There once was a pirate named Janus
whose deeds were particularly heinous,
so when he was caught
the trial was short:
Two years with a mouse up his ****.

Oh, the agony,
no rest, even when I sit.
Two years, a long time!

When Janus was finally free
the mouse was nowhere to see
but Janus was clever,
instead of a lever
he lured it out with a Brie.

In the morning the wind is vicious, tossing vigorously the woodland on the heights above the village. The sky is a hanging of grey and charcoal black bands of cloud. On horseback and in her male attire Zuo Fen is led by the village guide up the steep forest path. She is already questioning the past, the accounts she’s read of the annual transhumance to this remote spot that give no answer to its sudden abandonment. It seems the Emperor made himself incommunicado for the latter part of the third season. The palace inventory shows local provisioning, and the most carefully chosen companions. They also describe how season-by-season the habitation was enlarged in order to accommodate further and different visitors. Poets and musicians were particularly favoured and would accompany the Emperor to select locations to add a delicate resonance of word and sound to the natural world.
​         As the travellers came out of the forest a wilderness of rock and moorland stretched before them, relentlessly upward. The path was now vague and Meng Ning was perplexed at how his guide had brought him across this terrain in the near darkness of the previous afternoon. The ponies often stumbled here and in the high wind he had to stop himself from looking behind to check his Lady’s progress. Eventually the ascent became less precipitous and a clearer path asserted itself, and in the near distance a pile of stones marked the summit. There, Meng Ning alighted to see Zuo Fen walking purposefully beside her horse leading her maid for whom this was an unaccustomed adventure. Together they approached him as he surveyed the panorama that to the west revealed Lake Psumano, a silver thread of water curled between the thick forests.
​        In silence Zuo Fen handed the reins of her pony to Meng Ning and with a signal to the village guide strode off on the descent to Eryi-lou.
 
‘We are to wait here until my Lady is out of sight,’ said Mei Lim’s smiling voice. ‘Then we may go forward.’
 
Mei Lim sat firmly in the saddle, as though assuming command of this small party. This now comprised herself, Meng,Ning and two rough-spoken men from the village each leading a pack-horse of luggage and provisions.  
 
‘You know I travelled as far as Stone Village on my Lady’s visit to the Tai Mountains. I would have gone further but she required me to stay. She is a woman who is in love with the wilderness, who will walk out in any weather to greet it lovingly. You should have no fear for her. She is a strong woman.’
​          Meng Ning nodded, declining to speak, afraid to disturb the rough music of the winds that seemed to press on them from all directions. Such is the journeying spirit, he thought, and looking into the distance realized Zuo Fen and her guide had disappeared from view.
          ​Soon the autumn forest had been regained and Zuo Fen and her guide began the descent to Eryi-lou. The path here was well made and marked at regularly distances with small stone columns. The whirlwind, that had buffeted the travellers since their departure, was now being played out in the highest treetops leaving ground level to echo like a large hall as the trees above swayed, groaned and cracked sharply in the heights. Soon vistas of the lake began to appear. They were still high above, the path frequently winding in steep loops across the hillside. Suddenly they found themselves looking down almost precipitously onto rooftops, a maze of buildings falling in tiers, joined together with walkways and terraces, many invaded now by trees and undergrowth: the Emperor’s summer palace of Eryi-lou.
​          Here, Zuo Fen bade her guide turn back. She would now imagine reclaiming this place of her waking dream, alone. When she felt confident her guide had retreated up the path she removed the pins from her hair, loosened her cloak, took off her stout boots of Yak leather. There would be more later.
 
​Barefoot, she began her descent to the palace eventually finding a staircase to one of the terraces from which she began to survey the palace. She found many of the rooms as she had dreamed them, small guest apartments with open spaces where doors and windows might have been, and hangings of the richest almost translucent silks, torn, faded, some covering the ground. The detritus of twenty autumns had blown through these spaces: plant material had taken root in between the planks of the raised wooden floors. Miraculously, there were rooms almost untouched by nature, just piles of leaves providing a matted covering.
         ​In one room somewhat larger than its surrounding structures Zuo Fen feels a special and continuing presence. A veranda-like structure occupied its lake-facing wall. This room, almost a hall, had been recently swept. There is a faint memory of incense as she comes close to the wooden walls. She paces the area until she feels guided to a spot where perhaps a formal chair has long ago been positioned. From there she can see the leaves but not the trunks of the trees as they swirl about in the continuing wind. A long vista of the silver lake spreads itself across the hall’s panorama. But the space enjoys shelter from the prevailing wind and has a stillness and silence all its own. Here, after removing her cloak, her thick riding trousers, the woolen garments that bound warmth to her, she kneels in her shift, closing her eyes to feel the room, the palace, its surroundings, come close to her all but naked body in its repose.
       ​Losing all sense of time it is only the gentle covering of her shoulders by Mei Lim that wakes her from her reverie.
 
‘Gracious Lady, we are installed in rooms kept for the use of official visitors. The guardian here is a young woman with a small child. She would like to welcome you when you are dressed and have eaten.’
 
And so, being led by her maid, Zuo Fen is taken to a distant suite of rooms suited to the autumn weather. There are recently lit braziers, and fitted doors and windows provide a little protection against the relentless wind and the damp cold. Mei Lim reassembles her lady’s wardrobe, and having dressed her, places a hot infusion into her cold hands. The afternoon light has barely a few hours left, but already the cold deepens. This will be a hard place to spend the night, a palace built for the third season – the summer of the solstice, a time of laughter and of fire, and the phoenix red.
 
Meng Ning is also imagining the palace in its summer dress when to wake at dawn would be witness to the sun flooding the partially cleared forest from its heights. The palace is lit up by vibrant reflections off the lake and the very roofs of the many buildings pulsate and shimmer with the heat of a cloudless day. The women of the palace are deep in slumber, their maids with silent tread reclaiming their ladies’ dignity after a night which may have seen much experimental congress of men and women amidst the subtle music of the qujin, the drinking of local wine, the close inspection and divination of the heavens reflected in the still lake, and the elaborate trading between memories of poetry and folk tale.  Even without such imaginings, to be here, and in the company of the illustrious Zuo Fen is the richest gift in a life otherwise stunted by ceremony and courtly intrigue. Zuo Fen has clearly taken Emperor Wu beyond custom and, though briefly, fashioned moments of love and friendship. To witness this woman at close quarters, this artist of the brush whose selection of characters holds both charm and innocence is wondrous. Even in these cold quarters he is warmed by the thought of her presence and the journey they will make tomorrow along the lake shore – to the Red Slate Path.

( to be continued )

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.

MANILA, Philippines - The public knows me as the Father of Philippine Franchising but what is hidden from the public eye is that I am a father of five sons and a daughter. This fact became very real to me again recently when my youngest son, Sam Gregory, got married.

Like I said, I have five sons and all of them are achievers and successful in their respective fields. My eldest son, Sam Benedict, for example, has a master’s degree from Kellogg and works for a top American company. My fourth son, Sam Christopher, on the other hand, got his master’s degree from Oxford and used to work for a top British conglomerate.

When my other sons got married, I was happy and proud as I could be; but when Greg got married I have to admit that there was a certain tug in my heart realizing that my little Sam was finally leaving the nest. I am not the sentimental type, but I guess every parent has a special place in his heart for his youngest.

But don’t get me wrong, Greg is no pushover. Being physically small, he did have his share of bullying when he was in school. But Greg knows how to deal with his problems. He befriended a number of his bigger classmates and that solved his problem in a snap. He may be small but he has a big heart.

Greg is idealistic and principled. He usually volunteers for civic and charitable activities and contributes to fund drives for disaster victims. My wife and I have accepted the fact that every time there is a typhoon, we can expect our cupboards to be cleared of canned goods and our cabinets purged of old clothes, which Greg would donate.

He follows traffic rules and regulations even when there’s nobody watching and even if following is not convenient for him. He saves energy. He recycles. He even convinced me and my wife not to use narra wood flooring in our retirement home.

Being a careful planner, he is the most prepared among our family for the “Big One.” But what I find most admirable is that he keeps two emergency kits in his car in case he finds himself in a situation where he might need to help others.

Greg is also romantic, creative and dedicated. When he was studying in Beijing, he would organize a virtual date with Charmaine Haw (who would eventually become Mrs. Sam Gregory Lim), who was in Manila. They would watch the same movie on the web and Greg would order movie snacks, which he would send to Charmaine’s house. The couple would also have virtual dinner dates where Greg would order similar meal courses, which would be delivered to Charmaine’s house and then they would chat via Skype while having dinner.

When the time came for Greg to buy his engagement and wedding rings, he refused to let us — his parents — help him. He used his own money despite being the one among his brothers who could least afford it, being the least salaried employee among them. He did this as a symbol of his love and commitment to Charm.

But when the wedding came I insisted that it should be a grand wedding.

To guarantee a great party, we made sure to have great food, a great place and great companions. Being an avid sci-fi fan, Greg already had an idea of a unique garden wedding. He wanted to transform the New Grand Ballroom of the Marriott Hotel into the forests of Avatar. To do this, the wedding stylist had to import a collection of trees, hanging plants, shrubs, flowers and other plants. The images projected on the giant 15-meter panoramic LED screen added to the reality of the scenery. It was a unique and original “garden setting” and was certainly a sight to behold and remember.

For the food, Greg was at his meticulous best to make sure that the evening’s feast was memorable. The dinner opened with a mouth-watering appetizer, lemon-spiced pan-seared scallop with tomato cucumber timbale in creamy ginger soya sauce followed by Manhattan clam chowder with cornbread dumpling. For the main course, we had the beef tenderloin prepared by the master chef of Cru Steakhouse of Manila Marriott Hotel, sea bass with roasted shallots, dauphin potatoes in perigourdine and mustard herb sauce.

The espresso-infused tiramisu and the white chocolate cheesecake with mango salsa served with piping-hot coffee completed the culinary feast.

With 800 guests, I would have to admit that we did splurge a little. But we also wanted the wedding reception to be an opportunity to thank the people who have been a part of our family. These are our relatives, friends and associates who have inspired, mentored and helped mold my children to be what they are today.

To my youngest son, Greg, and my new daughter, Charmaine — quoting from the Vulcan salute of the Star Trek saga (of which Greg is a big fan) — may you both live long and prosper!

read more:www.marieaustralia.com/formal-dresses

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The sun rises tentatively through the forest heights behind the palace. In the pre-dawn light Jia Li has secured water and fuel for her visitors and despite the attentions of the pack horse men, who have returned from an evening at her village the worse for drink, she settles to feed her infant child. Meng Ning enters to seek her counsel. She already guesses his intentions and answers his brief questions with confidence. She knows the route to the Red Slate Path, perhaps four li distant. The path is clear, though little used. It is not a place those of her village visit, though she has learnt that the path itself defies nature’s attempts to cover its existence.
    Zuo Fen is standing on the terrace as Meng Ning returns to the Emperor’s Hall. She has slept deeply, is refreshed after a period of meditation and, despite the cold, has been washed and massaged by her maid. She appears dressed for walking, her boots, fur cloak and hat in purposeful combination. As she surveys the lake flocks of wild geese and duck chatter and squabble as they float on the surface. There are some experimental flights, pairs of duck taking off to fly in wide arcs only to return to the same stretch of water from where they rose in tandem. Soon the geese will leave to fly across the forests and moorland for distant harvested fields where they will spend the day foraging. Meng Ning points to a distant peninsula jutting out from the northern shore of the lake. Behind it, he says, lies the cove of the Red Slate Path. Perhaps there they will be able to understand more keenly the why of this mystery.

‘At such a distance,’ says Zuo Fen, ‘the detail of a boat would be quite lost. I imagine the peninsula acting like a pointing finger to its floating form. There is already fashioning within me a possible story that might explain this mystery.’

She smiles warmly at Meng Ning who bows his head rather than stare into her jade green eyes. She moves closer to his standing posture, taking his left hand secure but tense against the balustrade of the veranda. Lowering one leg before the other she slowly kneels, removing her hat, loosening her fur cloak that now spreads itself of its own accord beside and behind her. With both hands behind her neck she lifts her long hair found to parted and tied in simple peasant fashion. Raising her hands to full-stretch her sleeping hair warm from the bare skin of her back slowly cascades forward and across each of her ******* to curl like two cats in the bowl of her robe.

‘Mei Lim is with Jia Li’, Zuo Fen says curiously and with a voice Meng Ning has not encountered before. ‘I fell to sleep dreaming of your kind presence and the joy of being touched and kissed.’ He cannot see her face as she speaks, only the quivering fall of her hair across her kneeling body. ‘I awoke feeling your breath on my cheek and so brought your limbs to entwine with my own.’ He now senses the delicate unguents of her body; they compass him about, his hand falls from the balustrade to touch her hair.

Finding her right ear his fingers describe its shape, its sculptured relief of folded forms and crevices. He is becoming faint with something outside passion that requires him to go beyond her ear and flow of hair about his fingers. He unties his cloak, letting it drop behind him. He removes his boots and outer garments. She follows his example. He moves to her side, adopts the position of the swallow resting on the wind. They face one another.  To the accompaniment of their breathing, her hands begin a dance in the space between their lower limbs as though they are birds turning and falling in flight. Unlike the courtesans he sees at court her nails are short, her fingers long. Then, it is as though her hand holds a brush forming characters and she begins to write on his body with short deft movements this way that way describing her flight of passion. Some intuition tells him to allow this, and not to seek repricocity, as it seems from her breathing that these very actions give her the greatest delight, bring her to the edge of the first coitus. Eyes closed, he moves his nose into a glancing embrace with her own, feeling there a semblance of perspiration, that tell-tale sign of a woman’s readiness for the deeper embrace. She responds to this with sighs and swift movements of rapture that envelope him, and now, as she quickly brings her limbs into a right conjunction, he places one hand beneath her, the other to recline her body gently to the floor, her cloak becoming a pillow for her head.
    He now looks directly at her, her face expressionless as though all thought and feeling has entered her body in preparation to receive his own. She does not blink. There is a moment of great stillness, a great wave of calm breaks, moves forward and pulls back – and again, again. In an instant he will enter her Jade Gate to caress and kiss and move where only his Lord has visited. He knows that once there he will seal his own fate . . .
     It is the talk of poets that women are often at their most sensitive to love’s attention in the morning hours, and that this was, for so many reasons, the most impractical of times for men. Zuo Fen herself had written fu poems that took the reader to the most intimate moments of a concubine’s experience in the morning hours, those times when alone the body gathers to itself its essential nature, and is often caressed with the woman’s own hand and thoughts. To understand such circumstance, to hold its sweetness as an abiding taste during the formalities of the day, only to release its flavour in the pleasure hours of the night, was a manly attribute, said to be treasured, indeed honoured by women.
      When Meng Ning withdrew Zuo Fen lay for some while letting the unaccustomed circumstance and its location only gradually allow a return to conscious and present thoughts. She pictured now her journey to the Red Slate Path, Jia Li, her baby on her back, striding beside Meng Ning, then herself and finally Mei Lim - who would have entreated her mistress to be allowed to accompany her. There was the glade, a small bowl in the hillside where it was just possible to see a small cave from which, glistening, the broken patterns of the slate path fell after half a li into the lake. She would investigate the cave. She would walk to the water’s edge, where the trees stepped into and reached over the lake to lay a carpet of fallen leaves. Then to see the path gradually, gradually disappear into the depths.
    Whilst Zuo Fen, with her eyes closed, projected her thoughts forward in time, with accustomed tact Mei Lim left those accouterments a woman needs after the attentions of a lover. She feared for the young man, though she knew her Lord prized too much his Lady of The Purple Chamber to effect jealousy or display anger.
    As the sun cleared away the thin cloud and approached its zenith the company broached the crest of the hill above the glade. It was, Zuo Fen had to admit, just as she had imagined lying prone and in disarray in the Emperor’s hall. In silence, and in the company of her imagination, she now paced from cave to path to water, and standing at the very edge of the lake’s bank focused her mind to envisage the events of twenty years past.
     It was as though a rhapsody was already formed. She found herself recounting the tale in her world of characters where there is only present time. She felt her hand describe them with the flow of her brush, heard the sound of its movement across the thick parchment. She was slow to notice that Meng Ning had disrobed and was entering the water. Without a word she watched him move through the carpet of floating leaves, some sticking to his nakedness, and onwards, slowly, following the submerged path until his torso then only his shoulders were visible. She then knew what he hoped to find, even after the passage of so many years.

She saw it all, suddenly. The sorcerer Yang Mo and the Emperor’s second wife descending the Red Slate Path as a cavalcade of fire and smoke, loud flashes of light, noises of brass and clashing metal enveloped the glade and the boat itself. The watching company witnessed for a moment the couple disappear under the waters only for their collective sight to be shrouded in a climaxed confusion of the sorcerer’s devices and effects.

When, finally the smoke cleared, the boat and the lovers had vanished.

Zuo Fen watched Meng Ning disappear from view. She imagined him, as the pearl fishers she had heard tell of, diving down to the depths, holding his breath to seek what might remain of the illusory boat. But time passed beyond the possibility of what she knew could be endured by human-kind. The surface of the water remained unbroken. The division of open water made by Meng Ning in breaking apart the carpet of floating leaves was already reforming itself.
   Removing her cloak and her boots, and unpinning her hair, Zuo Fen stepped into the water. A memory floated towards her of bathing in the lake near to her summer retreat. Water held no fear for her, only now the cold consumed her. Her loosed hair, and her elaborate untied robe settled on the water’s surface: to surround her like a lily pad, she the budding flower at its centre. She felt her feet still firmly on the Red Slate Path, her chin now resting on the water’s surface. Whatever had happened to Meng Ning she knew her action to be compliant. She had immersed herself with the very element that had brought him either death or, as she knew in her heart, a most honorable escape.

I hope this does clarify beyond doubt--
the lim-erick was not invented by our Lim family
(with an illustrious history)--- the reference is to a place in Ireland-
but the first was written by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century.

Then this guy came along
in the 19th century
who perfected it so to say-
Edward Lear--he left behind a great legacy.

He wrote 212 in total
prolific he was--verily-
could Nigel Finn beat this record
as he did cause quite  a stir in Hello Poetry?

I should be ashamed
ever to claim--dishonestly
that my Lim family had changed
the world of Western poetry.

When Zuo Fen woke day was well advanced into the Horse hour. In her darkened room a frame of the brightest light pulsed around the shuttered window. A breeze of scents from her herb garden brought sage, motherwort and lovage to cleanse the confined air, what remained of his visit, those rare aromatic oils from a body freed from its robes. Turning her head into the pillow that odour of him embraced her once more as in the deepest and most prolonged kiss , when with no space to breathe passion displaces reason in the mind.
 
The goat cart had brought him silently to her court in the Tiger hour, as was his custom in these summer days when, tired of his women’s attention, he seeks her company. In the vestibule her maid leaves a bowl of fresh water scented with lemon juice, a towel, her late uncle’s comb, a salve for his hands. Without removing his shoes, an Emperor’s privilege, he enters her study pausing momentarily while Xi-Lu removes himself from the exalted presence, his long tail *****, his walk provocative, dismissive. Zuo Fen is at her desk, brush in hand she finishes a copy of  ‘A Rhapsody for my Lord’. She has submitted herself to enter yet again that persona of the young concubine taken from her family to serve that community from which there seems no escape.
 
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 ancient sages.
I am dim-witted, humble and ignorant,
But was mistakenly placed in the Purple Palace . . .
 
He loves to hear her read such words, to imagine this fragile girl, and see her life at court described in the poet’s elegant characters. Zuo Fen’s scrolls lie on his second desk. Touching them, as he does frequently, is to touch her, is to feel mystery of her long body with its disregard of the courtly customs of his many, many women; the soft hair on her legs, the deep forest guarding her hidden ***, her peasant feet, her long fingers with their scent of ink and herbs.
 
He kneels beside her, gradually opening his ringed hand wide on her gowned thigh, then closing, then opening. A habit: an affectation. His head is bent in an obeisance he has no need to make, only, as he desires her he does this, so she knows this is so. She is prepared, as always, to act the part, or be this self she has opened to him, in all innocence at first, then in quiet delight that this is so and no more.
 
‘A rhapsody for me perhaps?’
‘What does Liu Xie say? The rhapsody is a fork in the road . . .
‘ . . . a different line’, he interrupts and quotes,’ it describes people and objects. It pictures appearance with a brilliance akin to sculpture or painting.’
‘What is clogged and confined it invariably opens. It depicts the commonplace with unbounded charm.’
‘But the goal of the form is beauty well-ordered . . . . as you are, dearest poet.’
‘You spoilt the richness of Lui Xie’s ending . . .’
‘I would rather speak of your beauty than Xie’s talk of gardening.’
‘Weeding is not gardening my Lord.’
 
And with that he summons her to read her rhapsody whilst his hands part her gown . . .
 
Over the years since he took her maidenhead, brusquely, with the impatience of his station, and she, on their second encounter deflowered him in turn with her poem about the pleasure due to woman, they had become as one branch on the same tree. She sought to be, and was, his equal in the prowess of scholastic memory. She had honed such facility with the word: years of training from her father in the palace archives and later in the mind games invented by and played with her brother. Then, as she entered womanhood and feared oblivion in an arranged marriage, she invented the persona of the pale girl, a fiction, who, with great gentleness and poetry, guided the male reader into the secrets of a woman’s ****** pleasure and fulfilment. In disguise, and with her brother’s help, she had sought those outside concubinage - for whom the congress of the male and female is rarely negotiable. She listened and transcribed, then gradually drew the Emperor into a web of new experience to which he readily succumbed, and the like of which he could have hardly imagined. He wished to promote her to the first lady of his Purple Chamber. She declined, insisting he provide her with a court distant from his palace rooms, yet close to the Zu-lin gardens, a place of quiet, meditation and the study of astronomy.
 
But today, this hot summer’s day, she had reckoned to be her birthday. She expected due recognition for one whose days moved closer to that age when a birthday is traditionally and lavishly celebrated. Her maid Mei-Lim would have already prepared the egg dishes associated with this special day. Her brother Zuo-Si may have penned a celebratory ode, and later would visit her with his lute to caress his subtle words of invention.
 
Your green eyes reflect a world apart
Where into silence words are formed dew-like,
Glistening as the sun rises on this precious day.
As a stony spring washes over precious jade,
delicate fishes swim in its depths
dancing to your reflection on the cool surface.
No need of strings, or bamboo instruments
When mountains and waters give forth their pure notes . . .
 
Her lord had left on her desk his own Confucian-led offering, in brushstrokes of his time-stretched hand, but his own hand nevertheless, and then in salutation the flower-like character leh (joy)
 
‘Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart’.
 
Meanwhile Xi-Lu stirred on the coverlet reminding Zuo Fen that the day was advancing and he had received no attention or conversation. It was whispered abroad that this lady spoke with her cat whom each afternoon would accompany his mistress on a walk through the adjacent gardens. It was true, Zuo Fen had taught Xi-Lu to converse in the dialect of her late mother’s province, but that is another story.
 
Lying on her back, eyes firmly shut, Zuo Fen surveyed the past year, a year of her brother’s pilgrimage to the Tai Mountains, his subsequent disappearance at the onset of winter, her Lord’s anger then indulgence as he allowed her to seek Zuo Si’s whereabouts. She thought of her sojourn in Ryzoki, the village of stone, where she discovered the blind servant girl who had revealed not only her brother’s whereabouts but her undying love for this strange, ungainly, uncomfortably ugly man who, with the experience gained from his sister’s persistent research had finally learned to love and be loved in equal measure for his gentle and tender actions. And together, their triumph: in ‘summoning the recluse’, and not one alone but a community of five living harmoniously in caves of the limestone heights. Now returned they had worked in ever secret ways to serve their Emperor in his conflict against the war-lord Tang.
 
She now resolved to take a brief holiday from this espionage, her stroking of the Emperor’s mind and body, and those caring sisterly duties she so readily performed. She would remove herself and her maid to a forest cabin: to lie in the dry mottled grass of summer and listen to the rustle of leaves, the chatter of birds, the sounds of insects and the creak-crack of the forest in the summer heat. She would plan a new chapter in her work as a poet and writer: she would be the pale girl no longer but a woman of strength and confidence made beautiful by good fortune, wise management and a generosity of spirit. She needed to prepare herself for her Lord’s demise, when their joyful hours living the lives of Prince and Lady of Xiang, he with his stallion gathering galingales, she with her dreams of an underwater house, would no longer be. She would study the ways of the old. She would seek to learn how peace and serenity might overcome those afflictions of age and circumstance, and when it is said that love’s chemistry distils pure joy through the intense refinement of memory.

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 hope this does clarify beyond doubt--
the lim-erick was not invented by our Lim family
(with an illustrious history)--- the reference is to a place in Ireland-
but the first was written by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century.

I should be ashamed
ever to claim--dishonestly
that my family had changed
the world of Western poetry

You wrote to me:
'I never tried a Lim. Will have to give it a go!'
  George, a gorgeous idea
  Lim-ericks are seamless--I'm sure that you do know.

By the way, what does 'Lim' mean in Chinese
made up of two characters 'Tree and Tree'?
(Swung- mu lin---double trees =Lim)
in English, call me Mr Forest --I would be equally happy!

Zuo Fen meets Jia Li and her child Hui Ying. The temporary guardian of the palace speaks with the help of one of the pack-horse men who understands something of the dialect this young woman owns. Zuo Fen would rather envelope Jia Li with her eyes than communicate in three-way speech. And so when Jia Li begins haltingly to tell the same tale told to Meng Ning the previous night Zuo Fen halts her translator with a gesture until the story – and this is what it appears to be – is told.

(Here Zuo Fen assumes the persona of Jia Li as part of her rhapsody titled The Sorcerer of Eryi-lou)

Alone in this crumbling palace
I guard my father’s charge,
He has been ill since late Spring
And I have disgraced my family
With a child whose father stayed
but a week trading horses.
Hui Ying was born here
And here we hope to stay.

I have now come to recognize
Many spirits of the past.
Mostly invisible I take them by surprise
In their mortal form; meeting a lady
And her maid on the hall terrace;
Seeing two men bent over
A game of go in a lesser chamber.
Music and the sound of poetry float
Variously through the many rooms.
The aroma of food comes and goes.
The burning of incense is ever present.

For many seasons my village supported
Palace life during the Emperor’s summer visits.
We provisioned and provided animals
For food and transport. Our young men,
Our women too were propositioned
For the more elaborate practices of the court.
Twenty summers long the palace secured for us
a livelihood beyond expectation.

Over time the events of the Emperor’s
Last sojourn in the palace became
For us the stuff of legend, though we do not
Embroider its story and have remained silent
Out of respect for the Emperor’s memory.
We know his son has rarely ventured here.

Let me only tell what has come from
my father’s lips, what he as a young man
Witnessed and through his guardianship
Has protected and honoured. He was chosen
By officials of the Emperor as a trusted servant,
A man who would oversee what had been precious,
What had been valued here, and is still deemed to be.

My father has spoken to me of the disappearance
Of the Emperor’s second wife with the sorcerer Yang Mo,
A disappearance witnessed by the whole company of visitors,
By the Emperor himself, and his son. I am charged to tell
Of this only to those bearing Emperor Wu’s seal.  Know I speak
With all truth and honesty in lieu of my father’s presence.

Amongst the many guests honoured by the Emperor
The sorcerer Yang Mo arrived by invitation
To spend part of the third season at Eryi-lou.
Already well-known to the court he had come
At the express wish of second wife Xie Jiu.
It is said that he created many remarkable illusions.
Unusual objects and rare animals were summoned to appear,
Rain fell and winds blew inside the Emperor’s hall,
There were piercings of flesh and limbs seemingly severed.
One morning it is said Yang Mo caused a boat
To appear on the lake, thereby at odds with the legend
That no vessel should ever touch its surface. Forthwith,
The Emperor decreed that such sorcery should
cease. But he was discouraged by second wife Xie Jiu
Who wished to visit the boat and sail on the lake.
Yang Mo offered to escort her across the waters
And led the assembled company to a small beach where
A path of red slate had been laid.  This appeared from
within a cave in the hillside. From thence it travelled
to the water’s edge and beyond, under the water
in the direction of the magical boat. Yang Mo is said
to have brought wind and fire and smoke
To play upon the company, finally inviting Xie Jiu to step
On the Red Slate Path and accompany him across the waters.
The couple walked slowly down the path into the lake
Gradually divesting themselves of their garments
As the waters consumed them. Then, before their very eyes
The Emperor’s guests and entourage saw the boat
Enveloped in a pall of smoke and disappear from view.
Yang Mo and Xie Jui were never seen again.

The Emperor was enraged, realizing suddenly
he had been tricked and made to look a cuckold
in front of his own court. In such a remote region
He had the slenderest of means available
to search for the missing couple. He resolved
to leave Eryi-lou immediately. Neither He or
His son nor his court has ever returned.

Allowing Jia Li to tell this tale without interruption had proved a right and wise decision. No sooner had the young woman realized her story had grasped the undivided attention of this celebrated courtesan than her words of description seemed to take on a rough poetry. Zuo Fen felt herself summoning unbidden images of the sorcerer’s illusions, moments of secret and forbidden congress between Yang Mo and Xie Jiu, the appearance of the sailing vessel from the early morning mists, the lovers slowly processing down the Red Slate Path, the disbelief and then fury of the Emperor.
      When Jia Li had taken leave to comfort her infant child Zuo Fen called Mei Lim to summon Meng Ning. She was clearly troubled by how her autumn visions from the west had brought her to this place and its unforeseen legacy of magic and deceit. The illusion of the sailing vessel and the walk into the lake on the Red Slate Path, both were elaborate and well-contrived artifices. They required skilled assistants and collaborators and the most careful planning. Sitting in silence opposite one another the courtesan and the chamberlain set their minds to consider the possible and elaborate trickery that might have been brought to bear on the complicit theft of the Emperor’s second wife. It seemed clear that all official record of what had passed had been expunged, and the Emperor had decided to abandon not only his summer sojourn but also his palace - immediately and forever.
        Zuo Fen wondered at the fate of the lovers. There could be no future for them within the known territories of the Empire. Their lives would have to begin again far distant. The province of Yunnan perhaps? But she laid that thought aside.

(to be continued)

What on Earth deserves our trust ?
Youth and Beauty both are dust.
Long we gathering are with pain,
What one moment calls again.
Seven years childless, marriage past,
A Son, a son is born at last :
So exactly lim'd and fair.
Full of good Spirits, Meen, and Air,
As a long life promised,
Yet, in less than six weeks dead.
Too promising, too great a mind
In so small room to be confin'd :
Therefore, as fit in Heav'n to dwell,
He quickly broke the Prison shell.
So the subtle Alchimist,
Can't with Hermes Seal resist
The powerful spirit's subtler flight,
But t'will bid him long good night.
And so the Sun if it arise
Half so glorious as his Eyes,
Like this Infant, takes a shrowd,
Buried in a morning Cloud.

There was an old crab from the Andes
Who had claws in the place of the handies
She wasted her time
Chasing the sublime
Now she snips chickens in Nandy's


There was an old knight whose great sword
He'd swing so not to get bored
He ran through the Prince
But started to wince
When he saw the royal horribly gored


There was a dear ledger from Ryde
Who had Gods love at his side
He wrote bibles for pence
On an old picket fence
That loveable ledger from Ryde


There was an old fellow from Greece
Who always wore a golden fleece
He rode his horse far
Faster than any car
Because of the healing properties of the fleece


There was a camera man from Spain
Who always used to film in the rain
The water was wet
He'd always forget
Electrocutions caused him great pain


There was an old man whose bonnet
Was woven with pages of sonnet
For he was a poet
And didn't he know it
Pretentious old man with his bonnet


There was a young man whose cuticles
Were ornately fashioned in cubicles
He was so vain
To be pretty again
He funded big time pharmaceuticals


There was an old frigate from mars
Whose cannons sounded like guitars
This frightened the queen
Who vented her spleen
And shot the space frigate from cars


A cat and a mouse and a dog
Lived in a big giant frog
They always ate brie
For breakfast and tea
Now they all wear one sandal one clog


There was an old pear from Derry
Who was scarcely if ever so merry
He fell from a tree
Landing in a lee
Till farmer Giles turned him into perry


There was a young lady whose toliet
Was broken so plumber would oil it
The new seat would come
To comfort her ***
Until another breakage would spoil it!


There was an old dog with a dream
To build her own mighty trireme
She'd sail the sea
And be back home for tea
If only she had opposeable thumbs


There was an old butcher whose feet
Would every third sunday tread meat
He rolled in the blood
That came in a flood
From cuts in the **** so discrete


There was a young boy with three heads
Who slept in three seperate beds
Whenever he dreamt
He lost what it meant
(The downside of having three heads)


There was an old eagle who'd sing
About losing her old violin
She gave up the search
To perch in a birch
And starved herself horribly thin


There was an old priest by a tomb
Who curled up inside a stone womb
For so close to death
He cursed every breath
And waited the slow march of doom

I trod the liminal
But the walk is never long enough
Between is where time and space collide
I the liminal walker
The world resolute
in stagnant unsympathetic response
But for my walking feet
Resolution flits and flees
And leaves empty spaces
Gaping holes in my narrative
I walk over and through them
the metaphors becoming tangible
I trod the liminal
and run the same word
over around my tongue
liminal
liminal
lim
i
mal
lim     I      nal
where am I in it all?

Thus reconfigured the party covered the first two days of the journey with speed and ease. As evening approached on the second day it was clear that a village resthouse was to be favoured as its owner had ridden out to greet his illustrious guests. He assured the party of complete secrecy, their valuable horses to be his special concern.
​   Away from the palace Zuo Fen set herself to enjoy the rural pleasures of an autumn evening. This time of freedom from the palace duties, from her Lord’s often-indiscriminate attention, she valued as a most generous gift. She composed swiftly a fu poem in gratitude to her Lord’s trust and favour.
 
How fortunate to dip this hand
In a flowing stream whose water
Is already touched by the first snows
Know that I shall bring its caress
to the mouthpiece of my Lord’s  jade flute
holding its body with spread fingers
to press to open to close to open
 
The stream bisected the village, a village of stone and wattle buildings, though the rest house was stone through and through. She had ventured on her arrival up onto its flat roof covered as it was with harvest produce laid out in abundance. The colours and textures of peppers, yams, marrows, eggplant, and such curious mushrooms as she had never before seen, all this she gathered with joy into her imagination’s memory.
​      With Mei Ling’s help she then transformed herself back into a woman, though with the simplest of robes over the Mongolian garments of wool she favoured to fend off the cold. Then, after alarming the resthouse keeper’s wife and servants by entering the kitchen, she planned a meal to her liking, sought the herb garden and enquired about the storing of vegetables for the long winter ahead.
      ​As the evening progressed she was surprised to discover Meng Ning had gone on ahead to Eryi-lou. It was a capricious decision born of his wariness of Zuo Fen. He felt intimidated by the persona she had assumed. Here was a woman of infinite grace yet simple charm who in the time it took to travel 6 li had become unrecognizable. Even her voice she dropped into a lower register and gained louder amplitude. When they reached the village he had moved purposefully to provide assistance as she prepared to dismount, only to see her grip the high pommel and swing her leg confidently across her pony and her body slide down the pony’s flanks to a standing position. So as the late afternoon light failed he had driven his horse up and up the mountain path, forcing himself to think only of the route and task ahead. He had acquired the company of a local guide who, on foot, out-paced his horse, but would see him safe down the path in the coming darkness. There would be a moon, but it had yet to rise.
        ​To his surprise the caretaker of Eryi-lou was a young woman, a daughter perhaps of its official guardian Gao Cheng, a daughter Meng Ning considered banished to this remote spot: she carried a small child on her back. He would enquire later. For now, he sought in her company to reconnoiter the decaying web of wooden pavilions, some already invaded by nature. It was then he realized his mistake. He thought himself into Zuo Fen’s mind. Surely she would wish to come upon this place untouched and unprepared by his offices. He motioned to the young woman to come outside, and standing on one of the many terraces explained his error, asked her not to speak of his inappropriate visit, but made to suggest that there was a room ‘always kept for an official’s visit’, that it be swept and suitably provisioned. Her voice responded in a dialect he could hardly decipher. It had the edge of a lone bird’s roosting call. He knew she was trying to explain something of importance to him, but he quickly lost the thread. He could see the faint gleam of the lake reflected in her eyes, hear the snuffle of her baby carried against on her back, and in the near distance he was aware of the village guide admonishing his horse. He bowed and left.
 
‘You are a most considerate companion, Meng Ning,’ Zou Fen said, as summoned to her presence, the chamberlain prostrated himself before the woman he was charged to serve and protect.
‘My lady, you already know I am a fool.’
‘Yes, but an honest fool with a kind heart. You sought my well-being at Eryi-lou, but I think you rightly imagined I might wish to experience this dream habitation in an inviolate state. Let us say you made a dream journey there. No harm done.’
     ​He explained about the caretaker and that a suite of rooms was always kept ready for an official. That was all he would say. He was about to retreat from the guest room now vivid with firelight and rich with the scent of cinnamon, when she lifted her hand to stay his going.
 
‘You are a brave young man to accept charge of my company. I am sure you know how my Lord is likely to remove you from his circle on our return. I feel unworthy of such sacrifice. I did not expect my Lord’s favour in this enterprise, but my words, my application, were clearly persuasive. I feel we are bound together you and I, and we must see our enterprise be the making of a fine poetic rhapsody for the autumn season – something you might share one day with your children and their children. You must understand that I am already moving towards a meeting of reality and the world of dreams and visions. Do not be afraid should I seek your intimate council. I know already you dream a little of my person. You may even imagine our conjunction as lovers. Women know these things, and, as you may have heard, I have tutored your Emperor in the ways of the Pale Girl.’
 
‘My lady . . .
 
Zou Fen reaches out for paper and brush Mei Lim had placed to her right hand. Kneeling on the roughly swept floor, her long limbs hidden under her cloak, she deftly paints seven lines of characters:
 
The autumn air is clear,
The autumn moon is bright.
Fallen leaves gather and scatter,
The jackdaw perches and starts anew.
We think of each other- when will we meet?
This hour, this night, my feelings are . . .
 
‘I wonder how we are to cast the final character?’
‘Not yet, and not here my Lady’. And with that Meng Ning takes his leave.
 
(to be continued)

Gradually as darkness fell the wind that had beset the travellers all day subsided and the particular silence of the lakeside clearing assumed a presence. It was a silence of the discrete movements of animals and sporadic calls of birds, the settling now into stillness of trees wind-tossed for a night and day, the breathing to and fro movement of a large body of water that already held the night sky’s reflections and would soon be enveloped in moonlight. Zou Fen rose and beckoned Meng Ning to accompany her to the Emperor’s Hall. There, they stood together on the long veranda and looked down through the sporadic trees onto the lake.

‘It is said that the Master did not discuss anomalies, feats of strength, civil disorder, or the spirits,’ said Zuo Fen quoting Confucius. ‘It is for you and I to disregard sorcery as nothing but illusion and cunning. We must bend our thoughts to seeking explanations from circumstance.’

‘We know, my Lady, that Yang Mo had already seduced the Emperor and his guests with his many and infamous illusions. To achieve these feats of the miraculous would have required a sizable retinue and the most careful preparation. It is unlikely that the Emperor would have countenanced such sorcery in daylight hours, so we might imagine how with the play of lanterns, fire and smoke Yang Mo was able to make the impossible seem possible. Like the actor he undoubtedly was, he was probably a man of commanding presence - all eyes would have been upon his person, all ears tuned to his words. And round about the harsh clangorous sounds and shouts of his assistants would be sustained as his illusions began to unfold.’

‘Wisely spoken Meng Ning,’ says Zuo Fen, ‘a most convincing exposition. So we must imagine how after a long presentation of illusory wonders, the imbibing of much wine and other intoxigents inhaled or consumed, the first presage of dawn comes upon the company. Guests and their consorts seek the privacy of their quarters, lights are dimmed, only the meditative music of the zither sounds in the Emperor’s hall as new confections of poetry continue to vie with the ancient verses. Then, as the Emperor rises to seek his chamber there, half hidden amongst the wraiths of mist floating on the lake, lies a sailing vessel, its single sail empty of wind, a spectre at once marvelous and shocking.’

‘But an illusionary boat, possibly a vessel that could not and need not run with the wind, something constructed, a shell no more, made out of the lightest wood or taut cloth that in the blue dawn would seem more substantial than it is, fashioned and placed in position by Yang Mo’s assistants at a right distance to evoke the illusion of reality.’

‘The Emperor summons his court and its guests, summons Yang Mo, regarding this as a step taken beyond what protocol allows, a violation of the ancient spirit traditions of the lake. Yang Mo stands his ground suggesting that this is his greatest illusion yet, that there is no harm done, and should the Emperor decline to sail on the ****** waters he will take himself away from his presence boat and all.’

‘At this Xie Jui, the second wife, lets it be known that she regards with some contempt the prohibition of a vessel’s presence on the lake. She wishes passage on the boat and if the Emperor will not accompany her she will go alone with Yang Mo. At this the Emperor is incensed but challenges Yang Mo to explain how he will deliver Xie Jui to the vessel.’

‘This is where, My Lady, we will need to seek the Red Slate Path that, it is said, Yang Mo prepared to take himself and his passenger to the waiting boat - only to disappear from view in front of the very eyes of the assembly. Our task for tomorrow perhaps?  Jia Li can be our guide as she surely knows its location.’

And so, as the three quarter moon rises over Eryi-lou and the chamberlain takes his leave of the courtesan, Mei Lim appears from the near darkness to escort her mistress to the small chamber where they will pass the night. Zuo Fen remains in a trance-like state but allows the ministrations of her maid to prepare her for the business of sleep.
      Meanwhile Meng Ning, intoxicated by Zuo Fen’s presence, does not return to his quarters but takes the terrace steps down, down to the lakeshore. He allows his official skills as a poet to fashion an array of characters he will first commit to memory, only later write out in his fine calligraphic script, and then destroy. Whereas Zuo Fen commutes between dream and reality he has no such pleasure. This is a stark, cold place at autumn’s end. But this condition only seems to excite and fuel his passion for this woman, this gracious, mysterious woman with whom he has spent the recent hours in close proximity. Her face floats before his eyes; her precise lips and still perfect teeth, gentle chin and youthful neck, the beauty and grace of her bearing seated cross-legged like a sage before him.  He imagines for a brief moment her long nakedness revealed in the bright moonlight under which he now stands. Holding this momentary image close to his physical self he makes his way up the many terraces to the small wooden chamber in which he will sleep.
       Despite her journeying and the revelations of the day Zuo Fen lies awake. She is savouring a very different quality of the night in this remote place. For many years she has remained wakeful in the hours of the Rat and the Ox to welcome her Lord Wu should his goat cart find its way to her court. She would like to rise and reflect on the images that hold sleep from her – but fears to wake her maid without whose close attention she might falter. This natural world beyond her court and the Emperor’s gardens are of an almost constant wonder. She reflects that as she gets older each season seems to become more vivid than its predecessor. This autumn, with its vivid dreams and visions, she likens to flowers picked from her garden, their colours and textures continuing to hold true and firm. Between such thoughts the intimacy of her time with Meng Ning remind her of the delight of human association. Aside from her dear brother Zuo-Si she has rarely known that keen intimacy of another man - other than her Lord. Though she has, she reflects further, in the writing of The Pale Girl, allowed her mind to explore the variousness of the body’s pleasure. To school Meng Ning in the arts of passion would be pleasurable indeed, and she considers he would be a most willing and attentive student. She imagines, for a moment, guiding him towards the exacting refinements of touch and stroke a woman requires to achieve the deepest coitus. Her body stirs as this thought takes hold and caresses her towards necessary sleep.

(to be continued)

I can't
I can't handle this anymore
What used to be me heart it tore
I sit out in the dark and cry
I can't figure it out why
A Loss of my bestfriend
I wish I had a letter to send
But you can't right a letter to the dead
I close my eyes se his curly hair on hishead
His face looks sad but why
That how I last saw him I think with a sigh
But he's in a better place
No need to make haste
But I want to join him
As I  start to cut my lim
My rist covered in scars
I wish I was old enough to go to bars
I'd just drink the pain away
But for now I'll sit back with this J
Only one I say at first
But nothing can quench the thirst
My sadness is in control now
But how
I can't let it beat me
It was all fun
But now the pain and sadness won

Your love,
Is sharper than the edge of the crescent moon
that was struck in my heart and i futilely mourn.
Glimpse of angelic dagger was your lies,
and you burried it deep within my eyes,
     and now im blind.

Your love,
Is hypnotizing like the beauty of the moon above,
In the vague sight of my blindness you're a white dove.
Pain chastised me! tears drowned me! but i still love you,
For you're my heavenly poison that i can't resist through,
     and now im weak.

I as your moon wanders beyond lim'tation
just to flicker my lil light even at your reflection.
Go run away from me as far as you desire, leave!
But when you're in need, it'll took only 1 glance above to give,
     and you'll see me waiting for you.

Far above the grey sky i silently watch o'er you,
Tears frozed, blood drowned my crippled heart as i stare at you
With your new found happiness that's far brighter than me,
You have your sun now, so ill just force a painful glee,
    and you'll see tears in me as i smile for you.

Far above the blue sky you look up and found me no more,
But you never care and thought I'm atlast gone for sure.
Your sun just blaze to its peak & covered me from your sight,
Now my love you're so blinded with her spurious light,
    and you never see that i still light for you.

Far above the black sky and now that your world's down,
Now when your life's darker than the darkest night's lawn,
I'm your moon, gladly being a moon rather than your sun,
to give you light in your tragic night when your fake sun sets down,
     and you'll see that I'd never will ever leave you.

Shroud, encompassing
The blanket over my head I am the twin of
The sleeping spring, hers is snow my sister
The one I actually like

The unending winter, blank white
Now I see why animals hibernate, in the winter there is
No color to paint your thoughts on The sky is spliced with the ground, blazing white unending no limit to ponder
No sky to ponder the limit of (lim as x approaches 2, calculus, my bane)
You tip-toe through pure white banks, your soul is ***** in comparison you are old ugly jiggly and soft in comparison
To sharp clear fractals, individuals sparkling even in the whitesky's frank stare whiteground whitesky white
I don't add up I don't add up I don't add up I don't add up

They say this is the longest winter ever recorded for Canada
People joke we're Canada we live in igloos anyways I can confirm
This is wrong; I have distinct memories of spider-holes in damp dead grass
Furious water rushing down rock blasted for a highway
Warm sun damp air damp grass rubber boots and most of all
Bluesky greenbrownground an imperfect world to wonder in
To not feel incomparable to
Mud as jiggly and soft as fat and muscle layered on bleach bones, bone marrow chunky porous redbrownred
No white to speak of, even my pale skin is pinkish dotted with islands of moles

When I wake up the blanket is a shroud over my head to block out the light and now I understand what I must do
Hibernate and forget like the bears I miss
Let the white light filter through colorful sheets I will feed off the blue light instead
Remember, it can't last forever somethings gotta give

Express sympathy for the car crashes and wait.
Patiently.

jeg har ikke brug for nogle andre
spiser ikke morgenmad eller nogle
andre måltider, har nok i dig og
du sætter dig som lim lige på
min tungespids, du siger ikke så
meget mere
jeg lyver, når jeg hvisker, du skal
lade mig være, jeg taler sandt, når
jeg siger, jeg stadig hader dig for det,
du lod dig selv gøre
med maling under negle lader du
mig ridse overfladen af, du siger
jeg er smuk, fordi jeg ikke ligner dig,
jeg siger, du har øjne lavet af marmor
og du ser oftere bare på
spørger sjældent
for du kender godt svaret, hvis du
tænker dig om en ekstra gang, vil
du vide
at jeg ikke har brug for nogle andre
end dig og dine døsige ord

I'm sorry God, but they've taken you prisoner.

Their words indubitably once streamed from your lips,
as your fingers projected beams of light,
falling from the Heavens:
people dumbly read your signs so literally.

They've closed you in a book and recalled your name
when such mentioning benefited their own name,
hypocrites they are;
for there was never a hypoChrist
capable of making wine a commodity
and bread a demon,
unless it is gluten-free.

How your intentions are clouded in veils.
****** in your name.
To glorify you.
Pushing scared young lovers--two men-- against barbed wire fences
and insisting they are sinful, foul--better off dead.
Maybe the hate is right
because it wins ten times out of nine.

God, they constantly judge each other
when they don't believe in the "right" version of you.
And they represent a new hipper you for the youth:
they want to understand you, when really they just
want to be understood.

Some days I walk past strangers and wonder,
"Who do you want me to be?"
Am I not Muslim enough unless I cover my hair?
Am I too Moz-lim if I say Allah and mean God--
just God, not whatever inane misnomer you'll tell me I really believe
you to be.

I think you tire of our piddle paddle,
how we puff up our chests, only to blow out a tiny breath of air,
that in one instant you can extinguish:
the candle had no choice.

We think we give the world meaning.
We feel so special when we hear ourselves think,
but sometimes, I wish you'd speak instead of all these false prophets.

dengang duftede jeg kun af syntetiske roser, og
jeg så kun franske film med spanske undertekster
jeg røg 29 cigaretter om dagen, og drak 3 kopper
te med smag af håndsæbe
jeg skulle skrive en opgave om mord, men endte
med at skrive 12 ligegyldige digte baseret på din
soprane stemme, og den måde, du kunne få mandag
til at føles som en lørdag eftermiddag med vin i årerne
dit navn har klistret sig fast som lim omkring mine
tænder, men når jeg skal sige det højt, holder jeg op
med at blinke, og mine øjne forvandles til kviksølv
orkestre spiller blå toner under min hud, og hvis du en
dag ser på min tunge, vil du finde groende poesi som
en sygdom, der ikke kan helbredes
halvdelen af verden
er døende,
den anden halvdel ved
ikke engang,
de er i live

regnen græder ned langs hendes magnetskuldre
*** er stadig blond lige dér
i novembervinden
med metalsakse i håret og
lim på fingerspidsen svajer
hendes krop elektrisk udover
en fattig altan
stiller sig på en skrøbelig
tåspids
tynger blå knæ mod ligegyldig
mur, ser mod ligegyldige horisonter
*** græder langs regnens
magnetisme

han ville smile, når jeg fortalte ham,  
hvordan min læbestift
altid sidder fast til min hud som lim,
men han ville ikke svare
på mine postkort uden afsender
du siger vi lever i en verden,
der ikke findes,
og jeg siger, vi findes i en verden,
der ikke lever
der er gået halvandet år,
og jeg tænker stadig på dig sommetider
når det regner, og mit hår hænger fast
til mine negle som skarpe
metalgenstande  mod min hofte
når jeg sluger sorte sten for at tænke
på noget andet end dengang
min mor sagde, at man kun græder fordi,
man har ondt af sig selv
når jeg venter på bussen og får øjenkontakt
med de modkørende bilister,
vil min tunge føles rug fra de grin,
vi har grint i din baggård
jeg gemmer dit navn i min lever
sammen med transparente silhuetter fra i fredags,
jeg gemmer dine ord langs min rygsøjle
sorteret i alfabetisk rækkefølge,
jeg gemmer din stemme i mine knogler,
så hver gang jeg skriver noget,
vil det altid handle lidt om dig
mine ribben vil skrige af savn, og mine håndled
vil græde når solen vågner
der er gået halvandet år, og alting er uklart
som cigaretrøgens tåge, undtagen omridset
af dit måneblege ansigt
den sorte kaffe smager stadig blåt,
men det taler vi ikke så meget om
i hvert fald ikke længere

1
when I was at university
I did some babysitting:
Send the kids to bed
after meals
Never smile at them
and be very strict –
you know the trick
Instill fear in them
They’ll just stay quiet
in their rooms
while you watch TV
till the parents return

2
So there I was in the living room
and the kids in their room upstairs -
except for one brat
looking down and creeping down the stairs
And I’d say: “Back to the room!”
and he’d crawl back
Three times he did that, that brat


3
Then there was a
knock at the door
It was the neighbour, it seems -
a Mrs Lim; she wanted to know
if her kid Sam was in the house
“No,” I said
but the brat from the stairs behind me shouted:
*“I’m here mum –
but he won’t let me out!”

så er jeg på den igen
længe har der kun været nogen
én nat ad gangen
lige som jeg ville have det
men ham her
han må blive her for evigt

I would have liked to meet
Edward Lear
his limericks are very sweet
and marvellously dear.

He would have gladly welcomed me as a friend
as my surname is Lim---close to lim-erick
we would have had fun to no end
and I would have  acquired his every unique poetical trick

There was a man from Beijing called Not Tee Lim
Ugly, bald, belligerent, recalcitrant and slim
Won the year's First Prize for Insolence,
Belligerence,  Indifference and Intolerance
He was bestowed a  knighthood--his new name-- Sir Irreverent Lim

.i still can't find my generation bv limp bizkit online... that's... just, just ever so bothersome... and what did: the who, ever receive.... oh... right... the sunday times magazine front-cover.... HIS generation... roger daltrey, the Who frontman, on the groupies, the madness of keith moon - and backing Brexit... nice... nice... but i can't search for lim bizkit's my generation - song... this is the part where you pray with the congregation... when the last of the Auschwitz survivors die... hmm... a free world... when the last of the Auschwitz survivors die... hello wowld.

like burning out
cigarettes on the tips
of your knuckles...
just because...
you're too cheap
to intake tattoo ink.

always a blast with
a blur,
    of a remnant scar;
sure as hell
beats taking to
defining self-harm
with inking.

we can say without inhibitions: the english novel, the russian novel, the french novel... akin to the german thought, the polish thought; we really can't say: the english thought, the russian, the french thought... we can only say the german thought, the polish thought... i'm already frolicking in censorship... but that's how it is: the english / russian / french novel v. the german thought the anti-novel; perhaps even music.

they allowed trans-gender,
but **** me bubbly bumblebee
they will not allow
trans-profession anti-gender
stereotype, they'll keep on
feeding me humanism
by those educated in english literature
and not those educated in
physics or etc. boors and crass
willing to suddenly experience
a need for change... educating people
to write books... i'd stick
to educating people to write
journalistic columns, the times of
Tolstoy are dead, no one has the time
for blah blah poetic technique blah blah;
why?
we're missing the bored girls at leisure
in salons,
instead over-sexed girls in limousines
(anti-dyslexia: spelling a grapheme e.g. æ
is like watching multiples of
donkey and carrot arrangements
distributed via images of photo-sensitivity /
phonetic-sensitivity, like
admiring the excesses of *******
and censoring the words f*k).

.
                               Tom
                       Ford Yves St
                     Laurent Bill Bl
                    ***   Tommy  Hil
                     figer  Christian
                     Dior Michael K
                     orsMarc Jacobs
                     Karl   Lagerfeld
                     Oscar de la Ren
                     ta JohnGalliano
                     JeanPaulGaultie
                     r ChristianLoub
                     outin GeoffreyB
                     eeneCalvinKlein
                     R a lph L au ren
      Pierre Cardin         Giorgio Armani
Zac Posen Phillip     Lim Jason Wu Gianni
Versace Prabul          Gurung Emanuel
    Ungero Rick                      O w ens