I used to spend whole days of sapphire gold
rendering my name: a listless rambling cursive,
a dignified print, a fierce neurotic scrawl —
all a mad tracing of my plots of comfort,
circumscribing my anxieties so to
discover one that identified my soul.
I would consume repasts of Hecate’s night,
inebriated on the opaline moon,
in search of the echo of my voice: aural
shadow of the ineffable Spirit’s glint,
melodious outpour of the still stirring
once stored in my heart’s mind while within the womb.
But I never stumbled onto that one
signature of enlightenment nor any
reflected utterance which proclaimed, “I!”
Cramped, stifled, generic— I’m trapped in the margins.

At the fringe
of the precipice,
a cast-iron fence
girdles the cliff,
warding off grief.
Pandora lavishly whorls,
a blur of elbows and knees,
senselessly exploiting the space.
Free to scrieve and reel without worry,
she burrows her light feet into the ground
without care.  But as she curls along the plateau’s edge,
the enticing Unknown draws, lures and mesmerizes
her saucy curiosity, driving her to innocently clip the mesh.
She begins to clip. (Ka-tong)  Driven by unknowns,
she clips (Ka-tong) and pulls and clips. (Ka-tong) 
But the gaps grow on their own, (tong-ong)
becoming swirls of unbounded space,
a wharf for the insane, and, little by little,
(ong-ong) encumber her fevered
savageness.  Inaugurated,
the religions of skirting
taboo thoughts begin.
She twirls, now,
a huddle of arms
in the center,
without reason,
amnesia possessed,
afraid of falling
into the open
grave.

-Tsai