Anachronism [Haiku]

the temple might stand
a thousand years ago,
but for that city.

Floating [Haiku]

boats float the river;
balloons through the sky.
i float through time.

Shade [Haiku]

summer day from shade:
time attunes to floating
clouds and ducks.

Mountain Crumbles [Haiku]

once a mountain,
now just boulders; someday
not a hill will remain.

“Inspired by Late Spring” by Ye Cai [w/ Audio]

Sparrows cast on my desk their shadows in pair,
And willow down falls in my inkstone here and there.
Sitting by the window, I read the Book of Change,
Not knowing when has Spring gone, I only feel strange.

Note: This is the joint translation of Xu Yuanchong and Xu Ming found in the Golden Treasury of Quatrains and Octaves (a Bilingual edition of 千家诗 “Thousands of Poems”) on which they collaborated (i.e. China Publishing Group: Beijing (2008) p. 40)

PROMPT: Future Travel

Daily writing prompt
What are your future travel plans?

I plan to travel to the future one minute at a time.

At least until they invent a time machine that can transport something bigger than a subatomic particle, and only milliseconds into the future at that.

White Space [Free Verse]

I read the space
Around the poem.
It has no meaning,
But says so much.
It betrays a little secret
That no reader ever learned
Who was too concerned
With what was written,
While wholly inattentive
To
What
Was
Not.

PROMPT: Lose Track of Time

Daily writing prompt
Which activities make you lose track of time?

Everything but waiting the five minutes to press the plunger on the French press. As Tom Petty said, “The waiting is the hardest part.”

PROMPT: 10 Things

List 10 things you know to be absolutely certain.

1.) Nothing is permanent.

2.) The world is not what it seems.

3.) One’s subjective experience is not determined by the state of the world.

4.) Nobody grasps enough truth to be intolerant.

5.) Uncertainty is the root of all fear.

6.) Fear is the root of all hatred.

7.) Hatred is a subjective experience (See #3.) Also, uncertainty is the root of all hatred (by the transitive property,) hence the benefit of travel.

8.) Any who: a.) has suffered a string of hardships; b.) allows themselves to believe that some “other” is wholly responsible for said hardships; and c.) who lacks a sufficient sense of self-empowerment to avoid surrendering entirely to a group identity can (and likely will) become a Nazi (or the equivalent of their day.)

9.) No one can predict the future. [Regardless of how much we all love to try. (See #5.)]

10.) Entropy increases (ultimately, in a closed system.)

NOTE: I remain ready to abandon any certainty in the face of better information.

Stone Bridge [Haiku]

old stone bridge:
weeds grow in its cracks,
its river ran dry.