It doesn't sound weird because you can put arbitrary seasonal markers on anything and everything in Chinese.
Sep 2017
With the fighting spirit of the soap-bubble:
To the cicada, restraint means nothing.
Fireworks applaud
and vanish.

I can barely see you.
zhaolu (noun): lit. morning dew, fig. the ephemeral nature of human existence
Sep 2017
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Sep 2017
i know it's late
i know it's late

we can make it if we run
Sep 2017
Standing still, in the the courtyard, from sunset to nightfall;
Sometimes, I sit beneath the lantern until daybreak.
If I don't voice these feelings, who will?
On occasion I heave a heavy sigh.
translation of yezuo, 'sitting at night', by tang dynasty poet bai juyi. this website doesn't process chinese characters but who does?

— The End —