Fragmentising: Another Free Sonnet

To be                   a matter when there’s no question
Or not to be           a question when nothing really matters
To sing                       with a frog squatting straight
On a lotus leaf in the Honghu Lake near Jingzhou
To recollect                       all the pasts, and mix them
Together like a glass of                   cocktail
To build                                  a nest of meaning
Between two broken branches on                 Ygdrasil
To strive           for deity
Longevity                       and
Even happiness
To come on and off line every other while

To compress consciousness into a file, and upload it
Onto a nanochip. To be          dying, to         die

Hometowning

Having nothing better to do, I kill
time by looking at a traditional
Chinese painting on my iPad

 Much enlarged, it appears like
a plain sheet of rice paper
smeared with ink. I view it

 In the presence of bonsai; I
drop several thick strokes to the floor
of history, leaving a few fine lines 

Behind the sofa, and failing
to catch a colorless corner
between black and white 

It is a landscape newly relocated
into my heart’s backyard. Then I sit
on my legs, meditating about there

 Being no light in the picture, no
shadow of anything, no perspective
as in hell. Isn’t this the art of seeing?

Pondering Plasticity

                                                   Sure, I would paint my skin
into a colorless color, and I would dye my hair
Wear two blue contacts, and I would even
go for plastic surgery, but if I really do
I assure you, I will not remove my native village
accent while speaking this foreign tongue (I began
to imitate like a frog at age nineteen); nor will I
completely internalize the English syntax and
Aristotelian logic. No, I assure you that I’ll not give up
watching movies or TV series, reading books,
listening to songs, each in Chinese though I hate them
for being too low and vulgar. I was born to eat dumplings,
Doufu, and thus fated to always prefer to speak Mandarin
though I write in English. I assure you that even if I am
newly baptized in the currents of science, democracy and
human rights, I will keep in line with my father’s
haplogroup just as my sons do. No matter how
we identify ourselves or are identified by others, this is
what I assure you: I will never convert my proto selfhood
into white Dataism, no, not
                                      in the yellowish muscle of my heart

First Love

Afar, far from the other side of this world
I return to my native place for the first time
The riverlet through the village has dried up
Childhood playmates are rarely seen
Except frogs singing aloud as before

I heard that you were married to an unknown stranger
I don’t know who he was, nor am I aware
If ever you had one or two children
Also, I heard you died a few years ago
There must have been many cries over your loss
But none of them had anything to do with me

Definitely not, for I had already died before you
That was almost two generations ago
On a sleepless autumn night
I quietly buried my heart in your backyard
right under that banyan tree. Though it is no longer
there, our muted laughters left a deep impression
on the field as if still echoing against the stump