Yiling Ding Poems

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.
...