The fool🃏 Sit in the rotting bough of your fig tree and wallow in all the things you may never discover about yourself. In your shallow, hollow life - The places of emptiness, are they blank by design (nonograms), By uncertainty (crosswords) Or, perhaps, as warning? (minesweeper) Self reflection blends into narcissicism- Some puzzles are not meant to be solved. The May Fair buntings are raised. Let the still waters drain. Beat out the dust bunnies and cobwebs And let sunlight penetrate the empty corners
The magician 🪄 With your midas touch tenderness you defy all known theory. Transmutation, something (gold) from nothing (negative space), the orange glow of sodium fire, neutralize every square inch of my electrified skin. arcanum tibi est. The rest of the world died long ago, their mercury-poisoned bones lie beneath the flagstones, but grant me a hint of a sip of eternal life from your lips darling, and it will shine on intact.
The high priestess 🔮 This drought has baked the country to dust. Behind this no-man's town, The horizon flares orange - fire, or setting sun, or both. Carrion crows. A lone cloud still in the sky. She rides bareback. Shotgun, hot tin armour. The police raped her sister, beat her brother, And trialled her for their sins. All in the past. What matters now is that blood will be spilled. Pigsblood- Violence goes off like a bomb. The felled trees, his look of terror, the smoking shotgun, She rides on. Prophecise your own doom. The hunt is on, and the state always wins: entropy is always tamed. Ride on, priestess. They'll raze the safehouses, flush you out crying, Lovers, mothers, babes-in-arms. Mythology hit below the belt. A hundred against one. The smell of burning flesh --
The emperor 👑 (There was such a me, once upon a time.) Bloodless ruins, the frozen tides, The drunken smell of rotting fruit. Miles above my shipwreck, How did you know where to dive? * With your daydream gaze, You're always waiting on the corner for me. * Wave your hand and the tundras bloom. Pomegranates, cherries, persimmons. Bear us shelter, brave heart. That land where good things take root, Wood-sorrel and sage. You need not bid it. All falls into place.
Strength 🦁 O hallowed hand of fate, If you exist (and perhaps you do) Cradle us in your nest of strings, Deliver us from despair. In this fractured place The flood sirens howl, it is all Rupturing before our eyes. Mere mortals (grubs) (floating ephemera), we curl like the men of Pompeii, Clutching each other as the ash clouds darken. The shapes in clouds, The faces in my dreams, Prove to me there is no random misfortune, Or if there are, I can tame it, If I read the winds and carry the charms. Grant us the strength to absorb the burden of creation As we deceive and destroy. For your kingdom is always ahead, never behind, Glowing like a mirage. Our fragile hopes, our daily bread, Part the seas for us again.
Wheel of fortune 🎱 Why are you upset? Choose any of the following that apply [ ] Invested too much energy cutting off negative friendships without fostering positive ones in their place [ ] Ate nothing all day in order to feel good about losing weight [ ] Spent 3 hours straight scrolling shortform videos, retaining nothing but an encyclopedic knowledge of TikTok sound effects [ ] Online shopped [ ] Overloaded yourself with plans, conflating the act of being busy with having a generally meaningful life [ ] Let yourself put off difficult things, thereby compounding the negative consequences for your future self [ ] Confused the human need for emotional support with the right to demand unilateral validation for one's bad decisions [ ] Acted easygoing when in fact you cared, very much [ ] Wallowed in self-pity [ ] Confined yourself to a 9 to 5 job where you never see the sun. Your work is useless to society, but you're pretty good at making JIRA tickets [ ] Felt guilty about resenting your cushy job [ ] Got used to starting things and never finishing them, thereby having nothing to show for your efforts [ ] Hormonal birth control [ ] Non-hormonal birth control [ ] No birth control [ ] Low on Vitamin D [ ] Stayed up until 4am as an act of self sabotage [ ] Felt crushingly powerless against the struggles of our age: widening wealth inequality, climate change, genocide, misinformation, the rise of facism, etc. [ ] Pollen [ ] Just felt like it [ ] Other (free form)
Justice 🏛 You want to be remembered for something, right? We'll make you a star, Your smiling face on the big screen. For a woman, the easiest path to fame is to be hurt Violently. The headlines mine your body, The hyenas will scavenge your bones. You'll wish you never appeared at all. Nevertheless, the justice parade marches on. Wind back that tape. You know, long ago, they raped those Sabine women, And mounted statues of them in the piazza, for all to see. Their twisted bodies preserved for time immemorial. Hunting trophies.
Death 🌍 I was afraid of blood, So painkillers it was. Alone, on school break, Twenty-odd paracetamol and a glass of water. (Have you ever dreamed of being violently disassembled? Every day I peered down from that cliff's edge. Chin-deep in the sodden mire, you pray for flight, Your ribs torn asunder by Daedalian wings) The nurses were gossiping. "So many teenage girls these days-" I was, of all things, a statistic. My sister drew me a card with a yellow canary on the front. My parents were pleased our health insurance offered a private room. Playing tetris in my hospital gown, I felt my period start. But before --- Even late night, the wards know no silence. Plugged hazy with tubes and dripping saline, Lying amongst the coughing sick, In the sheets bleached with the memory of the sick, I had a vision of the earth, As a misty orb, cradled in my palm Turning peacefully, Impassive. Delicate. (Do you know how you'd die, If you needed to (if you had to (if you had no choice))? Like a glowing escape sign, Or the exit row of a shot-down plane I know. Still pulsing on ice In that cavity behind my heart.) I left my state-mandated therapy session And wrote my first ever poem. It went something like this: 'I won't do it again' - Words dripping with sincerity. And the glass-eyed chorus crows in triumph, Baring far too many teeth.
Temperance 🪷 aligning of edges, smoothing of corners, in a comfortable state of endless forgetting. draw deep from your patience's tranquil pool and tame my bucking-wild-horse moods, and leave me sprawled in your lap like a boneless thing.
The devil 🎃 They call it Devil's Ivy a.k.a. pothos a.k.a. the one plant I can't kill and I can kill anything living, if I try. It's a pleasant plant. Mottled, With becoming heart-shaped leaves. It thrives in dusty shelves, oft-neglected, But springs back with a drop of water, a kiss of attention. Pothos is invasive in the wild, A giant strangler starving the forest of light. In a pot, it is docile. Accomodating, one might say. Normal ivy bruises red with the seasons, My world warps in flux. We buy things and bury them, we break hearts, we disappoint people, things change and disappear-- They call this one Devil because it survives.
The moon 🌙 You must intuit how you wound me, But your face stays calmly smiling. Self defence. In the wolf-cage, best to not draw attention. My latent resentment must frighten you, Your stubborn silence drives me mad. I want to tear your jugular out With my bloodstained teeth. The definition of insanity: Ploughing facefirst into the plexiglass again and again Hoping for a crack. Pacing and howling An old refrain. I check my phone. No reason, none at all. Nay, It's two am. The moon is full and luscious above, Smiling down at me like a lover. She is crooning: "sleep, you wretched beast, Sleep and be made whole again."
Judgement 📯 The first place you start is always yourself. You take the broken pottery of your inheritance, And try to line up the jagged cracks. (My mother left home at sixteen, The princess, the genius, the youngest of three. That homeland was never her true home again.) On being a child. Sinophobia - how many other countries have a hate term for their borders? The Yellow Peril, The Red Scare, White Australia, Take up thy star-spangles. The enemy of the US is thine enemy. "Love the Chinese people, hate the country". But I was second gen, waiguoren, I was not "Chinese people" and never would be. The only thing I had was country. Dogged by the humiliating stink of the motherland, Like ethnic hitchhikers we huddled together, Deciding how different we wanted to be. Snapshot: pagodas, dragons, pale dark-haired women with jade in their hair. Snapshot: neon lights, holocraft dipping across a night city, pale dark-haired women with purple streaks in their hair. Oriential prostitutes in tang-button jackets. Can we sharpen it like a knife? Come, stop at our house for dinner. Gnarled chicken feet. Pigs ears. Intestines. Snails, fungus, potato leaves, Pig-slop, eye of newt. Waste not, want not. ("The Chinese were so poor they learned to eat anything," my father likes to say. As a youth he stole eggs to eat, cracking the raw, wet sacs straight into his mouth, Taiwanese floodlights of war across the strait, As Famine rode bareback over the fields.) Decades and oceans away, What does that make me? My polyester cheongsams, my jade from the souvenir shop. Daughter of selective memory, Inheritor of the gold the donkey bore to Bethlehem. Give me not your sympathy. Accept me not. I refuse to rewrite the narrative. sinopunk / orientpunk / this is our manifesto You are not welcome here. We blacken our lungs with indoor cigarettes. We race to the bottom and burn out face-down. We spit on the street and laugh in sick irony. I call down the missile rain. Come, bleed for me. This blood is not a door -- We save the blood and congeal it, we eat the blood for sustenance. It goes well in a stew.