a gazillon
        glass fragments
        fragmenting light,
        reflecting,
        refracting
        your lingerings
        in white.

        innocuous, you lie
        face down and on your back
        you bear a cup
        of woe, a titan keeping
        the sky from falling.
        but you faltered
        and the torrent traced
        the tabletop terrain,
        trickling towards the sheets
        and into the crevices
        of the keyboard
        and farther into
        the f
                  l
                  o
                  or.

        Adobe Photoshop

        One of the things I resolved to do this year is to read more books because sadly, I cannot remember finishing any book last year. There were some books I bought but I never got to finish them. For instance, I got Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories but I found it ridiculous halfway through. I also got China Miéville's Un Lun Dun but I had to put it off on several occasions due to a busy schedule.

        Currently, I am reading Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. I first heard about Calvino when I came across this Flavorwire article. But it was this webcomic that got me into exploring the book:

(via Incidental Comics)

        Invisible Cities is like a story within a story. In it, the explorer Marco Polo describes several urban landscapes to the aging Kublai Khan, from Armilla, "a forest of pipes that end in taps, showers, spouts, overflows", to Octavia, a city suspended over an abyss like a fragile spiderweb, to Thekla, a city under constant construction "so that it's destruction cannot begin". The book somehow reminds me of Lord Dunsany's The Gods of Pegāna in that the lands described, although distant, feel faintly familiar as if in some lifetimes past, we once walked in its streets.

        Here's an excerpt from Invisible Cities:

        In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationdhip of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.

        From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia’s refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.

        They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.

        Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.

        1.
        I did not hear the rain
        because I had my earphones on.
        And if you'd ask which track,
        I'd shrug ---
        I think it was some British act,
        some chamber pop that made a play
        of glottal stops.
        And then some aural guide
        on pastry terms: millefeuille,
        macaron, pithiviers...
        but that was before the rain.
        All along I must have listened to
        the sound of silence digitized.

        2.
        I did not hear the rain
        because it had its stealth mode on.
        And if you'd say a cat,
        I'd nod ---
        A thousand-footed cat
        that's sleek in form
        and dark in hue, tiptoeing
        over ground and grass
        and greenish pool
        with tiny, wet, and silent paws.

        Stabilo markers

        pencil, Adobe Photoshop

        midday, drowning in the whir
        of power generators,
        a collective of clockwork cicadas
        drunk on fossil fuels,
        a mechanical tinnitus,
        the throbbing of lives inexorable
        amidst a persistent season.
        the resolve reflected from faces
        whose contours are traced
        in sweat.

        now, there is barely
        a flurry of activity here:
        the dust bunnies proliferate
        in the void but they are ever
        the quiet ones,
        they do not squeak
        nor speak your lines.
        they accumulate like dialogues
        long rehearsed
        in the unswept corners
        of my mind.

        (via writeoneleaf)