Yiling Ding

The mess keeps piling up.
In the storage room
the number of empty boxes
keeps growing.
...

I ate a pebble for breakfast
A stone for lunch
And a boulder for dinner.
Usually the same mass of food
...

We cannot feel alive
without sensations.
A gentle brush
or a piercing pain:
...

We're just flightless birds
waiting an eternity to find love
With our clipped and injured wings
in silence we stare at the dark sky
...

They slit my wrists in the dark
with the hissing of their kisses
but I could not bleed.
With painful dismissiveness
...

Just because the flowers
are blooming now
Just because the fruits
have ripened now
...

If the butterfly had a neck,
it would stretch it out long and thin
and saturate its senses
with painfully blissful heat,
...

Like glass, like silk.
An image in the mirror
I dreamt of last night
continues to haunt me.
...

The smooth fluid touch of silk,
an ephemeral moment
leaving me desirous for more.
And then the rough burning
...

The Japanese scene-painter
sits on his pebble garden
cross-legged, brush in hand.
...

I've abandoned myself
to the dark and cold winters
of desperate struggle.
...

In the lonely places
of my heart,
a wretched fire burns,
all agony.
...

I can't tell if I'm
angry or sad, this
volcano that is
erupting. I am
...

In the face of an anger
that I can do nothing to ease,
and all the black hatred
directed straight towards me;
...

Some people's hands
are smaller than mine.

Sometimes, she picks mine up
...

Lost and deluded
The babe is chained
in her clay coffin
Overly large,
...

I have
smooth white skin.
Like
a porcelain child,
...

Nostalgic music
Iridescent bubbles of sound
drawing a fluid past from
the deepest wells of memory.
...

What am I waiting for?
in this dark house?
The lights are all off
and the ticktack of
...

Sometimes the empty night can get
far too overwhelming
The loneliness envelops me
devours me
...