Kingdoms rise and fall. Trees age. Even when you cry, the ground dries and the sea tides. Everything comes and go, fragile thing, but what remains is intimacy and poetry is its record. It is a way we found to pronounce love and a proper way to say goodbye.
I woke up this morning with a small but an agitated and moving kind of pain in my chest maybe I felt it because I was relaxed
pain sits with me for a while I curl myself up and down and inwards toss side to side
sometimes after a while it feels like pain is lifted off or peeled off from my body and then I can observe it touch it and play with its shape a little
I guess that’s why I seem to collect pain I don’t think I see the value in challenging my feelings they are the best uncooked but i do like the process of touching my pain this way
when I look for beauty out there it beckons me from inside and there’s the white hole sweeping as wilderland
Hotaru – Fireflies
The dead are like fireflies,
floating,
flickering, oozing-slow
present but unseen until they surface in the dark.
They can only live near clean water.
Summer heat.
Sweat-drenched Adam’s apple.
A heavy, viscous swallow of saliva.
Resurrection
Once upon a time when I was a mother,
I was a smashed tomato,
pitiful, and cold.
I was a piece of an orange,
squeezed and encased in a sterile cylinder,
and was a swarm of flies,
that flocked around the juice, splattered and dried.
As the smell of rotting fruit swelled,
saturated in a windowless room,
I stopped being a mother
and chose to love her.
The crimson of tomatoes returned,
the sweet and sour of oranges revived my taste buds,
I returned to myself,
and she was allowed to be a child.
Bodies in a container
Containing the superfluous limbs and ego
in a Tupperware, barely and squarely fitting them in
Ready-to-go!
to school, office, the sports club,
presentable, it is
On weekends at home,
busy preparing ahead and again, in square containers
to get through Blue Monday with Yellow Pills
Neatly label and tag each of them
so that others can under-stand us
then hash-tagging completes the packaging
so that psychiatrists can diagnose with ease
Compartmentalize. Cover.
Because we can’t bear the weight of everything
lids cover up, keep the stink in
stack them up, and side by side
see, even spatial efficiency.
The Shell
It was thick and coarse, grew in a world without a roof. To withstand the wind, rain, and pests, to protect the soft fruit inside from cracks and decay, layer upon layer it built, hardened like a solitary rock. It augmented, like an animal with a will of its own, taking over what lay within. Built to protect, it outgrew its function, began to guard itself to survive. Before I knew it, this swelling creature was about to crush the very core it was meant to shelter. Then he came, seeking to see inside, reaching for what had been pushed and tossed aside, shrinking small and buried deep in the shell. But the more he tried to peel it open, the tighter the shell clenched its mouth, buried itself in water, sank into the soil, retreating.
In the empty depth, alone, I stared into the eyes of my shell—identity, beliefs, embodied habits, expectations, masks, ego. The ground I stood on trembled. I touched the shell with my own hand; it began to crack. Nausea surged in my abdomen, dominating my body. With hands shaking from pain, I gently caressed it, with the same stroke as he had touched me, this time with my own hands.
Destruction is the beginning. The opened shell, the exposed core, basks in the light and shadow—all that has existed in the world, and it wills to unfold, its hungry arms stretching out, groping for whatever is beyond.
He, too, protected his own shell, yet longed to break it.
There’s light in being understood.
The soft, shimmering kind of light that slips through a thin, hemp-woven curtain.
The kind of light that comes and goes, elusive, anew every second. Never the same.
The kind of light that washes over you, bathes you, lets you soak and rest.
Then you’re a soft-boiled egg, exist by the thin skin of your becoming.
Understanding is a dreamy endeavor.
Nothing like having correct information and scientific knowledge,
it is complicated process which never produces unequivocal results. It is unending activity by which, in constant change and variation, we come to terms with and reconcile ourselves to reality, that is, try to be at home in the world.
It is embodiment.
Is understanding each other possible?
How, can we understand one another?
The sense of impossibility draws me closer to it.
There’s something moral and kind in doing what we sense is impossible but doing it anyway.
The moving light is hope and it is direction.
What if both of us can turn towards the other, with the intention to understand one another?
What if we can create a connection where,
both of us want to see each other beyond our projections,
beyond the comfort of being right,
beyond our fears of being misunderstood
and that sharp stinging sense of feeling alone that comes with it?
Hoko Horii 