As a woman, and in the service of my Lord the Emperor Wu, my life is governed by his command. At twenty I was summoned to this life at court and have made of it what I can, within the limitations of the courtesan I am supposed to be, and the poet I have now become. Unlike my male counterparts, some of whom have lately found seclusion in the wilderness of rivers and mountains, I have only my personal court of three rooms and its tiny garden and ornamental pond. But I live close to the surrounding walls of the Zu-lin Gardens with its astronomical observatories and bold attempts at recreating illusions of celebrated locations in the Tai mountains. There, walking with my cat Xi-Lu in the afternoons, I imagine a solitary life, a life suffused with the emptiness I crave.
 
In the hot, dry summer days my maid Mei-Lim and I have sought a temporary retreat in the pine forests above Lingzhi. Carried in a litter up the mountain paths we are left in a commodious hut, its open walls making those simple pleasures of drinking, eating and sleeping more acute, intense. For a few precious days I rest and meditate, breathe the mountain air and the resinous scents of the trees. I escape the daily commerce of the court and belong to a world that for the rest of the year I have to imagine, the world of the recluse. To gain the status of the recluse, open to my male counterparts, is forbidden to women of the court. I am woman first, a poet and calligrapher second. My brother, should he so wish, could present a petition to revoke his position as a man of letters, an official commentator on the affairs of state. But he is not so inclined. He has already achieved notoriety and influence through his writing on the social conditions of town and city. He revels in a world of chatter, gossip and intrigue; he appears to fear the wilderness life.  
 
I must be thankful that my own life is maintained on the periphery. I am physically distant from the hub of daily ceremonial. I only participate at my Lord’s express command. I regularly feign illness and fatigue to avoid petty conflict and difficulty. Yet I receive commissions I cannot waver: to honour a departed official; to celebrate a son’s birth to the Second Wife; to fulfil in verse my Lord’s curious need to know about the intimate sorrows of his young concubines, their loneliness and heartache.
 
Occasionally a Rhapsody is requested for an important visitor. The Emperor Wu is proud to present as welcome gifts such poetic creations executed in fine calligraphy, and from a woman of his court. Surely a sign of enlightment and progress he boasts! Yet in these creations my observations are parochial: early morning frost on the cabbage leaves in my garden; the sound of geese on their late afternoon flight to Star Lake; the disposition of the heavens on an Autumn night. I live by the Tao of Lao-Tzu, perceiving the whole world from my doorstep.
 
But I long for the reclusive life, to leave this court for my family’s estate in the valley my peasant mother lived as a child. At fourteen she was chosen to sustain the Emperor’s annual wish for young girls to be groomed for concubinage. Like her daughter she is tall, though not as plain as I; she put her past behind her and conceded her adolescence to the training required by the court. At twenty she was recommended to my father, the court archivist, as second wife. When she first met this quiet, dedicated man on the day before her marriage she closed her eyes in blessing. My father taught her the arts of the library and schooled her well. From her I have received keen eyes of jade green and a prestigious memory, a memory developed she said from my father’s joy of reading to her in their private hours, and before she could read herself. Each morning he would examine her to discover what she had remembered of the text read the night before. When I was a little child she would quote to me the Confucian texts on which she had been ****** schooled, and she then would tell me of her childhood home. She primed my imagination and my poetic world with descriptions of a domestic rural life.
 
Sometimes in the arms of my Lord I have freely rhapsodized in chusi metre these delicate word paintings of my mother’s home. She would say ‘We will walk now to the ruined tower beside the lake. Listen to the carolling birds. As the sparse clouds move across the sky the warm sun strokes the winter grass. Across the deep lake the forests are empty. Now we are climbing the narrow steps to the platform from which you and I will look towards the sun setting in the west. See the shadows are lengthening and the air becomes colder. The blackbird’s solitary song heralds the evening.  Look, an owl glides silently beneath us.’
 
My Lord will then quote from Hsieh Ling-yun,.
 
‘I meet sky, unable to soar among clouds,
face a lake, call those depths beyond me.’
 
And I will match this quotation, as he will expect.
 
‘Too simple-minded to perfect Integrity,
and too feeble to plough fields in seclusion.’
 
He will then gaze into my eyes in wonder that this obscure poem rests in my memory and that I will decode the minimal grammar of these early characters with such poetry. His characters: Sky – Bird – Cloud – Lake – Depth. My characters: Fool – Truth – Child – Winter field – Isolation.
 
Our combined invention seems to take him out of his Emperor-self. He is for a while the poet-scholar-sage he imagines he would like to be, and I his foot-sore companion following his wilderness journey. And then we turn our attention to our bodies, and I surprise him with my admonitions to gentleness, to patience, to arousing my pleasure. After such poetry he is all pleasure, sensitive to the slightest touch, and I have my pleasure in knowing I can control this powerful man with words and the stroke of my fingertips rather than by delicate youthful beauty or the guile and perverse ingenuity of an ****** act. He is still learning to recognise the nature and particularness of my desires. I am not as his other women: who confuse pleasure with pain.
 
Thoughts of my mother. Without my dear father, dead ten years, she is a boat without a rudder sailing on a distant lake. She greets each day as a gift she must honour with good humour despite the pain of her limbs, the difficulty of walking, of sitting, of eating, even talking. Such is the hurt that governs her ageing. She has always understood that my position has forbidden marriage and children, though the latter might be a possibility I have not wished it and made it known to my Lord that it must not be. My mother remains in limbo, neither son or daughter seeking to further her lineage, she has returned to her sister’s home in the distant village of her birth, a thatched house of twenty rooms,
 
‘Elms and willows shading the eaves at the back,
and, in front,  peach and plum spread wide.
 
Villages lost across mist-haze distances,
Kitchen smoke drifting wide-open country,
 
Dogs bark deep among the back roads out here
And cockerels crow from mulberry treetops.
 
My esteemed colleague T’ao Ch’ien made this poetry. After a distinguished career in government service he returned to the life of a recluse-farmer on his family farm. Living alone in a three-roomed hut he lives out his life as a recluse and has endured considerable poverty. One poem I know tells of him begging for food. His world is fields-and-gardens in contrast to Hsieh Ling-yin who is rivers-and-mountains. Ch’ien’s commitment to the recluse life has brought forth words that confront death and the reality of human experience without delusion.
 
‘At home here in what lasts, I wait out life.’
 
Thus my mother waits out her life, frail, crumbling more with each turning year.
 
To live beyond the need to organise daily commitments due to others, to step out into my garden and only consider the dew glistening on the loropetalum. My mind is forever full of what is to be done, what must be completed, what has to be said to this visitor who will today come to my court at the Wu hour. Only at my desk does this incessant chattering in the mind cease, as I move my brush to shape a character, or as the needle enters the cloth, all is stilled, the world retreats; there is the inner silence I crave.
 
I long to see with my own eyes those scenes my mother painted for me with her words. I only know them in my mind’s eye having travelled so little these past fifteen years. I look out from this still dark room onto my small garden to see the morning gathering its light above the rooftops. My camellia bush is in flower though a thin frost covers the garden stones.
 
And so I must imagine how it might be, how I might live the recluse life. How much can I jettison? These fine clothes, this silken nightgown beneath the furs I wrap myself in against the early morning air. My maid is sleeping. Who will make my tea? Minister to me when I take to my bed? What would become of my cat, my books, the choice-haired brushes? Like T’ao Ch’ien could I leave the court wearing a single robe and with one bag over my shoulders? Could I walk for ten days into the mountains? I would disguise myself as a man perhaps. I am tall for a woman, and though my body flows in broad curves there are ways this might be assuaged, enough perhaps to survive unmolested on the road.
 
Such dreams! My Lord would see me returned within hours and send a servant to remain at my gate thereafter. I will compose a rhapsody about a concubine of standing, who has even occupied the purple chamber, but now seeks to relinquish her privileged life, who coverts the uncertainty of nature, who would endure pain and privation in a hut on some distant mountain, who will sleep on a mat on its earth floor. Perhaps this will excite my Lord, light a fire in his imagination. As though in preparation for this task I remove my furs, I loose the knot of my silk gown. Naked, I reach for an old under shift letting it fall around my still-slender body and imagine myself tying the lacings myself in the open air, imagine making my toilet alone as the sun appears from behind a distant mountain on a new day. My mind occupies itself with the tiny detail of living thus: bare feet on cold earth, a walk to nearby stream, the gathering of berries and mountain herbs, the making of fire, the washing of my few clothes, imagining. Imagining. To live alone will see every moment filled with the tasks of keeping alive. I will become in tune with my surroundings. I will take only what I need and rely on no one. Dreaming will end and reality will be the slug on my mat, the bone-chilling incessant mists of winter, the thorn in the foot, the wild winds of autumn. My hands will become stained and rough, my long limbs tanned and scratched, my delicate complexion freckled and wind-pocked, my hair tied roughly back. I will become an animal foraging on a dank hillside. Such thoughts fill me with deep longing and a ****** desire to be tzu-jan  - with what surrounds me, ablaze with ****** self.
 
It is not thought the custom of a woman to hold such desires. We are creatures of order and comfort. We do not live on the edge of things, but crave security and well-being. We learn to endure the privations of being at the behest of others. Husbands, children, lovers, our relatives take our bodies to them as places of comfort, rest and desire. We work at maintaining an ordered flow of existence. Whatever our station, mistress or servant we compliment, we keep things in order, whether that is the common hearth or the accounts of our husband’s court. Now my rhapsody begins:
 
A Rhapsody on a woman wishing to live as a recluse
 
As a lady of my Emperor’s court I am bound in service.
My court is not my own, I have the barest of means.
My rooms are full of gifts I am forced barter for bread.
Though the artefacts of my hands and mind
Are valued and widely renown,
Their commissioning is an expectation of my station,
With no direct reward attached.
To dress appropriately for my Lord’s convocations and assemblies
I am forced to negotiate with chamberlains and treasurers.
A bolt of silk, gold thread, the services of a needlewoman
Require formal entreaties and may lie dormant for weeks
Before acknowledgement and release.
 
I was chosen for my literary skills, my prestigious memory,
Not for my ****** beauty, though I have been called
‘Lady of the most gracious movement’ and
My speaking voice has clarity and is capable of many colours.
I sing, but plainly and without passion
Lest I interfere with the truth of music’s message.
 
Since I was a child in my father’s library
I have sought out the works of those whose words
Paint visions of a world that as a woman
I may never see, the world of the wilderness,
Of rivers and mountains,
Of fields and gardens.
Yet I am denied by my *** and my station
To experience passing amongst these wonders
Except as contrived imitations in the palace gardens.
 
Each day I struggle to tease from the small corner
Of my enclosed eye-space some enrichment
Some elemental thing to colour meaning:
To extend the bounds of my home
Across the walls of this palace
Into the world beyond.
 
I have let it be known that I welcome interviews
With officials from distant courts to hear of their journeying,
To gather word images if only at second-hand.
Only yesterday an emissary recounted
His travels to Stone Lake in the far South-West,
Beyond the gorges of the Yang-tze.
With his eyes I have seen the mountains of Suchan:
With his ears I have heard the oars crackling
Like shattering jade in the freezing water.
Images and sounds from a thousand miles
Of travel are extract from this man’s memory.
 
Such a sharing of experience leaves me
Excited but dismayed: that I shall never
Visit this vast expanse of water and hear
Its wild cranes sing from their floating nests
In the summer moonlight.
 
I seek to disappear into a distant landscape
Where the self and its constructions of the world may
Dissolve away until nothing remains but the no-mind.
My thoughts are full of the practicalities of journeying
Of an imagined location, that lonely place
Where I may be at one with myself.
Where I may delight in the everyday Way,
Myself among mist and vine, rock and cave.
Not this lady of many parts and purposes whose poems must
Speak of lives, sorrow and joy, pleasure and pain
Set amongst personal conflict and intrigue
That in containing these things, bring order to disorder;
Salve the conscience, bathe hurt, soothe sleight.

The courtesan and poet Zuo Fen had two cats Xe Ming and Xi Ming. Living in her distant court with only her maid Hu Yin, her cats were often her closest companions and, like herself, of a crepuscular nature.
      It was the very depths of winter and the first moon of the Solstice had risen. The old year had nearly passed.
      The day itself was almost over. Most of the inner courts retired before the new day began (at about 11.0pm), but not Zuo Fen. She summoned her maid to dress her in her winter furs, gathered her cats on a long chain leash, and walked out into the Haulin Gardens.
      These large and semi-wild gardens were adjacent to the walls of her personal court. The father of the present Emperor had created there a forest once stocked with game, a lake to the brim with carp and rich in waterfowl, and a series of tall structures surrounded by a moat from which astronomers were able to observe the firmament.
      Emperor Wu liked to think of Zuo Fen walking at night in his father’s park, though he rarely saw her there. He knew that she valued that time alone to prepare herself for his visits, visits that rarely occurred until the Tiger hours between 3.0am and 6.0am when his goat-drawn carriage would find its way to her court unbidden. She herself would welcome him with steaming chai and sometimes a new rhapsody. They would recline on her bed and discuss the content and significance of certain writings they knew and loved. Discussion sometimes became an elaborate game when a favoured Classical text would be taken as the starting point for an exchange of quotation. Gradually quotation would be displaced by subtle invention and Zuo Fen would find the Emperor manoeuvring her into making declarations of a passionate or ****** nature.
       It seemed her very voice captivated him and despite herself and her inclinations they would join as lovers with an intensity of purpose, a great tenderness, and deep joy. He would rest his head inside her cloak and allow her lips to caress his ears with tales of river and mountain, descriptions of the flights of birds and the opening of flowers. He spoke to her ******* of the rising moon, its myriad reflections on the waters of Ling Lake, and of its trees whose winter branches caressed the cold surface.

Whilst Zuo Fen walked in the midnight park with her cats she reflected on an afternoon of frustration. She had attempted to assemble a new poem for her Lord.  Despite being himself an accomplished poet and having an extraordinary memory for Classical verse, the Emperor retained a penchant for stories about Mei-Lim, a young Suchan girl dragged from her family to serve as a courtesan at his court.
      Zuo Fen had invented this girl to articulate some of her own expressions of homesickness, despair, periods of constant tearfulness, and abject loneliness. Such things seemed to touch something in the Emperor. It was as though he enjoyed wallowing in these descriptions and his favourite A Rhapsody on Being far from Home he loved to hear from the poet’s own lips, again and again. Zuo Fen felt she was tempting providence not to compose something new, before being ordered to do so.
      As she struggled through the afternoon to inject some fresh and meaningful content into a story already milked dry Zuo Fen became aware of her cats. Xi Ming lay languorously across her folded feet. Xe Ming perched like an immutable porcelain figure on a stool beside her low writing table.
Zuo Fen often consulted her cats. ‘Xi Ming, will my Lord like this stanza?’

“The stones that ring out from your pony’s hooves
announce your path through the cloud forest”

She would always wait patiently for Xi Ming’s reply, playing a game with her imagination to extract an answer from the cinnamon scented air of her winter chamber.
      ‘He will think his pony’s hooves will flash with sparks kindling the fire of his passion as he prepares to meet his beloved’.
      ‘Oh such a wise cat, Xi Ming’, and she would press his warm body further into her lap. But today, as she imagined this dialogue, a second voice appeared in her thoughts.
      ‘Gracious Lady, your Xe Ming knows his under-standing is poor, his education weak, but surely this image, taken as it is from the poet Lu Ji, suggests how unlikely it would be for the spark of love and passion to take hold without nurture and care, impossible on a hard journey’.
       This was unprecedented. What had brought such a response from her imagination? And before she could elicit an answer it was as though Xe Ming spoke with these words of Confucius.

“Do not be concerned about others not appreciating you, be concerned about you not appreciating others”

Being the very sensible woman she was, Zuo Fen dismissed such admonition (from a cat) and called for tea.

Later as she walked her beauties by the frozen lake, the golden carp nosing around just beneath the ice, she recalled the moment and wondered. A thought came to her  . . .
       She would petition Xe Ming’s help to write a new rhapsody, perhaps titled Rhapsody on the Thought of Separation.

Both Zuo Fen’s cats came from her parental home in Lingzhi. They were large, big-***** mountain cats; strong animals with bear-like paws, short whiskered and big eared. Their coats were a glassy grey, the hairs tipped with a sprinkling of white giving the fur an impression of being wet with dew or caught by a brief shower.
       When she thought of her esteemed father, the Imperial Archivist, there was always a cat somewhere; in his study at home, in the official archives where he worked. There was always a cat close at hand, listening?
       What texts did her father know by heart that she did not know? What about the Lu Yu – the Confucian text book of advice and etiquette for court officials. She had never bothered to learn it, even read it seemed unnecessary, but through her brother Zuo Si she knew something of its contents and purpose.

Confucius was once asked what were the qualifications of public office. ‘Revere the five forms of goodness and abandon the four vices and you can qualify for public office’.
       For the life of her Zuo Fen could not remember these five forms of goodness (although she could make a stab at guessing them). As for those vices? No, she was without an idea. If she had ever known, their detail had totally passed from her memory.
       Settled once again in her chamber she called Hu Yin and asked her to remove Xi Ming for the night. She had three hours or so before the Emperor might appear. There was time.
        Xe Ming was by nature a distant cat, aloof, never seeking affection. He would look the other way if regarded, pace to the corner of a room if spoken to. In summer he would hide himself in the deep undergrowth of Zuo Fen’s garden.
       Tonight Zuo Fen picked him up and placed him on her left shoulder. She walked around her room stroking him gently with her small strong fingers, so different from the manicured talons of her colleagues in the Purple Palace. Embroidery, of which she was an accomplished exponent, was impossible with long nails.
       From her scroll cupboard she selected her brother’s annotated copy of the Lun Yu, placing it unrolled on her desk. It would be those questions from the disciple Tzu Chang, she thought, so the final chapters perhaps. She sat down carefully on the thick fleece and Mongolian rug in front of her desk letting Xe Ming spill over her arms into a space beside her.
       This was strange indeed. As she sat beside Xe Ming in the light of the butter lamps holding his flickering gaze it was as though a veil began to lift between them.
       ‘At last you understand’, a voice appeared to whisper,’ after all this time you have realised . . .’
      Zuo Fen lost track of time. The cat was completely motionless. She could hear Hu Yin snoring lightly next door, no doubt glad to have Xi Ming beside her on her mat.
      ‘Xe Ming’, she said softly, ‘today I heard you quote from Confucius’.
      The cat remained inscrutable, completely still.
      ‘I think you may be able to help me write a new poem for my Lord. Heaven knows I need something or he will tire of me and this court will cease to enjoy his favour’.
      ‘Xe Ming, I have to test you. I think you can ‘speak’ to me, but I need to learn to talk to you’.
      ‘Tzu Chang once asked Confucius what were the qualifications needed for public office? Confucius said, I believe, that there were five forms of goodness to revere, and four vices to abandon’.
       ‘Can you tell me what they are?’
      Xe Ming turned his back on Zuo Fen and stepped gently away from the table and into a dark and distant corner of the chamber.
      ‘The gentle man is generous but not extravagant, works without complaint, has desires without being greedy, is at peace, but not arrogant, and commands respect but not fear’.
      Zuo Fen felt her breathing come short and fast. This voice inside her; richly-texture, male, so close it could be from a lover at the epicentre of a passionate entanglement; it caressed her.
      She heard herself say aloud, ‘and the four vices’.
      ‘To cause a death or imprisonment without teaching can be called cruelty; to judge results without prerequisites can be called tyranny; to impose deadlines on improper orders can be thievery; and when giving in the procedure of receipt and disbursement, to stint can be called officious’.
       Xe Ming then appeared out of the darkness and came and sat in the folds of her night cloak, between her legs. She stroked his glistening fur.
       Zuo Fen didn’t need to consult the Lu Yu on her desk. She knew this was unnecessary. She got to her feet and stepped through the curtains into an antechamber to relieve herself.
       When she returned Xe Ming had assumed his porcelain figure pose. So she gathered a fresh scroll, her writing brushes, her inks, her wax stamps, and wrote:

‘I was born in a humble, isolated, thatched house,
and was never well versed in writing.
I never saw the marvellous pictures of books,
nor had I heard of the classics of earlier sages.
I am dimwitted, humble and ignorant . . ‘

As she stopped to consider the next chain of characters she saw in her mind’s eye the Purple Palace, the palace of the concubines of the Emperor. Sitting next to the Purple Chamber there was a large grey cat, its fur sprinkled with tiny flecks of white looking as though the animal had been caught in a shower of rain.
       Zuo Fen turned from her script to see where Xe Ming had got to, but he had gone. She knew however that he would always be there. Wherever her imagination took her, she could seek out this cat and the words would flow.

Before returning to her new text Zuo Fen thought she might remind herself of Liu Xie’s words on the form of the Rhapsody. If Emperor Wu appeared later she would quote it (to his astonishment) from The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons.

*The rhapsody derives from poetry,
A fork in the road, a different line of development;
It describes objects, pictures and their appearance,
With a brilliance akin to sculpture and painting.
What is clogged and confined it invariably opens up;
It depicts the commonplace with unbounded charm;
But the goal of the form is of beauty well ordered,
Words retained for their loveliness when weeds have been cut away.

“I will always remember you”

raise you hand if honesty
yet lives inside your muscle
memory of brain, of heart,
there is no one here who hasn’t
uttered them fool lying words

with difficulty we struggle to up
raise faces and places, moments
and images no longer mirrored
within the frontmost places of
our recollection, that searing then,
itself scorched, lichen+moss covered,
our greatest pains, pleasures sworn
allegiances to these razored inflection
points, now scoured by rusty hazes,
and we wonder what has become
of us, what we valued so to savor
as forever memories, their names
gray lady shrouded, and there is
no internet site to aid in self-recovery,
for our selfish selves have been altered,
time, new loves, guilt and other stuff
intersect with mind’s eyes and no mas-
more synapses paths instant linkages

I know you will vociferously argue but
it is almost physical, our shame at losing
them and ourselves, in the morass that
time digs daily deeper for what grieves
us is that losing as the end rushes to close
our story, makes us pick up pen and finger
scratch as best we can inside the lines on
our faces that are/had proofs, witnesses,
that once, we were there at the places,
whose names are no longer mapped any

where, so deep, no archivist’s submersible dare
fathom those fathom’s darkest we would need
to explore without the possibility that we
might implode if we sunk so far to rip apart sea
forests we knowingly, secret-planted to coverup
her memory, the words spoken, the oaths
and promises, we swore, for instance, simply
by saying, “I will always remember you”

p.s. and my self-shaming so great, that my
asking for forgiveness is buried so fast, it
may, not ever been real, just another fiction


Jul  6th, 8:36 AM,

1)

don't forget to keep breathing
cradle-rock your heart
soothe your ribs
don't forget to breathe

2)

the cold is natural
bundle up now
you can always shed
your skin
when the sky turns

3)

don't linger
in the places you once Were
keep moving else
your blood settle

4)

late night parking decks
hotel rooftops
yourSelf a whisper
honeysuckle blooms through
concrete wounds

5)

don't think about waking
ripping out of your body
clawing through the coffin and up
and up

your gravesite is spotless still

6)

dream
cool rich earth
lilies and lavender
whisper rustle of leaves
dream

7)

dream
heavy water
lake mud and rock ****
desperate silence
dream

8)

dream
hunger
Hunger
H u n g e r
dream

9)

dream
slow opening
granite doors and damp moss
spaces between absent heartbeats
wake

10)

the hollow is natural
the brain craves familiarity
the phantom mirrors the physical
the hunger will fade
for a time

11)

when eating cherries
don't forget to imagine a tongue

12)

remorse with me
may the living one day
bestow our graves with offerings
we starve in silence

13)

hollowing may beget holiness
but it doesn't denote such
divinity must be earned
few buildings have managed

14)

you can almost smell his skin
stomach rising and falling
best not to dwell
his life is no longer yours

15)

phantom petal flesh
teeth and thrush
rosethorn oleander s e e p ing black
curses and
sinking
  forest rot
    deep
       soil


16)

do not follow
when the wind asks your counsel
when the moon thorn buds
when the night screams bruiseblueblack
do not seek the woods alone

17)

don't dwell
it's natural to feel exposed
keeping space beside you
will only make missing them worse

18)

let the ceiling fall
it is beyond your power
stars make fairy lights
through the frame of branches
as it should be

19)

Death is a story keeper
an archivist
a library of everything
from the first atoms
to the last sparks

20)

don't worry
the house hasn't moved
since you last saw it
though the tree seems closer

21)

press yourself into
the size of a fist
wrap clockwise around
his heart
cherish the fleeting creature

22)

there is always
my s p a c e
left in the bed
when I come home to
haunt

23)

there is
My space
left in the house
when I come Home to
Haunt!!!a

Zombie

24)

missed exit
streetlights smeared by rain
vacant hotels
liminality made nostalgia

25)

tracing paper kisses
early spring thaw
did I melt away too

26)

isn't is strange
your shadow doubles
film printed over film
light runs through you
heat waves off pavement

27)

time will slip off you
don't cling to it
you'd have better luck
holding the sun
time is beyond you now

28)

the hunger doesn’t fade
it twists itself into sickness
an unfillable void

29)

let your heart fill
with paint and
dust
like the nail holes in plaster
last remains smoothed over

30)

there is no place
for you here
why do you insist on
lingering

31)

this house is a heart
you
are a phantom gunshot

32)

do you remember
a sharp pain where your lungs should be
the pressure of blood stagnant

33)

molars, incisors, canines
rigid and Real against
the memory of your tongue
a sharpness drawing blood
staining the sidewalk beneath your false feet

34)

your body is
wet rot and beetles
a collection of rooms
teeth and stomach and hollowing all disarticulated
a knife in a box

35)


sunlight breaking dust layers
the curtains wave lazily
someone has tracked mud through the halls
a splintered attic door hangs off
its hinges
the air tastes green

36)

when you finally become hollowed
the space between houses
the space between ribs
the space between teeth
the light that pours out
you will be made holy
in your Own image

37)

thick ozone at the back of your throat
rainless thunder rolls
the old piano shuffles untouched
a discordant funeral keen
the air ignites

38)

elevator doors close
open
close
stale cigarettes and cleaning chemicals
fluorescent buzzing
vacant sobs in an airy tomb
of concrete

39)

parking decks remain
a kind of home base
for those of us lacking liminality
every one is the same
and as such becomes intimately familiar
no matter how far it means you are
from home

40)

how many eyes are you supposed to have
what about teeth
count them in the mirror
again
again
Again

41)

beauty is in the eye
gnashing teeth
silent weeping
love lies not in the heart
nor head
but in the stomach

42)

skin peels back
muscles made of embroidery thread
birch bones bleeding
indigo
flesh transmuted

43)

you move through the world
as it moves through you
silently creeping
swirls of smoke and fog
filling up to your sternum

44)

wander
for a time
everything will be unfamiliar
on your journey and
return
to a stranger’s home

45)

dust to dust
and ashes to ashes
your headstone crumbles
your bones are meal
the world in which you haunt
will one day be far removed from
your own

46)

study the web
the winding and stretching of gossamer
collapsed in on itself
clustered with dew

47)

study the shell
the crests and smooths hard as bone
fragile against your fingers
an inner matrix of holes

48)

study the nest
the braiding weaves of branch and thread
fractured to one side
feathers slip asunder

49)

study the desk
the crags and slopes of precarious inkstaining
spilling frozen towards the floor
fine filtering of dust

50)

remember
what Precisely is a
Haunted
house

51)

Congratulations on Completing Part I of Your Introduction Handbook
Please Continue onto Part II

52)

fallow hearts sewn full of seed
bones with the crack and bend of trees
pressed petal flesh bruiseblack at the knees
when building a new body don't forget what it needs

53)

liminality is a current
riptide in some places
burble in others
watch for waterfalls
death doesn’t mean you're a strong swimmer

54)

builders write messages
on the innermost workings
of their buildings
behind the plaster disintegrating and
the wallpaper peeling
a belly button
a birthmark

55)

when the moon calls your name
listen
when the raven screeches warning
heed
when the voices of a house offer deals
Run

56)

kitten-footed fog
follow it through
the tall thin trees
until you see lights
then follow it
home

57)

tell me about humanity
does it hurt you
is it heavy to bear
or is it just breathing
one foot in front of the other
a faded photograph

58)

rivers slip blue
through the land like veins
cornflower and cobalt
cold tissue paper flesh

59)

missed connection
you left flowers
three graves down
I was in white
under the maple tree

60)

missed connection
you look so lovely
in blue
I'm right here
just turn around

61)

missed connection
every sunday
you walk
bakery library home florist cemetery
you talk to yourself
I always answer

62)

missed connection
you talk in your sleep
do you sense I'm there
deep in your bones
do you know you'll never
be alone again

63)

missed connection
I smashed a plate
and spent all night playing
in your wires
can you feel me now
in the light bulbs humming

64)

missed connection
you haven't spoken since
it's so silent I could be heard
I'm sleeping in the walls
singing for you

65)

missed connection
you were up all night
researching the supernatural
I'm right here
just see me

66)

missed connection
sunday you started talking
to me
we took a new walk
library shopping district cemetery home
notes and candles and blacksalt
a rubbing of my gravestone

67)

missed connection
nothing we tried worked
you still can't see me
you can just hear
my humming in the power sockets
my singing in the walls

68)

missed connection
I wrote you a letter
with leaves under your staircase
you swept them without noticing
singing one of my songs

69)

missed connection
you found a picture of me
framed it
sometimes you leave letters
my name on the front
hidden in the table drawer

70)

missed connection
I tried writing on glass panes
whispering in your ears
you tried spirit boards
seances and divination
I'll never stop
as long as you live

71)

missed connection
you stopped leaving letters
sunday walks abandoned
for living friends
I shorted out the tv
you don't come home much
anymore

72)

missed connection
you started driving
to nowhere
I tucked myself
between
the back seats
you locked eyes with me
through oncoming headlights

73

missed connection
I broke every mirror
ran screaming through the wires
the curtains are catching fire
can you still feel me
do you still know I'm here

74)

missed connection
you look so lovely
in black
just turn around
please turn around
I'm right here
always

In her previous life, my mother
must have been an architect.
She brought to each family occasion
her vision, her love of precision, her stability
- ensuring the family structure
was sustainable and capable
of longer-term development
- and we still bear her signature style.

In her previous life, I’m sure
my mother was a portrait painter
- able to take a fresh canvas,
such as mine and my sisters’,
and add layer upon layer
of colour, of texture, to portray
what she saw we would become
– each proudly bearing her inscription.

In her previous life, I expect
my mother was a pioneer
– not of paths yet travelled,
but of more frequented avenues,
boldly exploring the details and intersections
between friends and neighbours
helping us rediscover what we had in common
- each fresh bond bearing her seal.

In this life, my mother
was an endurance athlete, a gifted healer, a 5-star chef,
a respected teacher, a talented mediator, a wise counsellor,
an innovative financier, a diligent archivist, and our chief story-teller.

In this life, she was my mother.

Your mind is an archivist's *******, I'd like to spend an indefinite amount of time there and observe the inner workings
like a astrologist, seeing your constellations of thought...
it also doesn't hurt that your stubbled jawline
seems to speak volumes, and I wonder
if it's chiseled proportions would mind me using them
as braille.
I'd like to know the caverns of your mouth
more intimately--
please whisper prose on my collarbones...
and I don't believe in love at first sight,
but maybe, love at first poem.

Just one of the misfits
The mystics
The mythic
Enthusiasts  scripting
My own hieroglyphic
Codex to keep written
Recordings
Just jot
A few thoughts
Down each day
To see how they all look
Rearranged on the page
And that even I can't
Comprehend of this message
Perhaps in the future
Invaluable lesson
Is gleamed
From what seems
To be power mad schemes
But this world I will leave
Having not conquered even
A parcel of land
For I already hold
The whole world in my hand

In the beginning, we bartered hearts like merchants at a bazaar,
each of us donning silver smiles and guarded eyes,
holding a currency of whispers and half-truths,
our souls up for auction, a tangled web of worth.

I've always been a collector of broken things,
an archivist of fractured dreams,
a believer in the beauty of the mended,
but this time, I am the jagged porcelain,
cradled in your hands, asking to be whole.

You wove love into me like a tapestry,
threaded through my aching seams,
you took my tattered edges, stitched them tenderly,
and I could almost believe I am deserving,
though I wear this love like borrowed garments,
a thrift store treasure, waiting to be claimed.

Oh, how we danced in the shadows of our doubts,
with the moon as our witness, we pirouetted,
brushed fingertips like shooting stars,
my heart a hummingbird, in the cage of my chest.

I have held shame like a secret lover,
nestled in the crook of my neck, a serpent's breath,
it whispered in my ear, "you're not enough,
you're a counterfeit soul, a fool's gold,
a price too steep, a debt too deep."

I've chased oblivion, doused in liquid fire,
a self-destructive waltz, a frenzied masquerade,
but you, you held me close, a lighthouse in the storm,
your love, a compass guiding me to shores unseen.

Together, we excavated the depths of my despair,
traveled through the catacombs of my heart,
our love a language, a dialect of healing,
a lexicon of scars and whispered apologies.

I have been a doubter, a skeptic of my worth,
but you taught me to seek the gold within my veins,
to peel back the layers of rust and fear,
to find the precious, the hidden, the unseen.

And now, we stand at the edge of a precipice,
our love a fragile bridge, swaying in the breeze,
I tremble, unsure, a hesitant traveler,
but you, you hold my hand, and together, we leap.

In this uncharted landscape, we forge our destiny,
a mosaic of laughter and tears, a tapestry of dreams,
our love, a currency worth more than silver or gold,
for we are the treasure, the priceless, the untold.

dear line break,
sleep
is a hoax.

the color of my skin
represents
the time
I’ve been given
to meditate
on my blackness.

in retrospect, we belong
on earth.

the son of an archivist
and the son of a librarian
meet in a shop
where both
step in
to resolve an argument
over

a nesting doll
before pursuing
separately
the same
arsonist.

all angels want to be the angel
known as the man
who smuggled
into heaven
the sacred
text.

I write nothing my tutor can’t read.