Sonnet: Playground Scene

For a dear friend...

Laughter I hear as I approach a park,
The fallen leaves do waltz in autume breeze;
Like little dogs the children loudly bark,
The choir of birds is silenc'd by a sneeze.
And past the trees a playground I arrive,
I see two shadows merge, then one that fades;
A girl he chases, laughter 'gain revive,
The golden sunset paints their fleeting shades.
The boy his sister catches, they fall t'ground,
The bees to hives they fly at end of day;
In sea of grass they happ'ly swim around,
Until their mother comes they, tireless, play.
When I observe, so happy, such a sight,
Then how I wish that you are at my right.

First Aphorisms

I

I do not write mere words: they are a gathering of metaphysical vapour condensed into an ice cube of language.

II

Not for infinite cosmos, nor eternal time, would I trade for a single crystal fragment of your tear.

III

The softness of your fingernails etches ever so deeply into my cheek.

IV

Between our palms lies such radiating love compressed into a common pebble.

V

"Whatever can be spoken is dead." Hence I hear not your speech, but your voice, your music.

VI

Only when we look into each other's eyes do we capture the fleeting shadow of our identity - but how often do we dare to do that?

VII

That momentary gaze is joyous as a perfect circle, incomprehensible as a two-sided triangle, and haunting as an asymtote.

VIII

Only now do I realize that your absence tears apart the space-time fabric of my consciousness, a black hole that sucks away my words of comfort, leaving me with nothing but a string of atonal elegy.

IX

Dance and laugh! For those are the only activities that separates us from the dead. (No more Spirit of Gravity!)

X

Too often do we take a joke seriously - it is time we take seriousness jokingly.

XI

When Memory mixes with Fiction, like a drop of blood into a cup of water, it is the birth of Poetry.

XII

Which of you am I thinking of when I wrote all this? And which of me was doing the writing?

Work in Progress - Promenade

I

Time is the clock tower striking twelve,
Time is the silence, echoing after the bell;
Time is the footsteps through the halls,
Time is the sun dial, moving of the shadow.
History is a string of Time
Of one random moment holding onto another
By a thin thread of Memory;
Experience is the knotting
And the unknotting of these moments:
Love ties these knots, but also
Cuts the threads with the scissors of Melancholy…

But what was cut off floats onto the ground,
Like a kite with its string snapped,
Slowly and hauntingly drifts to the ground.
It is when the kite crashing that you realize:
The kite was in the air before;
The kite can still soar high,
So why don’t I fly it again?

There are fragments of moments
Which simply does not fit the puzzle.
The forgotten is a ghost, and only
Echoes through time,
Echoes in time,
Echoes with time,
Echoes as time.

Sonnet: The Philosophy of Love

Plato! Thou teachst to Men the Form of Love,
And thought that which the Gods quite suit
Can fit so smooth, so closely like a glove
To mere Mortal hands - but Form is no Fruit.

Chaucer! The Wife of Bath, her lives unfold;
The Form of Love? How she should laugh and mock
At those philosophers, those men that scold
Their flesh - her moral tale, such men should shock.

Byron! No man forgets young Juan's kiss
On fingers slender, hand of Julia,
That brought 'bout tempest and war, sweeping through his
Adventures - Price for Love's Utopia!

What poets remember, thinkers do forget;
The Heart demands, philosophers regret.

Time and Music

The magic about music is its relationship with time. Music alters our sensation of passage of time. I say that because for a moment I want to say that music suspends time - when we hear a Berlioz overture or a Liszt tone-poem, we do not feel time passing away; we see the colours of orchestration floating by our eyes, we hear the lively rhythm beating by our ears, we feel the current of sound waves brushing by our shoulders, but never Time...Time appears to be absolutely still. Once we are swept into the flow of music, we become like leaves floating along the current, and do not realize that the current is moving. We move with the current, and enjoy the bumpy ride, up and down; we might get wet from the clashing of the trumpets and horns, or perhaps a gentle wind of violins and violincellos might against the current. But we do not realize that we are moving along with Time. Consider listening to a Chopin Concerto: Dive into the waves of Hamelin's playing, and you will be surfing along, and only too soon will you come to realize that the wave is approaching shore, and you are brought back on land. Then all of our everyday-busyness: our papers, our readings, our labs, etc, come back to us.

Time, not sound, passes by again...actually, it doesn't pass by; rather, it smacks us right in the face...But what is lacked in time, we have Memory.