For a year or possibly more,
Decompression begins:
Purging electricity, electronics.
Fall away, Internet, Oh!
No more cellular,
**** the television set,
Except, perhaps, a radio,
Lest I totally forget....

Hello, paper,
Hello, books,
Come off the shelves;
Lose those ***** looks,
Warm again before my eyes,
Feel the press of my writing stick.

Thoreau, the fakir,
Left the social order
Just a year,
Though just how far
He really went
Remains foggily unclear,
And the fact that he returned
Suggests that Nature
Left him feeling burned.

So, like a diver,
Rising from the deep,
I'd take a while to meditate,
To let the busyness-es go
And put electric dreams to sleep.

Walk the nature trail when it's dark outside and the children are fast asleep, tucked under blankets stitched by their immigrant grandfathers. Let your shoes soak in the muddy ground, collecting dirt and crushed leaves, as you walk deeper into the forest. The birds weep as their lullabies get lost and twisted in the shadows. A deer or is it a gazelle hurries across the dirt-trodden trail, leaping into the a patch of ancient shrubs. Somewhere, miles away from civilization, is a city running on the labor of your Vietnamese father, his hands caked in red brick dust and pollen. Currently, all that matters is that the tab of acid you've taken has settled in your belly, as you cross the corroded wooden bridge to the other side of the trail, where the young adults are playing the ukulele and drinking Heineken.

I am empty like the pill bottle on my brother’s nightstand.

I did love you once.
-Hamlet

Light floods the road
invisible from the pavement
turned into beds of beggars
begging for the godly hope.

People plainly pass
perennial plot of pretensions.

Peace tonight is fragile,
so fragile that car honks fade,
so fragile that tire screeching
dies in the night.

Above are stars eaten by smoke.

The father and daughter
shared the night
with the blanket of stars
made of dusts.

(The night so fragile can’t hide their stomachs growling)

1.

Clarita, 24
let the night pass
under the warmth of coffee
and her broken press
whose myth died years back
but never in memories.

2.

(An old woman passed by with her cane fiddling the asphalt. I can hear her wishes. She wants to die.)

3.

It was Clarita who smiled
to all foolishness of childhood. True.
It was her way to ****
the marrow of life
knowing Thoreau or not,
from the threads of forgetting
& horrors of remembering.

4.

Her communique
falls flat from what she supposed to say
for she can’t utter a syllable
so ironic that she just tend to pretend
she never remembers
she never cares
for all what she need
is to let things reveal themselves
so apocalyptic that even herself
don’t mind when.

5.

(Lovers passed by with their hands swaying, either by gravity or by air)

6.

Her mother tried her luck to pick cherry blossoms.
Her father stole her past.

Clarita killed them in the vignette of her neurons.

7.

If only she can turn back in time
and live like her diary’s wishes
Clarita, whose heart pierced by a chance lost
will redeem what she has to,
& sleep like a child in a dusty bed
where the blanket hide her
& her universe.

8.

The phone rings. She can’t ignore the line.

9.

She hates the feeling of falling in love
like how she hears the phone ringing
in the middle of the night
where insomniacs finally sleep
from a distant snoring of customers
barraging like thunders of senseless
predicaments and tongue-tied promises.

10.

Tonight, Clarita made a promise.

She will let the night pass.

The complexity of coupling is an exponential increase.
No matter how perturbed life may be, we strive to linearize it,
thank you Laplace. You transform us.

It is integral to simplify life.
Like Da Vinci, Like Thoreau:
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”
“Our life is frittered away by detail…simplify, simplify”

Let us not differentiate between the good or the bad
                         the high or the low.
Life is too brief to quantify, qualify, and compare it to others.
It is yours alone. Embrace the change over time.

One foot in front of the other.
Days passed by.
Walking was said to be a spiritual practice which yielded many dividends. The replenishment of the soul and the connection to all around you. Pilgrimage to sacred sites, walking the labyrinth, meditation. Strolling, cavorting, frolicking or wandering. As we stretch our legs, we stretch our minds and souls.
Few philosophers and writers had ever penned the absolute, gut-wrenching torturous boredom of the walk as Ronnie James now experienced it.
Fifty-six bones, one hundred and twelve ligaments and seventy-six muscles of dull, throbbing pain.
Who could tell how long it had been? He had but only the tedious task of counting his steps to judge it by. He'd long ago lost all track.
Sauntering alone through the barren ocean of sand.
Indeed, Thoreau wrote that the word itself, "saunter," may have been derived from “sans terre.”
“Without land or a home,” murmured Ronnie.
With every step we take, we leave some ghost of ourselves behind,
He who sits motionless, watching life pass by through the window, may be the most awful vagrant of them all – but the saunterer is no more vagrant than the meandering river.
Days passed by.

A written word is the choicest of relics,
It is something at once more intimate with us,
And more universal than any other work of art,
Just as books are the treasured wealth of the world,

I wanted to live deliberately,
So I went to the woods,
And I found it wholesome to be alone there,
For we need the tonic of wildness,

A single gentle rain,
Makes the grass many shades greener,
So our prospects brighten,
On the influx of better thoughts,

We should be blessed if we lived in the present always,
And took advantage of every accident that befell us.